It has been a New Year's Eve tradition the past couple years for Mary to whip up some tasty paella while we wait for the East Coast ball to drop and watch Anderson Cooper look awkward while he forces small talk with Kathy Griffith at Times Square. Mary then falls asleep, I occupy myself for three hours, and wake her back up to celebrate midnight on the Left Coast.
The highlight of the night is always the paella. Due to the limitation of our previous apartment kitchen, Mary had just used the dutch oven, but this year the Christmas elves left a spankin' new f'real paella pan. Time to get serious.
As the pictures shows, clams were used, and also making a return this year was chorizo. However, the lobster Mary has used in previous years got cut and replaced by cod and tilapia. Maybe not as traditional or sexy, but most cost-effective at least.
Overall, New Years Eve was pretty low key for us considering we were coming off of two large holiday hosting events. I don't know if we were just still a little looney from the festivities of the holidays, but we felt the need to host more visitors.
Most of my extended side of the family still had not seen the finished house product, so I suggested to Mary that we host yet another dinner. Then we reached the end of the schnapps, slept off the hangover, took some Advil and water and realized that just doing dessert will be easier.
I decided to make some devils food cake cupcakes with seafoam frosting, and apple-pecan-cranberry turnovers:
My inspiration for these two choices were actually very rational. I wanted to make something with seafoam frosting, because.... I finally could with my new hand mixer. Mary thinks it is really funny that I got a hand mixer for Christmas from her parents and she got a circular saw, but we'll see which one creates better desserts. I tried to make seafoam frosting with an immersion blender in the past and I can definitively tell you that will not work at all. Not even a little.
The turnover was a result of having two spare Granny Smith apples illin' in the fruit bowl, a half eaten bag of dried cranberries in the pantry, and some leftover pecans that came from a pecan pie I made mid-December. I also cooked the filling in some rum and brandy to soften up the nuts and apples and re-hydrate the cranberries.
The Mayans do not believe in John Cusack, but I think they would accept paella and baked goods.
-Isaac.
