The twist is that I’ll be planning the whole trip myself and she won’t know where we’re going until we get on the plane. You won’t even know until I get there. Sounds simple, right?

I’ve actually tried to do this before in 2002 on our first trip to France but for various reasons, the cat got out of the bag and Barb found out about it. The fact that it’s just about 4 weeks before we leave and I don’t even know where we’re going should help on the secrecy front.

Stay tuned.

Baden

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Panettone is a traditional Italian cake-like bread and is said to have originated in Milan in the 1400′s. Originally called Pan del Ton (or Toni’s bread, the story goes that a baker named Toni invented the new bread to impress the father of the woman that he loved. Typically Italian, food and love are the cornerstones of happiness.

Normally made only around the Christmas holiday season, I actually only tasted panettone for the first time about 5 years ago. It had to be the strangely unique texture of panettone that’s not quite cake and not quite bread – somewhere in between. The panettone that I bought yesterday from the Mozart Bakery and Cafe had a tantalizing taste of some kind of liqueur in it and was deliciously fresh.

As Christmas has now come and gone, you might be able to pickup a panettone on sale like I did. I strongly recommend that you try one if you have not had one before. If possible, try to find one that comes in the cardboard box and is made in Italy. I guarantee that you won’t be disappointed.

Baden

One of the most difficult parts of the dinner was making the stuffing. My aunt Marlene had given me her stuffing recipe that she had been making for years and as I have found with recipes that have been in the family for a long time there were no exact measurements and instructions to go by. As such, just getting the instructions over the phone left a lot to my own interpretation.

The stuffing recipe was not technically difficult but the success of it depended a lot on the amount turkey broth that was added. I knew what the stuffing was supposed to taste like but this would only help me at the final stage to know if I got it right or not. The most difficult part was the mixing of the broth and the dry ingredients and knowing when it was “wet enough”. Marlene’s instructions to me were to keep adding the broth until it looked right.

In the end I didn’t think that I got the recipe quite right but now that I’ve made it once, making it the next time will be much easier. Once I review my notes I’ll probably post the recipe on the web site.

After everyone had gone home and the dishes had been run through the dishwasher and the fridge was packed with leftovers, I lay awake in bed recollecting the past two days and thinking how bad of an idea it was to do two big dinners back to back. It’s not just the cooking but there was so much extra work having to clean everything up after Saturday’s Christmas goose to get ready for last night’s turkey. Because of the way that Christmas dinners rotate among our family we probably won’t be making dinner on the 25th at our place for a few years so this issue won’t come up for a while. However the next time that we end up hosting the 25th dinner, we won’t be doing the goose that year. It may not please everyone but from a practical perspective it may be the only way to still enjoy Christmas.

Now I wonder what we’re going to be cooking for New Year’s eve?

Baden

Last night’s German Christmas goose dinner went well enough but I don’t think that it wasn’t the best dinner that we had made before. I stress the we as both Barb’s mother and I were in the kitchen cooking together. I can definitely say that there is truth to the saying that too many cooks spoil the soup. Don’t get me wrong, I get along well with my mother in law but when it comes to my kitchen, there only so much compromise that can be done.

After our guests had gone home I put the turkey for tonight’s meal into the sink and let it soak in cold water for the night. My original plan was to start preparing the giblets and vegetables yesterday evening around 8PM as it needed about three hours to simmer to be the base for today’s gravy and stuffing. However, I just went to bed exhausted and woke up again early this morning to get things started.

Under normal circumstances, we could have taken our time today to clean up the kitchen but everything had to be done fairly early as the next wave of food preparation starts in a few hours for our next big holiday dinner tonight.

I suspect that by this time tomorrow I’ll be sleeping in until noon and will need the subsequent two days off to recover from this weekend.

Merry Christmas,

Baden

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Before I met Barb and started going out with her years back, my Christmas world really was just one day as it is for most people: December 25th. I looked forward to the turkey dinner and the whole family would get together and we would enjoy eating as much turkey as is humanly possible on one day. December 24th was never really considered any special day. It was the day before Christmas.

That all changed when I met Barb and started learning about the whole German Christmas thing.

Like many European countries, Christmas in Germany is all about December 24th. Although Barb wasn’t born in Germany, her childhood memories of Christmas did not include anything on December 25th. To her and her family, December 25th was the day after Christmas. Pretty much like December 26th was for us (without all of the Boxing Day sales).

Sidebar: It came to our attention that many people outside of Canada don’t know what Boxing Day is or it’s significance to us. When we went to Germany in 2001 during Christmas time (see Barb and Baden’s Excellent German Adventure), we talked to people in Germany about how December 26th is Boxing Day. Stating this usually invoked fits of laughter by most people envisioning how us Canadians were putting on boxing gloves or some such thing.

For those of you who don’t know, Boxing Day here is normally associated with lots of sales at most stores with big discounts and tons of crowds. But I digress.

After getting introduced to Barb’s Christmas traditions, we eventually started incorporating them into our regular Christmas routine so the 24th quickly became an important part of the whole Christmas holidays. By far the biggest change has been the eating of the Christmas dinner on the 24th. While I’m sure that a German Christmas dinner varies from house to house, with Barb’s mother Ruth, it is only three things that has no variation from year to year: roast goose, boiled red cabbage and potato dumplings. Years ago I had a smart idea by trying to introduce some new things into this dinner. Let’s just say we don’t do anything new any more. In fact, the relative simplicity of the meal is its charm.

For those of you who have never eaten goose (as I had, years back), it’s quite good and very different from turkey. A goose has quite a bit less meat than a turkey and is pretty much all dark meat. For some reason which I haven’t really looked into, the goose is more greasy than turkey (although I prefer to think about this as being more succulent). Other than the usual basting which is required, the whole Christmas goose dinner it pretty much an easy dinner to make – in comparison to the work involved in the typical Christmas turkey dinner. The red cabbage is simply chopped up and put into a large stock pot with some sliced Granny Smith apples and some white vinegar. It is then boiled to within an inch of it’s life.

I exaggerate here of course and in fact the boiled red cabbage is actually one of my favourite parts of the dinner. Lastly are the potato dumplings. My mother in law uses a packaged potato dumpling recipe from Panni – which surprised me the first time that she made this as she rarely uses packaged recipes and likes to do things by hand. A few years back I got the big idea to make the dumplings by hand so I hand ground tons of potatoes from a recipe I found in one of my books. We fondly remember that year as the year we had soggy potato dumplings.

I keep trying to remember to redo the recipe for the potato dumplings again to work out the kinks for the next subsequent Christmas but for some reason I never get around to it.

As I mentioned earlier we are doing two birds this year. Due to some unexpected circumstances, in addition to the goose dinner that we’ll be making tonight, we’ll be making a turkey tomorrow for about 10 people. As such, before the goose is even finished tonight, the turkey will be out of the fridge and into the sink, floating in cold water defrosting. I also need to start the process of making the gravy tonight for tomorrow’s dinner as it requires boiling the turkey giblets. Suffice to say we have a busy two days ahead of us.

So I’ll leave you not with Merry Christmas (something I’ll reserve for tomorrow), but a more appropriate Frohe Weihnachten!

Baden

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For most people (and even for us for that matter), buying luggage is not something that happens very often. Barb and I really just have two suitcases each that we use separately: one large suitcase for the longer trips and a smaller carry-on for trips of a week or less. I guess we have a third type which is a suit bag that we bought for our honeymoon as we took along all kinds of formal wear. The suit bag really hasn’t seen much use over the years as we have never taken another vacation requiring formal wear since the honeymoon.

It’s the larger suitcase that recently were renewed with new replacements.

The type of luggage that Barb and I prefer is called the Pullman and is probably the most common type of suitcase nowadays. Pullman luggage have the two wheels at the bottom and the telescoping handle that comes out the top. When we went on our honeymoon we bought all brand new luggage and learned a lot about what luggage not to use. Other than the suit bag (which can be useful is you travel with business suits a lot), the luggage that we bought back then were heavy, hard-sided luggage that had the lift handle on the small end so the suitcase would tip over when going over the smallest bump. This luggage also was bad in the sense that when you were lifting from the handle so it would roll along on the wheels, you were really lifting most of the weight of the bag. The Pullman type is a better design as you tilt the bag over to roll it from the top so not all of the weight is on your arm.

When time came to go on our first big trip in 1998 to Britain after our honeymoon, we did a lot of research into the kind of replacement luggage that we wanted to get and found a line of Atlantic luggage with a unique feature called 4×4™:

The “4×4″ feature was a set of extra wheels that could fold out when needed and allow you to rest the entire weight of the suitcase on the four wheels and roll it along like a stroller. Because the suitcase was in a reclined position when in 4×4 mode, you could rest additional hand baggage on top of the suitcase on the extended handle rails and it was all perfectly stable. When you didn’t need the 4×4 mode any more, you just used your foot to snap the two wheels back into place in less than 1 second.

Since that Britain trip, that luggage has seen lots of use including one trip to New Zealand and five more times to Europe. During those years, our luggage had taken a beating but for the most part had only seen superficial damage. However it was the recent vacation to Italy that saw both of our 4×4 suitcases take more than just superficial damage. It looked like it was time to look at some new luggage before our next trip in 2006.

Over the years we had done some quick peeks to the Atlantic web site and had noticed that they seems to have discontinued the 4×4 option so we were always concerned that when time came to buy new luggage that we wouldn’t be able to find what we wanted. Luckily for us, Atlantic has come out with an updated version of the 4×4 concept called Quadwheel™ technology. Quadwheel seems to be similar to 4×4 in the sense that the extra wheels can extend and retract but the enhancements they have made are that the wheels are larger and now pivot. This makes rotating the luggage much easier especially when on rough surfaces. The other enhancement is that there is a small button on the top of the luggage to extend the Quadwheels. On the 4×4 system, you had to press a button with your foot to extend the wheels and sometimes stood there kicking the button a few times before the wheels would extend.

We actually weren’t planning on purchasing new luggage right away but we happened to see these suitcases on sale at a store called Collacut in Metrotown mall so we decided to pick up two of them. One of the difference between our old and new Atlantic luggage is that the old luggage was sized as 26 inch and the new ones 25 inch. Although this makes the new luggage technically smaller, it has a 1.5 inch expansion zipper which the old ones didn’t have which will be useful for those return trips laden with shopping bounty.

If you’re in the market for new luggage and want something that stands alone in being easy to carry around the airport and to/from your hotel, look into the Atlantic luggage with Quadwheel technology – I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Baden