My friend Claire has been doing this for at least a decade...and in the different places she's lived (two lofts, now an apt) and most of the same people have been attending all this time. Her friend Sid makes the most amazing sausages: sometimes venison, this year duck.
There have been the occasional lapses. Claire once made the Brussels sprouts so bouncy you couldn't cut them and because I complained that they were TOOO UNDERDONE, didn't make them again for another year or two. This year they were perfect (but she thinks they were overdone). One person doesn't eat meat or fowl so bring his own fish to cook (at Thanksgiving, the old pyrex pan his fish was in exploded in the oven--so he was carefully picking glass out of his soon to be dinner).
The rutabaga this year did not impress me. Claire is a wonderful cook except for pastry--she cannot make pie to save her life. Luckily she's given that up and leaves it for someone else to do (or we buy them).
But it is indeed a wonderful tradition. (sit down dinner, after munching appetizers for a couple of hours). The adult son of one of our crew now joins us, which is nice, too.
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There have been the occasional lapses. Claire once made the Brussels sprouts so bouncy you couldn't cut them and because I complained that they were TOOO UNDERDONE, didn't make them again for another year or two. This year they were perfect (but she thinks they were overdone). One person doesn't eat meat or fowl so bring his own fish to cook (at Thanksgiving, the old pyrex pan his fish was in exploded in the oven--so he was carefully picking glass out of his soon to be dinner).
The rutabaga this year did not impress me.
Claire is a wonderful cook except for pastry--she cannot make pie to save her life. Luckily she's given that up and leaves it for someone else to do (or we buy them).
But it is indeed a wonderful tradition. (sit down dinner, after munching appetizers for a couple of hours). The adult son of one of our crew now joins us, which is nice, too.