Today was our day inside. We started the morning with elsaf making us a breakfast of pancakes & bacon (mmmm, bacon!) and I had whole milk with mine (OMG, whole milk!) Tasty, tasty. Then we didn’t eat at all until supper time, cuz Elsa was making us our Christmas Dinner. (Well, OK, we all had a slice of butter bread from the loaf of bread that Elsa baked.)

I did take a short walk to Jewel (with a stop into Trader Joe’s for grins) to get a few essentials that we needed. Oh, and I took Patty (judiang‘s doggie) out for walkies once. She wanted to get back inside ASAP to watch Elsa cook, so we weren’t out long.

Elsa had e-mailed us last week asking for votes on the dinner. The consensus was rack of lamb, mushroom soup, asparagus, rice pilaf, and lava cakes. She added a red currant & wine sauce, pear salad, and from scratch rolls to that menu.

I think I cleaned the cooking dishes 3 times during the day, it took that much cookware for the meal, but it was worth it when we finally sat down for our meal.

The pear salad was very simple – sliced fresh pears with bleu cheese, walnuts, and a poppy seed dressing (no lettuce). Very tasty. She’s made the mushroom soup (with sherry) before and it was once again very yummy (and I’m not overly fond of mushrooms). The lamb was cooked perfectly and the sauce complimented it well (and was also good on the pilaf). For out-of-season asparagus, they were pretty good. And the lava cakes were spongy and nice, especially with a side of ice cream.

After the meal, we opened presents. I got lots of nifty stuff, including a real surprise – a K’nex roller coaster thingy that Judi got when she was in the studio audience of the Anderson Cooper show. Pretty darn nifty!

I managed to get stuff packed into my bag (and into another bag). I tweeted several photos from the meal tonight, along with a few gift photos. If you visit this lockerz.com page, you should be able to click on the photos that I tweeted tonight.

Tomorrow I fly home for more festivities! Woo!