New Year's Eve Party Menu

- Tower of Cheese - I'd do this again, but only make one tower (probably the raclette) and get it on the table faster, so the cheese would be even meltier

- gougeres with and without black truffle

- Benton's Country Ham w/red-eye mayo - I wish we'd had the time to slice more of this

- mushroom puff pastry bites - These were one of the highlights for me, very easy and delicious

- mini beef wellingtons - 6 lbs of beef was too much, but smaller bites seemed to work well

- deviled eggs with smoked paprika or caviar - the ones with caviar were less popular, all 3 doz disappeared

- cucumber cups with lobster salad - filled the extra cups with whitefish salad, which also got raves

- butternut squash soup - I ended up adding a can of coconut milk and a lot more veggie broth and would add still more if I'm doing shooters again, it really needs to be much more liquid, but people liked the taste of it--one squash makes plenty of soup

- chocolate covered strawberries

- cheese tray (Comte, Pt Reyes Blue, Bemster aged Gouda, Bucheron, Cabot Clothbound Cheddar with Italian cherry honey and marcona almonds) this was less popular this year, perhaps because of the Tower of Cheese, but Jason really loved the Bucheron

- pate - mousse truffee (pork & chicken) and duck with Sauternes - must remember to stick to just one

- gravlax with rosemary baguettes, thanks to Scott Lefton!

- crackers, baguettes

From Wegman's - simple online ordering:
- shrimp cocktail - 80 was not too many!
- veggie tray - skip next year
- macarons - disappeared quickly, many compliments
- mini desserts - very tasty, moved slowly
- mini cookie & brownie tray - very tasty, but many left
- mediterranean dip tray - skip next year
- fruit tray

StoryWorth: My First Big Trip

It's hard to decide which trip qualifies as "my first big trip," because travelling was something my family just did. The year before I was born my parents had taken my sisters to Europe on a six-week sabbatical trip, so that was the Big Trip often discussed throughout my childhood and I grew up eager to know when my turn for Europe would come. We lived in Upstate New York with grandparents just outside New York City and my mom's side of the family in North Carolina, so thousand-mile roadtrips south were something we did at least two or three times a year. I know that my first flight on an airplane was at six weeks, when my mother took me down to see my grandparents. My father led bustrips for church groups each year and I visited Montreal, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, DC that way, without remembering which city was which year. When I was in 3rd grade my mother was elected to the School Board and went each year to the national convention, taking my father and me along to Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco when the dates lined up with my school breaks. There were a lot of trips.

The one I'm going to pick is the trip to Florida when I was six. We drove down to North Carolina, as usual, and spent at least a few days visiting family there, but then continued on "South of the Border". Finally I got to visit that tourist mecca, familiar to anyone who's driven I-95 past the Mason-Dixon line. We visited a few more family members in South Carolina--my Aunt Myrl, who was really a first cousin of my mother's, and her sister, Margaret, as well as one of my mother's bridesmaids who had married a pediatrician and settled in Columbia. We drove down to Savannah and had a magical dinner at the Pirate's House. We continued driving and spent a day and night in Jacksonville, where my strongest memory is an exhibit at the Children's Museum where I could climb through a model of the human digestive tract and slide out the end, and my mother left one of her favorite dresses in a drawer at the hotel, so we had to turn around and drive back more than an hour down the road. We also spent a night in St. Augustine and went to the nighttime presentation of the history of that oldest settlement, of which I mainly remember flaming torches. We visited Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center and visited the Edwards, family friends with a daughter just my age. And then we went to Orlando! We spent two or three days at DisneyWorld--this was before even EPCOT was built. My memories of that visit to the park are mostly of standing in long lines, but the stories my family tell include me disappearing and coming back with the life story of everyone behind us in line, and me falling asleep in the Hall of Presidents and napping all the way through the American Revolution and the Civil War. I have clearer memories of the water-skiers at Cypress Gardens, and I'm sure we stopped at at least a couple of other attractions that have faded from memory.

Now that I try to pull up memories, it's interesting how much has faded and what still stands out. Somewhere I convinced my parents to pay for a drawing done by a sidewalk artist, who made my shirt blue instead of the white it really was, and that portrait hung in my parents' bedroom for many years afterward. We ate at Morrison's Roast Beef almost every day--an all-you-can-eat cafeteria-style chain where I fell in love with the hot open roast beef sandwiches. I tried Key Lime pie for the first time and still don't care for it. It was incredibly hot for much of the trip, especially while we were in Orlando--there are pictures of six-year old me with sweat standing out on my brow, and I think that trip is what convinced my Dad to start getting air conditioning in our future cars. I remember the orange briefcase, handed down from my father, that held my books, toys, and drawing materials. I remember singing show tunes and Scottish airs and rounds along the highway. I remember sleeping on Beckie, who was incredibly patient for a fifteen year old dragged along on a six-year-old's dream trip.

As I think about it, that's why I'm picking that trip: it was the first time that a trip focused on what I would enjoy, not on visiting family, or attending a meeting, or entertaining a church group, or--as would soon become the case--visiting colleges. My parents wanted me to love travelling as much as they did and I can see now the effort and expense they went to in order to teach me the joy of it. That was a good trip.