Thanks for stopping by! I'm Cori and I'm happy you've found your way here. If you're wondering why my blog is called "Let's Eat Grandpa," it's an old grammar joke: Let's eat, grandpa! Let's eat grandpa! (Punctuation saves lives.) 
So, this was automatically supposed to post on Christmas Eve. But it did not. So, here it is, in all its late glory.
Ahh, Christmas is upon us. Tomorrow. At least I think it is. I have hardly noticed since I don’t have a TV anymore (no commercials or Christmas specials) and I’m making most of my Christmas gifts this year so I haven’t been in a lot of stores to be bombarded with snowmen and reindeer. It’s actually quite nice to have a simple Christmas, without feeling the overwhelming consumerism push this time of year.
But despite not really feeling it too much, Christmas is coming! And I know this because I have been Making Things. Some of these things were made in the kitchen. Last weekend I broke out the canning supplies and, with the help of my mom, got cracking on some homemade orange and meyer lemon marmalade.
I ended up making two different recipes:
First up: Naval Orange and Lemon Marmalade from my Canning For A New Generation cookbook. This recipe was a little fussy (the kitchen was a delicious, citrus-y mess), but it turned out some great marmalade. This recipe doesn’t require additional pectin — it uses the natural pectin in the oranges and lemons. But it had to cook quite a bit longer to get up to 220° (a candy thermometer is helpful for this), compared to marmalade that uses a packet of pectin to get it to gel. The result, however, was phenomenal. Cooking the marmalade for so long and at such a high temperature almost candied it — my mom and I were licking the pan after we canned the marmalade. It turned out this dark, rich, orange-candy-like marmalade that was utterly divine. I want to smear it all over everything.
Second up: The next day, I wanted to make some more marmalade, but we didn’t have the time to make the first recipe, so my mom pulled out her trusty Cooking With a Food Processor cookbook (which is older than I am) for a Meyer Lemon and Orange Marmalade recipe that was much quicker than the first, but required pectin to make the jelly set. It’s a much less involved recipe, though there is still a lot of peeling, cutting, segmenting, etc. of the citrus — there’s just no way around this when making marmalade. This recipe turned out a lighter, more traditional marmalade than the first recipe, and was also really delicious. There was also pan-licking on this one.
Additionally, we also made hazelnut biscotti, from a recipe that we learned when we in Italy. I don’t have the recipe in front of me, but if you’d like it, I’d be happy to type it up for you — just let me know!
This was definitely a Lesson in Cooking. Here is what we learned. First of all, buy already shelled hazelnuts. My mom had a heck of a time banging open all of the hazelnut shells with a hammer to get to the nut. I nearly lost an eye. She will be finding hazelnut bits around her kitchen for a year. Second, remember to add the baking soda and baking powder, or you will end up with a brick. A delicious brick, but one that can double as a sledgehammer (perhaps for cracking more hazelnuts?). I made three batches — the first was a brick, the second was perfection, and the third was just OK — I don’t think the baking soda and baking powder fully incorporated into the dough (I added it a bit late, despite my brickwork in the first batch). It really reminded me of Italy — the process of making the dough from scratch and smelling the biscotti fresh out of the oven.
I’m realizing how much I enjoy this slow sort of cooking and baking. Maybe my disdain for cooking for so many years came from the fact that I always felt rushed and stressed. I’m still getting the hang of things and I still find myself a little on edge in the kitchen, but I do enjoy spending time there, making things that people will appreciate and enjoy.
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Training Update: I am officially a red belt! All over the Interwebs, I have myself listed as an Intermediate Ninja — but my red belt puts me into Advanced Ninja status. My dad and Aunt Bonnie came to belt promotion the other night, and gave me the best compliment ever: “You do push-ups better than all the guys!” Heck. Yeah.
I haven’t run since Thanksgiving — it’s been cold (well, California cold…which is probably fairly warm for the rest of the country…but STILL) and I’ve been very busy. I’m hoping to start working toward a 10k after the new year starts. I just don’t have the time to run until January!
Last Saturday, Tough Mudder training was really “fun” — the workout sort of fun where you’re sore for a week. Tough Mudder is all about camaraderie and helping your teammates make it to the finish. To illustrate this in our training, my friend made a list of exercises, and she, her boyfriend and I had to get through them all. It didn’t have to be broken up evenly — we just had to count down the exercises until there were none left. There were also two 1/3 mile runs where we had to carry a 15lb weight disc between us, passing it back and forth when we got tired. Here’s what we did:
300 push-ups
200 box jumps
100 burpees
Holy crap, right? It was really difficult, but together we got through it all!
