New Year, New Home, New Kitchen!
| Post Your Comments |The end of 2009 was an exciting whirlwind of activities. My girlfriend fiancée moved in on December 15 and just 10 days later we were hosting an intimate Christmas Dinner for 18 people (our immediate family) .
Moving and unpacking brings it’s own stress and problems, and many relationships crumbled under less stress than that. Secure in our relationship, we upped the stress ante with Christmas shopping, wrapping presents, decorating trees and hosting 18 people for dinner. And to top it all off, there was no room to unpack all of Julie’s belongings into my townhouse! At one point, i considered wrapping her moving boxes in Christmas paper, just so we could leave it in the living room!
By December 17th we realized that no Christmas miracle would allow us to comfortably fit in the townhouse, let alone start a new family. So along with the stress of “moving, unpacking, Christmas shopping, wrapping presents, decorating trees and hosting 18 people for dinner” we decided to house hunt as well!
This is a food blog, so let’s talk about food. For Christmas dinner, we decided to make a traditional porchetta roast. Something i’ve never had, nor had I ever heard of until my mom returned from her FoodBuzz weekend in San Fran. Undaunted, I added to my list of “moving, unpacking, Christmas shopping, wrapping presents, decorating trees and hosting 18 people for dinner, and house hunting” the search for pork belly in Palm Beach County. Which apparently, is a lot harder than I thought. Thankfully, chef Jeremy had some contacts that allowed me to cross pork belly off my list of “moving, unpacking, Christmas shopping, wrapping presents, decorating trees and hosting 18 people for dinner, house hunting, and finding pork belly” and helped us get a couple of Kubota Pork bellies.
I used this three-part video (1, 2, 3) that I found on Jamie Oliver’s site of Gennaro making the porchetta roast as my inspiration. BTW, these roasts measured over 21-inches long and barely fit in my oven! And we ‘needed’ two roasts to feed our 18 guests, since Genarro said they would reduce in size by almost half!
Obviously, Gennaro never used Kubota Pork Belly, since these were so lean and delicious, they barely shrunk! The roasts paired well with Creamy Polenta with a Fricassee of Mushrooms and Truffle Reduction, as well as pumpkin risotto, and string beans with romesco sauce that were made by my mom.
Whew! Now that we survived “moving, unpacking, Christmas shopping, wrapping presents, decorating trees and hosting 18 people for dinner and finding pork bellies” it was time to focus on house hunting full time.
Offers were made, countered, rejected and we ultimately found “exactly-what-we-never-knew-we-always-wanted” on January 2. We happily closed a month later and now sit amongst boxes, loving, laughing and giggling at the echos and playfully getting ‘lost’ in the our new home as we happily plan another big event — the wedding!
And finally, our new kitchen with the realtor and home inspector as models! New photos to come once we unpack the kitchen.
