Christmas Chef-tacular

One of my first food memories is baking glitter cookies with my great grandmother in her kitchen. My cousins and I used to stage sleepovers at her house and baking inevitably worked its way into our agenda.

Grandmother Lang would measure out the dry ingredients for the cookies and let us pour them into the mixing bowl. We'd fight over who got to crack the eggs. She usually ended up fishing stray pieces of shell out of the batter regardless of which sous-chef won egg honors.

She had a kitchen table that folded away into the wall like a Murphy bed. The leg hung down just within reach of our little hands - we used to hit it against the wall like a door-knocker, re-creating the scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy arrives in the Emerald City while we waited for the cookies to come out of the oven.

Once the door to the Emerald Palace had turned back into a kitchen table, we'd spread Grandmother Lang's assortment of sprinkles across its surface while (I'm sure) she braced herself for the mess that would soon ensue.

Twenty-something years later Grandmother Lang is gone, but her recipes are still with us. We made her rolls for Thanksgiving dinner and one of my aunts brought glitter cookies for Christmas (even though we tease her for being the worst cook in the family - someday, I will describe "cake balls" and everyone will understand why).

My grandmother (Grandmother Lang's daughter) is also a great cook. The trait was passed down to Momma J and one of her brothers, and in turn, on to me and Lil'Bro.

This year for Christmas, Grandmother bought everyone a cookbook. This is nothing new - someone inevitably gets a cookbook every year- it was just the first time cookbooks were the featured present. I give her points for trying, but I think Grandmother might be loosing it just a bit...

The first few selections were perfectly typical. Lil'Bro got Bobby Flay's Bold American Food (one of his faves, along with Tyler Florence). He's already planning to make barbecued ribs with peanut-chipotle sauce for NewYears:

My uncle got Hubert Keller's Burger Bar. He's lucky he kept a watchful eye on it, otherwise it may have ended up in someone else's pile:

Then I unwrapped...  The Official Southern Ladies' Guide to Being a "Perfect Mother":

A few gems for your entertainment:

You know you're a Southern Mother if:
You took the initiative to help pick your daughter's husband, silver pattern, honeymoon destination, and even the flowers in the table decorations - at her birth.

You keep a discrete stash of sedatives for use during important events if needed.
Your Granny's idea of "going green" is with creme de menthe.

At some point in her life, every Southern female experiences the shock and awe of recognition: I have turned into. . .her. I AM MY MOTHER.
[so true. it's already happened to me.]

I mean, I get the joke - I live in New York, she wanted me to have a Southern cookbook. But... really? Forget Hubert and Bobby - clearly, I was gifted the winner.
 
Until Momma J opened her cookbook:

Morbid? But funeral food is also a big Southern thing, I guess...

Surprisingly, the biggest hit was a cookbook devoted entirely to bread, which Momma J had bought with the intention of giving to someone as a gift, but couldn't part with:

My uncle entertained us all by reading excerpts aloud, our favorite being Jim Lahey on the beginnings of his bread-baking career:

I baked bread for the first time to impress a girl. I was in college... Bread's sculptural quality attracted me. I don't think anybody else I knew then, crazy as they were, would imagine that thrusting a loaf at his girlfriend was the most romantic idea in the world.

The juxtaposition of "thrust" and "loaf" was enough to reduce us to inappropriate comments and laughter for a good half hour. (I love my family...)

Whether this fine selection of cookbooks was given in earnest or meant in humor, I can't say. All I know is, they definitely made for another successful family Christmas.