At Thanksgiving, I asked my mom if I could help cook Christmas dinner. I think it took her by surprise, but she agreed.

Her first assignment for the day was a ham, cheese and chives scone for breakfast. We used some awful Rachel Ray recipe that didn’t have a cook time and called for ingredients but never said what to do with them, so we did some improvising. The scones turned out okay, but the recipe called for too much sugar and the mustard sauce we put on as a glaze overwhelmed the scone’s flavors so you couldn’t really taste the ham or chives.

Next were the desserts. My mom had me make orange salad and pumpkin pie. The orange salad is just a mixture of orange jello, whipped cream, canned pineapple and canned mandarin oranges. My mom added the whipped cream in too soon (the jello hadn’t started to harden yet) and had me add the entire container, so the orange salad was delicious but not quite the orange salad we were used to having. The pumpkin pie was AWESOME. I was really proud of myself here. I used a recipe on the side of the canned pumpkin and it was just really good. I wish I had been able to take the photo before a certain piggy took a bit out of the middle.

Somewhere in here, I prepared a marinade sauce for the beef tenderloin and also did this thing where we put holes in the beef and stuck garlic cloves in the holes. Yum. No pictures though, because big lumps of meat are not particularly pretty to look at…

Somewhere in here, I also sauteed frozen crab cakes and baked frozen rolls. Not really impressive, but at least I didn’t ruin anything.

Lastly, I made the mashed potatoes and the dressing for my mom’s spinach salad. The mashed potatoes also had chives and a little bit of cheese. My sister kept saying my favorite line from While You Were Sleeping (“These mashed potatoes are sooooo creamy”) while I stirred. Good times.

The dressing for my mom’s salad (which had spinach, mushrooms, bacon bits, bean sprouts and boiled eggs) consisted of ketchup, salad oil, chicken broth, green onions, vinegar, sugar, Worcestershire sauce and salt and pepper. It was really good (Leslie hated it). This was probably my second favorite item behind the pumpkin pie.

All in all, the experience was pretty great. My mom and I got along cooking all day in one room, so that says something. I think we enjoyed each other’s company and my mom appreciated the help. Most of the items I made turned out well; the only real problem was some pumpkin pie spillage as I transferred the pie to the oven. I give myself an A-.

I’m planning to make a little pesto while I’m here but I think that might be it for this trip. My mom got me this awesome Cooking Light cookbook and I cannot wait to use some recipes from it. It also has a lot of information about basic cooking techniques. One of the best gifts this year! Thanks Mom!