Your Best Hosting the Holidays Tips

Okay, I was freaking out yesterday, thinking I couldn't do all I needed to do for Thanksgiving, then Christmas Eve, then Christmas Day, then New Year's. There's the cooking, cleaning, planning games, and generally being a good host.

Then I remembered that I have done these holidays every year, and I have managed because I plan it all out and do some work in advance.

So I thought I'd share a tip, the ask for your input.

My Tip

For hosting and cooking for a big holiday meal. . .

Cook in advance, in particular make a freezer-stable pie pastry in advance and store in the freezer. I made this recipe this morning and froze it in 5 portions. They thaw overnight in the fridge before I need to bake the pie. For Thanksgiving this year, I'll be making 1 single-crust pie and 1 double-crust pie, using 3 of the 5 portions of this dough. I'll be using the other 2 dough portions in a sweet and savory meat pie for New Year's Eve. (There's a fun name for this meat pie -- Medieval Game Pie.)

Fool-Proof Pie Pastry (enough for 5 single crusts)

4 cups flour (if you want to use some whole grain, you can use 1 cup whole wheat + 3 cups white flour)
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1  3/4 cups shortening
1 large egg
1/2 cup water
1 tablespoon vinegar

In a large bowl, stir flour, salt and sugar together.  Cut in shortening.  

In a small bowl or the measuring cup from the shortening, beat the egg with a fork then stir in water and vinegar. Pour over the flour mixture and mix until dough comes together. Chill for 30 minutes. 

Divide into 5 portions and shape each into a flat, round patty. Wrap each in plastic wrap.

This dough can handle extra flour, if needed, for rolling. Extra flour and handling will not toughen the baked product. 

The dough keeps, refrigerated, for 3-5 days, or frozen for several months. Thaw completely before rolling out.

Your turn -- tell us your best tip for hosting and cooking for a big holiday. Do you play any games after Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Years dinner? Do you prepare foods in advance? Any that can be frozen? Feel free to provide links to recipes or the recipes, themselves in the comments.

Off-Season Garden Fruit

We have 2 fresh apples and 4 fresh pears left of our fresh fruit harvest from this season's trees. But that doesn't mean that we're out of homegrown fruit. 

I still have oodles of apple and crabapple sauce, and lots of apple chunks (from bruised apples) and Asian pear chunks (from our neighbor's fallen tree branches). I also have home-dried prunes, home-dried apple slices (from early apples that were softening), home-dried Asian pear slices, and homemade fruit leather rolls.

The applesauce and crabapple sauce are great to have on hand. However, for those who go off to work during the day, they make terrible portable food, lacking watertight food containers. We do buy some fresh fruit this time of year, tangerines, oranges, bananas, and some apples. As a supplement to those purchases, it's time to start using the dried fruit I made this summer.

This week I brought out some of the fruit leather rolls (I made 120 total). I also made little bags of dried fruit. Each of these bags has the equivalent of half an apple and 5 small plums, about a serving of fruit at lunch.

When we run out of the fruit rolls, I will make more batches, using the frozen apple and crabapple sauces.

By processing a lot of our tree fruit into dried slices/halves or into leather, I ensure that we will have garden fruit when the fresh fruit has been exhausted, stretching our grocery budget during the tough late fall and winter months.