Happy New Year - Two Weeks Later

I'm playing catch-up with holiday posts, but as I travel around to other blogs, I see that quite a few of us are a bit behind.

New Year's Eve has never been very exciting to me. A lot of hype and quite often a big letdown. In my younger days, I'd go to clubs & bars to party it up, but it was too crowded, too expensive & the night never lived up to the expectation. Now, I like to either go to a house party with some friends, or stay at home. This year, we did the latter.

Mama Rita had hernia surgery the day of the 31rst, so Jim & his sister spent most of the day at the the hospital. The surgery was a success & Mama Rita is doing just fine. I had to work. It's fun being in the booze business, but the down-side is working mega-hours during holidays. We were both a bit tired and just planned on staying home to either throw in a movie or just watch Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve.

I decided to make "The Joint's Cheeseburger Pizza" from La Dolce Vegan. I started with the dough and what better way to knead it than with my new mixer!

Here it is in action as everything started coming together into a nice ball. After it was left to rise, punched down and made into a pizza crust, I added the toppings.

I think I piled on too much for the toppings, but hey, it was the last day of the year. Go out with a bang I say!

While the pizza was baking, we opened is Richard Hamilton wine. I bought 3 bottles last year around Christmas time. We had one then and saved the other 2. I thought it would go great with "cheeseburger", so we dug this baby out and cracked it open. It has improved greatly over the past year. It's smoothed right out. I think I'll save the last bottle until the end of the year and it should be amazing by that point.

Ding! Pizza's done! It looked and smelled so good. I couldn't wait to eat. I hadn't made this for a long time & we both thought it was a perfect dish for New Year's Eve.

See, I did load it up! I think I went a little overboard on this one. I'll restrain myself on the next one.

We had comfortably full bellies and were awaiting the countdown. At midnight we had some bubbly. I was in a pink mood, so I bought this one.

It's a decent, affordable, easy to drink cava. I served it up in these funky glasses I found a few months ago. Reidel makes wonderful glasses. They came out with a stemless wine glass line a few years back called O. I wasn't really taken with them but I love the sparkling wine glasses. It makes bubbly even more fun!

Someone just couldn't hang on until midnight.


I hope you all had a happy new year and all the best for 2008!