Family, Friends, and the New Year

Well the drive on Friday was one of the smoothest we have had in a long time. In anticipation of possible bad weather we packed the truck to avoid all extra wind resistance. I know I have done this drive a lot of times especially when I recognize truck stops, Denny's, Pilots, and other gas stations along the way. I found myself several times pulling in and saying "Oh I've been here". Also without the wind resistance of the last few trips we didn't use nearly as much gas. We got to TN Friday around 5pm which was just in time to unpack the car and have a nice dinner. Then we got to open Christmas presents with Meghan whom we hadn't seen in almost two months.

On Saturday morning we got up and headed to the store to do some shopping. We planned on having dinner that night with my Uncle and his family and another local family. In total there were eleven of us which definitely makes this the first large party at my house :-) In my honest opinion everything came out awesome. We had some pasta in a marinara sauce, spinach in oil and garlic, potato pizza (mashed potato with mozzarella cheese baked as a pie), artichokes and eggs, chicken cutlets, macaroni and cheese, and a nice salad. For dessert we had pfeffernüsse "pepper nuts" which are german spice cookies baked by Meghan and Panatone which is an an Italian cake with pieces of dried fruit in it.

On Sunday we headed to Atlanta to meet up with family from my Dad's side in what we have named "Not- Christmas" so far it looks like we are going to have a nice tradition of Not- Christmases which will always fall on the weekend after Christmas. We brought a baked rigatoni and cheesecake with us to the party which we had made the day before. The drive was about four and a half hours and is pretty easy consisting of mainly two highways. We only hit traffic when we got right up to Atlanta and two highways (75 and 85 I believe) began merging. When we got to the house there was family galore, some we hadn't seen in years. We hung out talked and caught up with each other for hours before heading back to TN.

On Tuesday we started cooking for New Year's Eve. Now Italian's (and probably a lot of other cultures) believe meat should not be eaten on New Year's Eve. The reason, as my Mom explained, is that you eat fish because fish come from the ocean (water) and is cleansing so that you wash away the bad from the year before and start out fresh. We had linguine in a red pepper, clam and lobster tail sauce, potato pizza, fried artichoke hearts, fried cauliflower, rice balls with cheese, crab cakes, black-eyed-pea patties, fried shrimp, fried scallops, tilapia, cold broccoli salad with lemon and garlic, gardineir and a regular green salad. The very full table looked something like this:

After eating and resting we moved the party from my house to Mom's condo which is outside down town Nashville. There we counted down the last hour of 2013 and waited for the fireworks from the Bash downtown. When we arrived we discovered my Uncle's family had slipped in at some point and set up balloons, and noise makers, poppers and party hats! Then the final seconds ticked away and the fireworks began!

After the fireworks we had a toast to the New Year with Osti Spumanti or sparkling grape juice. And then after some cards we had Italian lemon cake and coffee before heading back out onto the streets and to my house.

The next morning we popped another bottle of Osti for breakfast mimosas and panatone.

The night before I had written 2014 Nashville, TN on the cork in my Mom's condo and left it there for my Mom. On New Year's Day I did the same on the breakfast bottle and will keep it as a momento of my first New Year's in my house.

Basically my Mom put it best on Saturday when she said "It's nice to know we are moving here and we have friends and family already."