Happy New Year!

New Year's Eve has always been a night dedicated to good food for me. If I stay home with my family, my mother cooks something special. If I go out for dinner, I go to a fancy restaurant. This year I tried to make dinner reservation at a couple of popular places on December 30th. Needless to say, I failed to find an open table at a reasonable time...

Well, that was also good news because it meant I would have some tasty home-cooked food that's also way cheaper than dining out. This year we had something we call "Stefanie" meatloaf. It's made of seasoned ground pork, but differs from American-style meatloaves. The Stefanie meatloaf is made almost like a jelly roll - you lay slices of hardboiled eggs, cooked carrots, and pickles on one end and roll them into the ground meat. The result is simply delicious!

As sides, we had sliced fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, and mushrooms that were baked together with the meatloaf. You gotta have something healthy, right? :P Well, that was combined with mashed potatoes (shaped as rosettes), so the health factor probably went back to zero...

This wouldn't be a family dinner without dessert. We had two of them this year. First, something we make every year, some pastries. We usually make them with regular cake batter, but my mother decided to make them out of velvet cake this time. The layers are then soaked in a syrup to make them nice and moist. There is buttercream icing in between the layers and covering the pastries. After cutting them in squares, we decorate them with more buttercream that has been dyed with food coloring. My mother made an incredible poinsettia pattern!

The other dessert were Bulgarian Christmas cookies that we call "Christmas trees" (yes, we had them for New years). The dough is very similar to sugar cookie dough. We then cut out the three different players with special cookie cutters and baked the cookies. After they cooled down, we assembled them with rose hip jam to hold the layers together. Finally, for the snow effect, the cookies were dusted with some powdered sugar. This was a great ending for a great dinner :)