I always get sick around the holidays, and this year I got sick right before Christmas, killing my tastebuds. Which meant that while our Christmas Eve meal- a prime rib roast, yorkshire puddings, and creamed spinach- was fine, I have a feeling our Christmas night party food was less than inspired.

There was the sugar cookies from Nigella (note, she has a recipe for butter/sugar cookies in almost all of her cookbooks, but this one is the one to use, with the cake flour. They are so tender and delicious and are like cookie crack) which were the only success, really.

I tried the buche de noel from Feast which was a disaster. I mean, a people laughed at it kind of disaster. I can't make anything that is supposed to resemble something else. People say, "What is that supposed to be? A tree? HA!" Plus, it tasted like a swiss cake roll but NOT AS GOOD.

There was spinach dip, too. I tried a variation that called for cream cheese and I think it only confirmed that I am a sour cream and mayo spinach dip person. I mean, people ate it (I had homemade pita toasts and breadsticks to go with it, so that helped) but I thought it was pretty terrible. (The breadsticks, though? Not bad.)

And I tried to make these sandwiches with the leftover roast beef but shot myself in the foot by trying to bake the fricking bread, too. It came out overly yeasty and the tomatoes turned into leather, not the jammy confit I imagined, and I am not even linking to the Patricia Wells cookbook I got the recipe from because I hate her so much. I wound up just serving the roast beef as a meat plate, and will try to make some sort of tomato confit in the summertime when one should handle tomatoes anyway.

Oh, and an alsatian tarte flambee, which our friend who works at Trader Joe's mistook for a tart they sold there. He thought I had just added extra caramelized onions to it.