This year for the Jacob family Christmas extravaganza, I am planning to make pumpkin pie, pumpkin panna cotta, jaffa cookies using my favorite chocolate chip cookie dough base, and Chilean-style empanadas. We just finished grocery shopping for all the ingredients, but of course, since Australians are not super familiar with the idea of canned pumpkin, we brought canned organic Trader Joe’s pumpkin into the country, as well as masa harina. These empanadas are going to be the most time consuming and laborious, and of course, the dough for them will not be light. I can already see Chris’s mother cringing at the amount of real butter we bought for them. No margarine use here.

Christmas is the one time of year historically (okay, so this is only the second Christmas) when Chris and I have cooked together in the same kitchen at the same time. One day, it will be nice when we have our own little ones in our kitchen pitching in to help cook and prep Christmas dinner every year together. My little Bart figurine can be in the background while we all cook to “Jingle Bell Rock.”