Happy New Year!

May 2007 be filled with love and happiness for all.

We had a good New Year's Eve, everyone had fun. The only one who didn't make it till midnight was Sylvia, she fell asleep around 11pm.

We made the traditional Dutch New Year's treat, called oliebollen.



They are some kind of deep fried cinnamon raisin bread. Not a low calorie snack.

Making oliebollen makes me remember my father. Every year, during the last weekend in December, he would make a HUGE batch of oliebollen dough and turn them into hundreds of oliebollen. We would have a lot of visitors on New Year's Eve, and they all would eat tons of oliebollen and appelflappen.

These friends included one of my aunts, who always ended up drinking too much, and whose stories got more and more unlikely over the course of the evening.

You would think that all those visitors would be enough to eat all the oliebollen, but it never was. Which meant we ended up with oliebollen for weeks into the new year. Oliebollen for breakfast, oliebollen for lunch, oliebollen for dessert. We would beg everyone visiting us 'Please!!! Take some oliebollen! Come on, you know you want them!'

I also remember the very first year we have moved to the States. I couldn't imagine a New Year's Eve without oliebollen, and of course, they weren't very available in the US. No problem, I would just ask my father for his recipe.

Let's just say that somehow the yeast got mixed up and that the dough seemed to keep rising. It rose out of the bowls, ran around on the counter playing tag, and tried to forcefully take over my kitchen. It grew, and it grew, and it grew. That was quite an interesting experience ^^