Today’s Adventures in Non-Euclidean Geometry:

Your pantry is a small room, approximately 8 feet by 4 feet in size, with shelves on three of the walls. It is crammed full of stuff and you are beginning to have trouble using it. You are also annoyed because you have a cereal bug infestation that you have not been able to stop. Because spring fever is setting in a few months early, you have decided to spend your Monday, with the help of two others, cleaning out the entire pantry from top to bottom and then only put back the things you like. You remove every single object from the pantry — boxes, cans, books, glassware — and you fill up your entire kitchen with what used to be in your pantry. Then, after the pantry gets scrubbed down and mopped and disinfected, you return things to the pantry. At the same time, you fill three black garbage bags full of items you are discarding.

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When you finish, your first thought is:

1. “Wow! This is so wonderful!”
2. “Take THAT, cereal bugs!”
3. “Why is it I have a ton less stuff and it still doesn’t all fit back in?”

Answer: 3. I still can’t figure it out. If you have a lot of stuff, and you remove a ton of it, you should have LESS, right? Apparently it doesn’t work that way. Weird.

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You have removed the six shelves’ worth of cookbooks so that you can rearrange them or get rid of them, as the case may be. It used to be that collecting cookbooks was your husband’s thing. Since you’ve begun cooking and more especially since you’ve begun baking, however, you’ve taken over the cookbook buying habit. How many books have you bought in the past year?

1. 10
2. 20
3. 50

Answer: 2. I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to keep it to about 20. Lots of cupcake books (Why? Have I been making many cupcakes? If so, when?), lots of baking books, a couple of casserole books.

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What’s the oldest expiration date you find in the pantry?

1. 2005
2. 2002
3. 1993

Answer: 3. Which means it’s from the year Darin and I got married. Which means it survived a move to Los Angeles… and a move back. It did not survive today’s purge, however. And strangely enough? I can’t remember what this item was. Probably for the best.

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You are confused by the presence of which item(s) in your pantry?

1. The Flours: all-purpose, bread, cake, rice, potato, and whole wheat.
2. The endless containers of balsamic vinegar.
3. The three separate bottles of Ancho Chile Powder, a spice you never use.
4. All of the above.

Answer: 4. Okay, I kind of understand the flours. But the 5 separate bottles of balsamic vinegar? I think the pantry must have been such a mess I didn’t know I already had balsamic vinegar. (Gee, ya think/) And the Ancho chile powder: go figure.

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One of the first things you find once you’ve put everything back in the pantry is:

1. That library book you’d been searching for.
2. A cereal bug.
3. Something for tonight’s dinner.

Answer: 2. GodDAMN cereal bugs. Everything that a cereal bug might find tasty is in plastic buckets, so I’m hoping to God this is going to starve whoever’s left.

Despite having had a lot of help in doing the pantry, I am completely wiped. Tonight’s dinner will be leftovers, ’cause I got nothing left for actual cooking. This is why you need a small house, so that you aren’t tempted to have all this crap to begin with.

This is totally the year we get this house in order. I need to feel less hostile toward my living environment on a day-to-day basis.

I am completely wiped. The kids are playing nicely together in the other room with their new dolls — Simon got Batman and Robin, Sophia got Batgirl and Princess Genevieve, and somehow they’ve come up with a shared universe. My father-in-law is finishing up some of the dishes from yesterday. I’d stop him, but that would take effort and, well, let him do it if he wants. Darin is upstairs in bed, not sleeping as I had supposed, but reading his birthday/Christmas/Hanukkah/Solstice gift from his brother Mitch: Absolute Sandman. Mitch also gave me a book that I was up reading into the wee hours (well, well past my bedtime): Essence of Chocolate, by the founders of Scharffen Berger Chocolate. As I lay in bed last night reading this book, I kept thinking, “I’ve got to get some sleep. I’ll read just one more recipe. Okay, I’m going to make that. No, I’m not going to make that, because I have not one but two refrigerators stuffed full of food. But as soon as we have run out of food, I am so making that.”

(I actually bought a small refrigerator this year specifically for Christmas. It fits into a utility closet. Darin says he’s going to take it to work when he goes back in January. I said we’re going to see about that.)

The reason I had to get to sleep (and not bake anything when I woke up) was that yesterday was Christmas and we hosted 15 people for dinner: my family, Darin’s family, and a family of friends of ours. I asked my guests to bring hors d’oeuvres and Mitch to make salad while I concentrated on dinner and the local French pastry master did dessert. I need to make a few notes of things to remember for next year:

• I’m not cooking for 15 people, I’m cooking for 9 adults and 6 children. Thus, I should make food for 10, not 15..
• And not 10 hungry people either, but 10 people who’ve just gorged on delicious appetizers.
• Take the roast out when the internal temperature is about 120. We took it out at 130 and while it was pink inside, it wasn’t rare and we were all kinda hoping for rare.

On Christmas Eve I made the batter for the Yorkshire Pudding, so it would be nice and cold when the time came. And so I didn’t have to worry about it come the morning. I also made about 3 dozen gingerbread cookies “for the kids to decorate.” Uh huh. If you say so, Diane.

First thing Christmas morning at about 7 am I took the 12-pound, 5-rib prime rib out of the fridge and put it on the counter to get to room temperature by noon. As it turned out, it did not get to room temperature by noon — we put it in the microwave for a few minutes at 20% power, and that seemed to work without cooking it.

I trimmed and washed three pounds of spinach. I washed each clump of spinach twice, and there was still sand in it when I was all done. That was for the creamed spinach, which was wonderful, although three pounds of spinach steams down to about a handful.

I scrubbed, peeled, and sliced (using a mandoline) four pounds of russet potatoes into 1/8-inch slices. This went into potato au gratin. I actually topped the potato au gratin with a bunch of gruyere cheese, so it was a bit of a gratin dauphinois too. Every recipe I read said, “Supposedly one batch serves 8 but everyone had two helpings so make more!” Of course, you should only make more if you have 10 hungry people and not 10 people stuffed with hors d’oeuvres. I’m going to learn. Seriously. But the potato au gratin was wonderful: creamy and just enough tang from the cheese.

I made actual egg nog, with raw eggs and rum and everything. It was not nearly as thick as the store-bought stuff. I don’t know what I did wrong (if anything). Probably didn’t fluff the egg whites enough.

As hors d’oeuvres we had a variety of hard cheeses, sour cream coffeecake (from Zingerman’s), leek pie, spanokopita, spicy chicken drummettes, goat cheese, and some other tasty things that I don’t think I got around to.

When the beef came out we deglazed the pan, poured a 1/4 cup of drippings back in, poured the Yorkshire pudding batter on top of it, and put it back in. I watched it for a while and started moaning, “It’s not puffing.” “A watched pudding never puffs,” I was told. Repeatedly. By everyone in the kitchen. It did, in fact, eventually puff up and quite nicely too. Yorkshire pudding? Rocks.

We all ate like kings for dinner, if I don’t mind saying so myself (and I don’t), and after resting for a bit we had the chocolate buche de Noel and tarte Normande with creme Anglaise. Oh, they were good. I could only eat small slices of both, but you didn’t need more than a small slice because they are so flavorful. That Pascal Janvier, he is a genius.

The kids played on the Wii for a while (which was tricky, given that we had 4 controllers and 5 kids, but apparently they shared pretty well). After my sister’s family and our friends left, Mitch played Zelda for a while. We had to keep telling the kids, “No hints! Let Mitch figure it out!” But they wanted to share everything they knew about the game, despite being told not to.

After Mitch left and I did as much cleaning as I could stand, I headed upstairs and started reading the chocolate book. I forced myself to stop around 11, when my eyes were closing of their own accord.

It was a pretty good Christmas day.

ETA: Darin started reading The Essence of Chocolate and said, “This is the greatest book EVER.” He agreed I should wait to make a few of the recipes until we have a space to store them, however.