a collage of all the recipes the team has shared from a whiskey neat to christmas cookies to mushroom gracy, pasta cabonara, a 7 layer cake, sausage balls, and a grasshopper drink

af+

A Very Special Senior Team Holigay Recipe Roundup

The Editors

—

Dec 23, 2022

COMMENT (8)

A space vector in black, teal, and purple. It reads 13 Days of A+. The A is a triangle. — See all our 13 Days of A+ Content!

This is…you can’t make a meal with this roundup. We’ve got cookies, gravy, cake, pasta, sausage balls and two separate and very different alcoholic beverages. Okay, like, you could make this a meal but I have questions if you do that and don’t add anything else. Why are the only options straight whiskey or grasshoppers (lactose intolerant arsenic, basically) and WHAT DOES THE GRAVY GO ON. What this is, however, is a pick-your-own-adventure of the senior team’s fave recipes for the holigays. And what this is REALLY about as opposed to anything you could use to build a meal, is what we consider ours and what we consider worth sharing with you. Enjoy and as Anya says, mangia mangia! Wishing you the happiest of holigays!

xoxo,

Nico

glowing letters emerge from a dark cyber spacey background. they read "day 11" and there is a cartoon gir of a cat looking cute

Carmen Phillips , Former Editor-in-Chief

Delicate Butter Cookies and Almond Meltaway Sugar Cookies (plus Icing)

a photo carmen took of her Christmas cookies, two plates, one with the cutaway cookies and almond melts with chocolatey centers, and one with sprinkle-decorated butter cookies, sit on a wooden flour-powdered table

Before the pandemic, I’d regularly bake about 120-150 cookies (roughly 10-12 dozen), pack them into tins, and distribute them to my family and across my apartment building. It was my version of community care, squeezed into the middle of the night.
I say “squeezed into the middle of the night” because I would wait to bake them all at once, in my sweatpants with corny Christmas rom-coms to keep me company, overnight. I’d usually wrap up just as the sun was beginning to peak, distribute everything, and sleep the entire next day. Which at the time seemed chaotic and charming, but in retrospect, is a lot of fucking work!

I cannot imagine spending an entire night baking anymore (these days everything feels so exhausting??), but I still return to these two recipes every year. For me they go hand-in-hand, a platonic ideal of two different types of “perfect for Christmas” cookies. One is sweetly covered in icing, a homemade version of the addictive — and ok, chemically — version that’s in every supermarket and hard not to love. The other is so elegant, so delicate, it’s like they were bought in an incredibly fancy bakery instead of made in my kitchen. Both types of cookies are so delicious, soft, and buttery that they melt against the roof of your mouth.

I don’t necessarily believe that Christmas cookies should be quick (this is the time of year to slow down and enjoy the process, because if not now, then when?) — but they should be clear and easy to follow! The delicate, fancy butter cookies are a process called slice-and-bake, which requires a few lengthy trips to the fridge, but are otherwise very straightforward and not at all fussy. They also make a shit ton at once, with infinite mix-and-match potential. My favorites are walnuts and cranberries or white and semi-sweet chocolate.

Trust me, when it’s all done, you will come across as if you’re professionally trained, but with the level of practical skill that you can accomplish using only one hand while drinking eggnog in the other. The full recipe makes about 50 small butter cookies, but I usually half it and make about two dozen.

The Almond Meltaways are my show stopper, and they can be made in less than the length of a Netflix Christmas rom-com. These are the cookies I had to start hiding from people because they’d ask for it so often. You can use the icing recipe that’s included, but I find that when you stack the cookies in a tin, the icing doesn’t quite get hard enough to make the task easy. Instead, I recommend using this icing recipe (just half it) and the results are just as easy and equally delicious, but dries hard enough that you can tap on it. Leave the icing white or use red/green food coloring if you like.

They are perfect cookies. perfect. And I love them.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya , Managing Editor

Grasshoppers

a stock photo of a grasshopper cocktail that is mint green with chocolate shavings on top

Christmas is actually the one time of year where I’m not super in charge of recipes/cooking. I’ve always lived pretty far from my hometown, so traveling logistics mean that I’m a little less involved in some of the cooking. My sister usually makes the traditional Norwegian cookies with my grandmother (I’m not really known for my baking anyway). Kristen and I were in charge of the Norwegian sausage one year, which was fun! We made it at home with my meat grinder and sausage casing attachments for my KitchenAid and then froze them and traveled with a case of homemade pork sausage across several states lol.

Now that I’m living even farther from my family and also because Kristen is estranged from some of her family, we both have been really intentional about developing traditions that are just ours. She has also been absorbed into my family’s traditions, but it’s nice for us to have things that are our own and that feel new and special. One of those things has been special Christmasy cocktails I make for us in the days leading up to when we need to leave to drive to my parents.

My recipe for a grasshopper is 2 ounces creme de cacao, 2 ounces creme de menthe, and 1 ounce heavy cream. Put it all in a shaker with ice and then strain into a coupe glass! Then I like to use my microplane to shave milk chocolate on top for an extra special touch. It tastes exactly like a junior mint. Hot tip: If your liquor store is out of the green creme de menthe and only has the clear kind, add green food coloring!

Heather Hogan , Senior Writer + Editor

Sausage Balls

a stock photo of sausage balls which are like cooked dough balls with sausage in them with a side of sauce

My wife and I aren’t huge Christmas people. Honestly, the way we both grew up, the stress and pressure of the holidays, the performance of it all, the way our families didn’t fully accept our gayness, the fraught relationships. Neither of us have a lot of great memories of Santa Time. One of the only consistent joys of Christmas, for me, was my grandma’s sausage balls. They’re nothing fancy. My grandma is a FANTASTIC cook and baker, but she made these things one time from a Bisquick box recipe in a pinch and I never stopped begging for them. So she makes them every single Christmas day. And now, so do I.

1 pound sharp cheddar (Shred your own so it sticks right!)
1 pound ground pork sausage (I like spicy! Veggie sausage works too!)
2 cups Bisquick
1/4 cup milk (Maybe! If your dough is too dry!)

Preheat oven to 350 °F.

In a large bowl, combine everything together. You can use a stand mixer or just your hands.
Form the dough into golf ball-sized roundies and place on baking sheets. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until golden brown and the sausage is cooked through. I like to dip mine in the same kind of remoulade I use for fried green tomatoes, which is just a mix of greek yogurt, pickle juice, spicy mustard, horseradish, and a splash of Tabasco.

Anya Richkind ,

Pasta Carbonara

a big ole bowl of carbonara pasta

I cannot think of a single thing we consistently make over the holidays — my family has never been huge on baking or cooking, I guess! The biggest food-oriented tradition I had growing up was going to this cafe called Javaholics every single Friday before school, ever since I was four years old. (One day I will calculate how many Fridays of chocolate croissants that is.) My parents still go out for pastries every Friday, though Javaholics is long gone. ANYWAY! I’m sharing a recipe for my dad’s carbonara pasta, since that’s something I always urge/force him to make while I’m home, because no one makes it as good as my dad. When he was in grad school, he and my mom lived in a house with a bunch of Italians, and that’s how my dad learned this carbonara recipe. I’m going to list out this recipe exactly as I was taught it, which will reveal a lot not only about carbonara pasta, but also about my dad.

Ingredients:

One or two onions
One package of canadian bacon (or regular bacon), which is probably six pieces?
One or two raw eggs
Your favorite kind of pasta
Lots of parmesan cheese

Recipe:

Chop up the onions. It’s okay to have some bigger pieces in there, it adds texture! Overall, chop them pretty small.

Saute the onions until they’re translucent, or however long you want. Put those in a bowl.

Cut up the Canadian bacon into little pieces.

Saute the Canadian bacon until it looks crispy. Don’t overdo it.

While all this this is happening, enlist someone (ideally the youngest sibling in the family) to grate a boatload of parmesan cheese. Like, way more than seems necessary. A little mountain.

Boil water for the pasta. Cook the pasta until it’s al dente.

Combine the pasta with the onions and bacon. Mix everything together.

Crack an egg into a separate bowl and whisk until it’s all mixed up.

Pour that egg — yes, raw! — into the pasta/onion/bacon mixture, which should still be quite hot at this point. Mix everything together!

Make a decision — do you want to add another egg? The pasta should look coated, so if it still looks dry, add another raw egg in. If not, time for the next step!

Mix the mountain of cheese in with the rest of the pasta, along with some salt and pepper. Think you have added enough cheese? Throw in a little more! Mix everything together and… mangia mangia!

viv , Art Director

Medovik Honey Layer Cake

according to viv, a failure of a 12 layer cake. it, um, kind of looks like a stack of very thing pancakes with cream between the layers

This recipe is awesome because it’s a 12 layer cake. 12 layers!! A chemist friend baked it once and I can say it’s one of the best cakes I’ve ever had, and I still think about it sometimes. I tried baking it in the summer of 2019 in my sister Megan’s dirty apartment in Long Island and I failed hilariously (see photo). It’s really hard! I hope one day I can find someone who can make this cake for me again…

Nico Hall , Team Writer

Mushroom Gravy

a photo of mushroom gravy simmering in a cast iron pan

Okay, so I don’t have a firm recipe for this because this is just something I have been doing as I’ve gone along over the years, but it can be made two ways, vegan or vegetarian. The most important thing is to use lots and lots of mushrooms and if you can round up some affordable dried mushrooms or if you have fancier mushrooms besides button, such as shiitake, then now is the place to splurge because it really is all about the flavor of the mushrooms here. (Do you forage for mushrooms? I am jealous.)

Why do you need mushroom gravy for the holigays? Because literally everyone else is eating meat gravy and you don’t wanna eat meat, or you have guests who don’t eat meat but they need that flavorful sauce for their potatoes, their seitan roast, literally everything. It is a nice-to-have that will also make the meal like 200% better.

What you’ll need:

Mushrooms, various. Everything is in proportion to how much you’re making and how many people you’re making it for, but I might use two pints of mushrooms for six people, if that makes sense, maybe more,
Butter or butter substitute,
Salt,
Alliums of your choosing — I prefer shallots,
Some kind of creamy stuff — vegan sour cream, chevre (what I usually use these days),
Soy sauce and (optional) vegan beef base (I like Better than Boullion)

Okay, so, take your preferred oil: I think butter or vegan butter substitute is best. Maybe that isn’t your style. Olive or avocado oil will do in that case! Probably not something with a high burn point like canola though. That will make it greasy.

Then, low and slow, sautee your cleaned, sliced alliums in butter in a pan. I usually use my cast iron that I use for almost everything. After they get medium-translucent, not quite caramelized, add the mushrooms. Get these cooked down until nice and soft. If at this point you are using vegan “beef” base add it and mix it into the liquid coming out of the mushrooms, then add salt TO TASTE DO NOT MAKE THIS TOO SALTY because now you are going to add soy sauce to taste. Then add your creamy stuff, also to taste, to make a kind of creamy gravy situation. Add herbs if you got them but not too much and careful with the dried ones. The mushrooms are the star here. You’ve got this!

Laneia , Director of Operations

Whiskey Neat, after 10:00pm on Christmas Eve

a stark glass of neat whiskey stands out against a black background

Ingredients

Lowball glass
Whiskey
Children
Time

Put aside plenty of time. Escort two children — or however many you have on hand — into their rooms. Use lots of time before and during this step, as it’s truly the only thing that matters here. When all but around 90 minutes of your time is left, close the bedroom doors and turn off any lamps and overhead lights. Pour some small amount of whiskey into a lowball glass, and either open it up with a splash of water or don’t. Light a candle if you have it. Fold yourself up under a blanket on your sofa or in a chair, or on the floor — I’ve also had fairly good results sitting alone in my car — and sip this room temp whiskey for up to one hour while you listen to the first holiday playlist you find on Spotify.

You did it! I’m proud of you.

COMMENT (8)

13 Days of A+

Did You Like This?

Independent queer media needs your support to survive. Become a member now so we can make more gay stuff like this.

LEARN MORE

Comments

Amy Wesolek

December 23, 2022 at 8:20 am

I love this, especially the last one. I have a logistical question, Laneia. Say you have two children and also need to put presents under the tree after they are asleep. When should you fit that in? Before, during, or after the whiskey?

Loading…
- Laneia
  
  December 23, 2022 at 8:35 am
  
  after!
  
  Loading…
hihello

December 23, 2022 at 8:53 am

okay i am FASCINATED by the honey cake, immediately looked up a recipe, but as a service baker who does not want to wear out my people with too many delicious desserts will have to wait a little to actually go for it. thanks for the tip (and the cake fail photo, epic), viv.

Loading…
- viv
  
  December 24, 2022 at 7:48 pm
  
  The recipe that my friend used was from Olga’s Flavor Factory. Let me know how it goes and if you can send me some ;)
  
  Loading…
forawhile

December 23, 2022 at 7:20 pm

WUT these sausage balls look amaaaaaazingggggggg. And the dip. I mean remoulade. That.

Loading…
Caitlin

December 23, 2022 at 7:25 pm

heather that recipe is the exact same one that my family uses and every year i’m like ‘maybe i shouldn’t make sausage balls, i end up eating most of them and then feeling vaguely queasy’ and every year i’m like ‘eh that’s christmas’ and make them anyway! they are so good

Loading…
- adunlap
  
  December 25, 2022 at 10:53 am
  
  Me tooooo!!! My mom made these when I was growing up and I LOVE THEM and would have eaten the whole batch if I had been allowed.
  
  Loading…
Amelia C

December 28, 2022 at 7:28 pm

I have been chasing the high of medovik ever since the bakery I discovered it at here went vegan and stopped making it. The instagram algorithm learned this about me and showed me lots of recipes for it- in Russian- early in the pandemic shut down, and the translation was always comically bad, so I also have this association of it bringing me a smile in a dark time. Some day I will give baking it a go. I can make baklava, so surely I can make this?? I’ll keep you posted, Viv! I appreciate the humility of sharing your failed attempt.

Loading…