It’s another cold and bleak midwinter day and I am holed up wearing a turtleneck, a sturdy L.L. Bean sweater, wool socks, and lined legging – and I am still cold. I think a lesson to be learned is that one should not visit Florida in February, because re-entry to the real world is rude indeed.

Mr. Sanders and I drove to Jacksonville Beach, Florida for a few days of R&R with our daughter, and her family of whirling dervishes over the long Valentine’s Day weekend. The weather wasn’t approved by the Florida tourism board – it was cool and breezy – so we never unpacked shorts, or bathing suits. But it was warmer than it is here, and there were sunrises and sunsets like nothing we get to see normally. There were congregations of white cattle egrets stalking through drainage ditches, and squadrons of pelicans flying in precision formations along the waterline. There were crowds of sandy, barefooted beachgoers waiting in lines for healthy green smoothies and açaí bowls for breakfast. Later we sat in folding chairs on the sidelines of a flag football game, shivering in a light drizzle, watching parents buzzing after their children. The Floridian version of winter clothing entails hoodies, and maybe socks. No one is holed up at home wearing L.L. Bean, or wool.

The dervishes, boys aged 4 and 10, needed to be re-fueled constantly, like sharks on patrol: pancakes, strawberries, carrots, pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, apples, blueberries, mac and cheese, smoothies, organic chickpea flour cheese snacks, organic seaweed snacks, crackers, celery, avocado, lemonade, Triscuits, cookies, bananas, and more grilled cheese. We thought about grilled cheese a lot.

Why does grilled cheese belong to the young? It is just as tasty now as when I walked home for lunch in elementary school, when my mother would fry up an American cheese-based sandwich in the smallest Revere Ware frying pan and crank open a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Ah, those childhood hot lunches! I did the same for my children, except I used store brand cheese product, whereas my mother bought sliced American cheese by the pound from Benny’s Butcher Shop around the corner on Belltown Road. Benny would stand behind the marble counter, rhythmically slapping a square of waxy paper between each piece of cheese as he sliced it, before wrapping it all in crackling white butcher’s paper, and tying the bundle with a neat red and white string bow.

Usually, for wintery Sunday lunches, Mr. Sanders will make his grilled cheese with Swiss cheese, and I still prefer the oozy store brand. Last night we needed warmth, and ventured into adult territory. We upped our grilled cheese game: posh bread, upscale cheese, and opulent add-ons.

I used to think that adding bacon to a grilled cheese sandwich was innovative and fancy. Sometimes including a slice of tomato was an interesting variation. But you can easily expand your repertoire just by rethinking the bread you use. This will elevate your grilled cheese sandwich experience: artisanal sourdough bread. Whoa. But you can also experiment with ciabatta, brioche, Challah bread, Kaiser rolls, or baguettes. Don’t take my word for it: Escoffier Leave the Pepperidge Farm white bread behind. Visit your local artisanal bakery and find something fresh and warm and delicious. Maybe add some fresh pastries to your order for breakfast tomorrow, too. Yumsters.

Then wander through a deli and pick up some Gruyère cheese, and some good cheddar, and invest in a nice wedge of Parmesan cheese. Wander around some more and wonder at the clever packaging and cute containers for sun-dried tomatoes, capers, pesto sauce, pickled jalapeños, chutney, sriracha, and gherkin pickles. Grab some sweet onions, basil, and bacon. Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Grilled Cheese Sandwich includes Romano and Asiago cheese, kimchi, butter, country bread, salt, and olive oil.

The Tasting Table has some great suggestions, too: Tasting Table

Punchfork suggests: Opulent Grilled Cheese

And this is very luxe indeed, with Brie, Gorgonzola, figs and prosciutto: Sugar Love Spices

Chins up! We are almost through February. The daffodils are starting to poke their heads up. I have some crocuses already blooming in the back yard, so spring is on its way. Pull on your hoodie and your wool socks and make a nice hot lunch. You’ll feel better for it. Winter’s not over yet.

“In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone…”
Song by Christina Rossetti and Gustav Holst

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

It’s Friday, the fourteenth of February, and you are reading this at your desk after a nice turkey sandwich, smugly looking forward to the weekend stretching before you. I hope you have done a little planning. It is Valentine’s Day. It is Friday. Fridays require a little flair, a touch of panache, a little extra effort, particularly if you want to enjoy the weekend. I suggest chocolate.

Homemade, store-bought, ordered from the dessert cart, frozen Sara Lee poundcake topped with ice-cream and chocolate sauce, Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, Hershey’s Kisses from the convenience store, a Whitman’s Sampler (for irony) snatched up at grocery store. These are realistic gestures of love and affection and true regard. If you are considering carnations garnered at the gas station – don’t bother. They do not sing of love and inspiration – they signal the impending rueful tales of woe. And don’t go for the over-priced roses that were flown in from gigantic farms in Latin America – they will be dead in under a week. You could use that money to invest in a sizable bower of daffodils. Plan ahead before you head home this afternoon.

Mr. Sanders and I have rarely spent Valentine’s Day together – it might be a major contributing factor to the longevity of our marriage. Most years he has had to attend an annual boat show in sunnier climes, leaving me to my own devices. Though there was the year when he was home, forgot about Valentine’s Day sentiment, and stopped at the grocery store on his way home and snatched up one of the last, limp, cellophane-wrapped bouquets of carnations in the place. You know the ones – already sitting in a shopping cart near the check out lane – not even a full dozen. He arrived home to find happy, scrubbed pajama-clad children, a home-cooked meal, flourless chocolate cake, and a nicely drawn Valentine. It was memorable.

This past Sunday afternoon I assuaged my conscience, and baked a batch of Dorie Greenspan’s Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies for Mr. Sanders’s early Valentine. I am paying the Valentine’s Day love forward. This is the best recipe I have found for chocolate chip cookies. I love it because the oatmeal gives it the appearance of health food and I can freeze more than half of the dough, which feels like money in the bank, knowing there is cookie material waiting for any possible emergency; better than money spent on roses that have an embarrassing carbon footprint.

Dorie Greenspan’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

I use my electronic kitchen scale for this recipe – Dorie calls for 340 grams of semisweet chocolate. I followed the recipe on the back of the Nestlé bag for years, obviously, and just dumped a bag of chocolate chips into the dough. Now I use Ghiradelli 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate because I am a grownup who prepares for sentimental gestures, but a bag of Ghiradelli weighs only 283 grams. It is a good thing I finally checked. I have been cheating Mr. Sanders and his children for years! Now I weigh out the prescribed amount of chocolate chips. Purists would say that I shouldn’t be using waxy chocolate chips, but should instead be chopping the chocolate – but there are limits to my devotion. But you go ahead and eyeball the amount of chocolate you want to include in your annual show of love. I’m aiming for a little overkill. I also sprinkle a smidge of Maldon salt over the cookies, so they are not cloyingly sweet. This is real life, after all.

Mr. Sanders is home this year. The happy children are off on their own, and it is just us and Luke the wonder dog here tonight. We are going to make pizza, watch No Offence on Britbox, and read for a while before bed. Life is good.

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

You’ll have to go somewhere else for your Super Bowl snacks ideas this year – although – between you and me – you really can’t do much better than a party-size bag of nacho cheese Doritos.*

While some writers wait for divine inspiration before angling their fingers over their keyboards, others of us wander dazedly through the grocery store, looking for ideas. During our COVID year I’d rush tearing through Food Lion- colors, packaging, smells, people! It was all there. I found myself photographing some loose carrots on our kitchen countertop over the weekend: the low angle of the sun setting made the carrots radiate an unearthly orange glow that I think I have only seen in the incandescent light of the genre paintings by the Vermeer and Leyster. This week, while on another motivational stroll through Food Lion (after I had scoped out the extensive and flashy Valentine candy display) I was drawn to this display of radicchio. Look at those colors! Raspberry, magenta, plum, magenta, amaranthine, violet, amethyst, fuchsia, aubergine and carmine! What could I do with those colors in real life? It’s time to make a colorful winter salad.

I love a nice leafy, crunchy salad. I was raised on iceberg lettuce salads, so the discovery of romaine lettuce in college shifted the tectonic plates of my tetchy palate. I used to eat sun-warmed tomatoes out in the garden every summer, but grew up eating tasteless, refrigerated, hothouse tomatoes in my salads all winter long. Luckily time does march on, and we can avail ourselves of healthier greens all year long. Our local farmers have also come into the twenty-first century and are ready to nourish us with their winter bounties. Look for parsnips, garlic, turnips, rutabagas, leeks, lettuce, spinach, kale, chard, potatoes (sweet or regular), and cabbage.

It might be a new year, but that doesn’t mean that I am any less inclined to take the easiest way out in preparing dinner. There is nothing like enjoying a lighter-than-air salad for a summer dinner, though in the winter it needs to be much heartier than our summertime frolics with cool cucumbers, airy vinaigrettes, and artful splashes of lemon juice. We need calories and heft right about now, just so we can go outside and do battle with snowy sidewalks, and scrape the windshield while the wind blows and the snow is still falling.

I also like to use up leftovers when I make salad, no matter what time of year it is. This is our new budget in action – less waste! In the summer I will shred leftover chicken and fling it across a bed of crisp lettuce, with a handful of sunflower seeds and some chunky homegrown tomatoes. This week I warmed up a leftover chicken breast, and sliced it, and nestled it on a bed of spinach leaves. I cooked the last three slices of bacon, and then used the resulting bacon fat for frying the best, and crunchiest, croutons (made from a loaf of old-ish French bread from the weekend). I nestled a couple of still-warm soft-boiled eggs within some of the spinach curls and scattered the bacon over everything. A heavy, homemade vinaigrette, redolent with garlic, was drizzled over the plates. Add candles. Yumsters. A warm, nutritious salad, and an efficient use of leftovers. You could even add a side dish of (canned) soup, if the shoveling has gone into overtime, and you are feeling generous.

Homemade Vinaigrette
6 tablespoons vinegar (use the fancy stuff – the ones you got for Christmas)
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/2 cup olive oil
1 crushed garlic clove
Pinch of ground black pepper
Pinch of nice sea salt

Bacon-fried Croutons
Bacon makes everything better – and you know it!
Cook 3 or 4 bacon slices in a frying pan. Save the grease. (Sometimes I add a little olive oil to make a deeper puddle of cooking grease – use your judgment.)
Add a handful of cubed French bread to the frying pan, cooking for 2 to 3 minutes, until golden brown on all sides. Drain on paper towels. Lightly sprinkle garlic powder, onion powder and Lawry’s Seasoning Salt over the crotons. Using Lawry’s is crucial – make no substitute – not even for “Slap Ya Mama”.

The dark of winter is a good time to introduce hints of color and sparkle to your salad. Reds, oranges, purples, yellows – a veritable rainbow of earthly delights. Cranberries! Apples! Cheddar cheese! Pomegranate seeds! Kale Salad
You can throw everything in a main course winter salad, by cleaning out the produce drawer in the fridge and adding shredded cabbage, carrots, Brussels sprouts, roasted squash, or chunks of apples. Martha knows best:
Radicchio Salad

Radicchio Salad with Oranges

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
—Jack Kerouac

*Food52 Super Bowl Snacks

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

I have retreated to the cozy bedroom to write this morning. I am back in bed-ish – lying on top of the covers, but covered by a thick down throw. It is 19 degrees outside this morning! I have a good view of our front yard, which is swaddled in a thick throw of snow. We haven’t had snow here for at least five years, and the novel beauty of it stops us in our tracks as we trot around the house, performing our daily chores and rituals. A naked shadow of the Japanese maple stretched across the snow yesterday, angled and stark, so like a master’s Sumi-e brush ink painting on pure white paper; sure, fleeting perfection.

Luke the wonder dog had forgotten about snow. He was raised in Florida, hasn’t read too many books, and is prone to forgetfulness, so I can’t blame his incredulity. His first walk yesterday was gleeful and joyous and he ran and kicked up white, fluffy clouds. By the afternoon he was less charmed by the snow, and seemed slightly spooked – everything looked, and smelled, different. I had to shovel a narrow path for him in the back by the raised garden bed so he could see the frozen ground under his cold feet. He then trotted off to happily smell the trail he had blazed earlier, reassured that his back forty was secure. He did not detect even a whiff of a neighboring cat trespasser. And the bare hydrangea bushes, with their few sodden heads, provided excellent cover and privacy. He patrolled quickly, and then came inside to reclaim his position near a hot air register.

Luke and I are clinging to our creature comforts, while Mr. Sanders has been wrapped in layers of flannel, corduroy, fleece, Heattech, alpaca, wool, Gore-Tex, and goose down; shoveling the drive and clearing off his car, happy as a new clam. He had oatmeal for breakfast, and is a furnace of hyperbolic energy. My breakfast bagel and Luke’s kibble are no match for hot, steaming, fruit-topped oatmeal. And if you have to go outside this weekend, instead of retiring to a warm indoor writing space, I encourage you to eat a hot, nourishing breakfast before you put your big boots on.

Mr. Sanders, and Ina Garten, like to cook their oatmeal in the microwave. And they are both practically perfect. Ina Garten Oatmeal

Mr. Sanders makes cold, refrigerated overnight oats 9 months out of the year. He likes to doctor his winter oatmeal with brown sugar, maple syrup, cream, and/or fruit. He suggests banana slices, blueberries, strawberries, granola, cinnamon, a splash of vanilla, pumpkin spices, almonds, Kiwi fruit, raspberries, and raisins are all viable and deelish toppings for winter oatmeal breakfasts. You could also try dried cranberries, honey, applesauce or peaches! Ina likes adding a little chocolate, for a sweet change of pace. Here are some more topping suggestions: Toppings

A more novel approach to oatmeal is to embrace the savory side of life. Add eggs, sausage, cheese, onions and greens to oatmeal! Savory Oatmeal America’s Test Kitchen

Or you can try Cooking for Peanuts’s savory oatmeal – in case you need a new way to serve kale!

Baked oatmeal? Ah, the golden era we live in. Baked Oatmeal

Here is a handy oatmeal guide – everything you should know about cooking oatmeal: Delish

Personally, I think oatmeal is best employed in Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes, but I am huddled inside, and Mr. Sanders is out there enjoying the snow. Dorie Greenspan’s Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

“…now and then a giggling trail of mermaids appeared in our wake. We fed them oatmeal.”
—Tove Jansson

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

I love trailing through food stores, peering through shop windows and admiring perfectly arranged still lives of fruits, vegetables, and meats; getting ideas and inspirations. In Selfridge’s palatial food hall in London a few years ago I marveled at the goose eggs, duck eggs, and quail eggs artfully posed in small packages in a case that also included tubs of duck fat. Interesting. Unusual. Nearby there were the picture perfect piles of roasted meats, and strings of sausages, and boatloads of fish and pretty shiny red lobsters: too many culinary concepts for my addled tourist brain to absorb.

We used to live near a butcher shop where all manner of imported specialities are stacked on every surface, and they were fascinating to consider while standing in line for my two pounds of Italian sausage; one hot, one sweet. Perched on counters and shelves there were day-glow pink pickled eggs in Jeroboam-sized jars, capers small, medium and large, a color wheel of of olive varieties, huge cafeteria-sized tins of La Bella San Marzano Italian Plum Tomatoes, gallons of imported light, plain, virgin and extra virgin olive oils in varying-shaped vessels, dusty packages of pastas, trays of fresh mozzarella, and I could continue the inventory all day. I always feel humbled when confronted by all the ingredients of what must be the potential for many feasts, when all I want is some sausage.

One of the first meals that Mr. Sanders wooed me with was a dish of sausage and peppers. We still prepare it regularly, because it is easy, delicious, pairs well with garlic bread and red wine, it reminds us of our mis-spent youth, and it provides leftovers.

Sausage & Peppers
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 large bell peppers, cut into strips (We like the sweeter tasting red or yellow peppers)
• 2 medium onions, thickly sliced (I like Vidalia or any sweet onion)
• 3 garlic cloves, minced (or be daring and use your garlic press – it will smell heavenly)
• 1 pound hot Italian sausage
• 1 pound sweet Italian sausage
• A generous sprinkle of crushed red pepper flakes
Heat oil in heavy large skillet over medium heat. Add peppers, onions, garlic and sauté 10 minutes. Cook until tender, about 5 -10 minutes. I like to char the edges of the vegetables.

Cook sausages in another heavy large skillet over medium-high heat until brown and cooked through, turning occasionally, about 15 minutes. Slice the sausage into disks, return to the pan and cook until they are nicely browned. Scoop the peppers and onions onto a platter and pile the meat on top. Mr. Sanders likes to add diaphanous curls of Parmesan cheese. Add a salad, a crusty loaf of bread, a tall glass of red wine (Dry January, ha!), and candles.

This is a good meal to make on the weekend, because you can toss the leftover sausage with pasta or rice, and voila! Dinner is already made for a dreary Monday, when no one (least of all me!) wants to cook. Or you can pile it onto leftover crusty bread and have a pretty deelish sandwich. Or add it as a topping to your Friday Night Pizza! We are kitchen geniuses!

Our smart friends at Food52 add potatoes to their sausage and peppers. Sausage & Peppers

Martha has to get fancy, as one would expect, but at least hers is a sheet pan dinner – super easy to clean up. Martha’s Sheet Pan Sausage

I made this Penne and Sausage dish for Monday night pasta last week, and we had it again on Thursday. The next time I try it, though, I will follow the recipe, and will remove the sausage from the casings and will crumble it in the pan, to speed up the cooking process. I also used half a can of crushed tomatoes because it was what I had in the pantry, and it was cold enough that I was not going back out to the grocery store for one more damn thing. I also substituted whole milk for half & half – too lazy to put on my winter coat. The recipe is that good! Imagine how it will taste when an ambitious, thorough cook like you makes it! Skillet Penne and Sausage Supper

Stay warm and dry! Enjoy the creature comforts you can prepare in the kitchen. Everyone will love you for it – even when you use milk instead of cream.

“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.”
― Carl Reiner

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

Winter has arrived. Snow has fallen, and so have the temperatures. I ask my best friend, Alexa, to tell me the temperature throughout the day. She is delighted to tell me the current temp, what the high will be, and what dire weather warning Amazon thinks I should know about, because she is just doing her job.

After all my belly-aching about the summer that wouldn’t end, I should finally be happy that I can wear my precious turtlenecks and wooly sweaters every day. But it has been chilly, even for me. I have been making almost daily announcements about The Miracle of the Heated Car Seat. They bring great comfort and joy. (A genius invented them, and he should be venerated: Robert L. Ballard — inventor of the heated car seat.) Last night I announced to Mr. Sanders that our next house needs to have a heated floor in the bathroom. He just smiled, and turned the page of his book. Think of the luxury of heated floors! I bet they will feel great even in the summer. Luke the wonder dog won’t have his favorite cool retreat then, but that’s life, Luke.

Luke doesn’t know about the heated seats in the car. He only knows that we seem to spend a lot of time in the kitchen these days; chopping, dicing, baking, boiling, broiling, mixing, blending, braising, poaching, blanching, frying, basting, stewing, searing, sautéing, and toasting. We are trying to keep warm in the kitchen and have been cooking up a storm. Luckily for Luke there is gravity, so lots of delicious bits end up on the floor, and he is happy to pounce. The kitchen is a cozy place in the winter, in a house without a fireplace. It’s where you’ll find the three of us most days.

All of that prep work results in delicious meals that generate leftovers for days and nights to come. Spaghetti and meatballs is a fine dinner, with candles and garlic bread, and wine (were this not Dry January). But what we fail to appreciate is that buckets of homemade spaghetti sauce cooked on Tuesday can go into the freezer and reemerge over the weekend. More spaghetti for everyone! Or some hot, cheesy chicken parm. Maybe a lasagne. On Friday night we can use the sauce on Chef Tomasso’s world-famous pizza.

Sunday night will be the perfect opportunity to try some homemade Lasagne Soup

On Thursday night we tried a new recipe for Chicken Noodle Soup, using a rotisserie chicken. It cooked in an apple red Dutch oven, simmering all afternoon, which drove poor Luke nuts. The house was perfumed with the heady scent of hot chicken, and warm garlic. Bits of rotisserie chicken found their way into Luke’s bowl, and he was a happy dog. Instead of being my studio assistant all afternoon, he got to nap in the kitchen, monitoring the soup-making process. He loves cozy family projects that involve food, and Mr. Sanders. This is Luke’s gift to you, a free recipe from the New York Times: Easiest Chicken Noodle Soup You can save those boxes of Lipton’s chicken soup for when your next winter cold hits.

We are expecting snow this weekend, and I feel lucky that we have gallons of hot soup on the stove, and spaghetti sauce in the freezer. We might have to bake some cookies, too. A warm and messy kitchen in the winter is even more wonderful than heated car seats – and that is saying something.

“Bubble, bubble, pasta pot,

Boil me some pasta, nice and hot,

I’m hungry and it’s time to sup,

Boil enough pasta to fill me up.”

—Tomie dePaola

And for your reading pleasure: Heated Seats – Good as Sex?

This is an updated version of the column I wrote last year for New Year’s Eve. Happy New Year, Gentle Readers! 

This New Year’s Eve I will be sitting companionably on the sofa with Mr. Sanders, Luke the wonder dog will be chasing bunnies from his cozy bed nearby. All the holiday cooking and merry making has exhausted us. We were very, very merry. That said, we haven’t stayed awake until midnight on New Year’s Eve in years, let alone gone to a party that involved conversation, panty hose or staying out late. Usually, and in the COVID times, we have had a simple supper of nibbles with candlelight, and a glass or two of fizz before we collapse on that sofa and find a movie we can both enjoy, before one of us falls asleep. I expect no different next week, when we ring in 2025.

Prosecco or Champagne? It’s a personal choice. I prefer the economy of Prosecco, because the quality of the pricey, tinier, more French bubbles in Champagne no longer strikes me as crucial. I’ll be asleep by 10 o’clock, with either French or domestic wine. The nationality of cool, sparkling wine we guzzle while toasting a festive New Year’s Eve is not so important. The significant moment is marked by the gentle pop of the cork; the shimmering rivulet poured into the waiting flutes.

2024 was been a year full of ups and downs, hopes dashed, passions rediscovered. Let’s move briskly on to 2025: with the minimum anxiety and dread, because as a brand spanking new year, it is a tabula rasa, fresh, clean and shiny; as yet unmarred: there are no footsteps in the snow yet.

This year we will greet the new year with the best of intentions: to be economical, resourceful, and clever with our use of leftovers. We will promise to compost and recycle more, waste less food; eat more plants, and less red meat. We pledge to grow something more nutritious than one crop of costly tomatoes, and we will patronize the farmers’ markets. We will exercise more, and will be good volunteers. We will resolve to read more books and spend less time on our screens. We will try to be kind and tolerant.

In the meantime, it is Friday night, and it has been a long week. It’s the last time to indulge in 2024. Instead pouring a glass of my usual cheap winter Malbec, I thought I should test some seasonal, perhaps New Year’s Eve-ish cocktail recipes, to get back into the holiday spirit. These are crowd pleasers, but they require a little planning.

“The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love is like being enlivened with Champagne.”


– Samuel Johnson

My Favorite French 75s

“Hits with remarkable precision.”
The Savoy Cocktail Book

2 ounces gin
1 ounce lemon juice
1 spoonful extra fine sugar
Champagne
Shake the gin, lemon juice and sugar in a cocktail shaker filled with cracked ice until chilled and well-mixed and then pour into tall glass containing cracked ice and fill up the glass with Champagne. This clever cocktail was said to have been devised during WWI, the kick from the alcohol combo being described as powerful as the French 75mm howitzer gun.

“Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of Champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.”
—Winston Churchill

Champagne Cocktail

In a Champagne glass add a teaspoon of sugar and enough Angostura bitters to melt the sugar.
Add a tablespoon of Grand Marnier or cognac and mix in with the sugar, bitters mix.
Add a “fine” quality Champagne and stir.
Float a slice of thin orange on top.
This is what Ilsa and Victor Laszlo sipped in Casablanca.

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”
-Mark Twain

As always, our party hearty friends at Food52 have some delightful ideas for nibbles to help soak up some of the bubbly we are sure to be drinking on New Year’s Eve.
 9 Bites to Go with Your Bubbly

This is very pretty, and so seasonal:
Pomegranate Mimosas.
Yumsters.

“My only regret in life is that I didn’t drink enough Champagne”
-John Maynard Keynes

And the best of both worlds: a Black Velvet!
 Champagne and Guinness.
This drink is simply equal parts stout and sparkling wine, and to be honest, there are some who will never understand its appeal. But to fans, this is a perfect special-occasion drink, particularly suited to mornings and late afternoons.

Black Velvet

4 ounces (1/2 cup) chilled Champagne or Prosecco
4 ounces (1/2 cup) chilled Guinness Extra Stout

Pour the Champagne into a tall glass. This is not an effete drink. It is robust, and fills your hand with determination. Be sure to pour the Guinness on top. (This is important: Guinness is heavier. If you pour the sparkling wine second, it won’t combine evenly, and will need to be stirred. I shudder at the thought!)

Enjoy yourself. Happy New Year! Call an old friend. Read a good book. Let the games begin, again, on Wednesday.

“Isn’t it amazing… how a full bottle of wine isn’t enough for two people any more?”
–John Updike

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.