The Fuzzy Chef & Friends

This is a recipe I synthesized based on other Spanish recipes to be a side dish for Christmas Eve dinner.  It's great for that purpose in two ways: it's dramatically red and green, and it can be 100% prepared ahead and simply baked in the oven for 25 minutes while you do other stuff on the stove.

Christmas Eve was very different from Thanksgiving as far as cooking was concerned this year.  Thanksgiving dinner I had planned out 2 weeks in advance.  Christmas, I was still thinking about things on Monday.  So it didn't throw me much when dinner had to be revised and revised.  Also, we had a surprisingly "white Christmas" for Oregon; it snowed nonstop for several days, which is a rarity for Medford.  So what did all of this snow make me think of?  Why, sunny Brazil and Spain, of course!

Since my local wine merchant (Val de Cole) got in a few cases of dirt-cheap Spanish wine, I decided to make 4 liters of sangria for my Open Studio. I may not have sold as much art as I wanted, but the sangria was gone. People complimented me; I don't know why people think sangria is difficult to make (or how restaurants get away with charging $8 per glass). It's easy, home-made fortified wine.