Janet, Jeff, Bruce and Anne came up on Friday for Christmas/New Years.

We spent some significant time taking pictures of each other.

We exchanged lots of Christmas presents. Janet and Jeff gave the America's Test Kitchen cookbook to Jaya, to his sheer delight. He had spent the night before and that day in the kitchen preparing the pork shank roast from that series. Here are pictures of the preparation. The recipe called for coca-cola to brine the pork, but as Jaya is a Pepsi fan, that's what he used. I have dubbed this the pepsi-pig.

We brined it overnight in Pepsi, garlic, pepper and bay leaves. The next day we rubbed it with a puree of sage, parsley, pepper and garlic, and roasted it, basting every 45 minutes with a mixture of Pepsi, brown sugar and jalapeños.

The roast took longer to cook than we thought it would, but it was bigger than the one used in the recipe, so we should have expected that. We had a wonderful meal of roast pork, collard greens and cream biscuits. Janet brought black-eyed peas, which were absolutely delicious. We barely had room, but managed to have some pie for dessert.