New Years Eve Dinner/ New Years Day brunch

For the past few years now, Ryan and I have stayed home, cooked an amazing dinner, drank champagne (except last year when it was sparkling grape juice), rented movies, and avoided the chaos of amateur hour that is NYE.  I feel like there's always so much pressure to have "the best night ever" on New Years, and it never lives up to the hype.  Our relaxing celebration was even more fun this year with Carter here (although the fireworks around did wake him up once...seriously when did it become like 4th of July?!).  We splurged and went to Whole Foods to get the ingredients for our dinner.  Our menu was grilled dry-aged NY strip steak, lemon poached lobster tail, risotto, marsala mushrooms, and of course champagne! We hope everyone had a terrific start to 2013.

The poaching liquid for the lobster tails, 2 sliced onions, bunch of fresh thyme, and 8 cups of seafood stock

2 pints of button mushrooms, simmered in butter and marsala wine along with fresh thyme (so good, especially because they were simmered for 3 hours)

2 spiny lobster tails

Grilled to perfection to medium-rare thanks to Ryan

Not a bad way to spend a NYE!

For breakfast/brunch this morning we had paprika and sweet onions home fries with scrambled eggs. For the potatoes, we sauteed 1 large, sliced sweet onion in 2 tablespoons of olive and 1 tablespoon butter and season with salt and pepper over medium heat for 10 minutes, until they were just turning brown. 

Browned onions

 After the onions were browned, we added the diced Yukon gold potatoes (4 of them)

Add the potatoes to the same frying pan, and add 1 more tablespoon each of butter and olive oil.  Add 1 tablespoon smoked paprika and season with salt and pepper.  Cook over medium heat with a lid on for 10 minutes.  When potatoes have started to get soft, add the onions back in the pan, and continue to cook (with a lid) for another 10 minutes, stirring every 2-3 minutes so that the potatoes/onions on the bottom of the pan don't get burnt.

After adding the onions back in the frying pan

Continue cooking until potatoes are crispy around the edges and easily pierced with a fork.  Serve with some soft-scrambled eggs (whisk 4 eggs with 1 tablespoon half and half and cook over low heat until softly curdled).