Christina Hendricks' Tips For Holiday Entertaining

Spoiler: the Mad Men maven’s must-dos include four days of cooking and unlimited Scotch.

There are some stars who you don’t want to read about because they kind of ruin your perception of them with their pretentiousness or banality or asshattery. Or there’s Christina Hendricks, who makes us fall in love with her every time we read an interview. Seriously, she had us at “lots of garlic.”

Hendricks, a face of Johnnie Walker, is conveniently quite outspoken in her love of Scotch. She tells New York‘s Grub Street:

It is a nice thing to come home [to] at the end of the day, ‘cause, for me, it’s such a slow, sipping drink; it’s very, very nice. I like my Green Label neat or I like my Gold Label chilled. My husband likes Black Label on the rocks.

And of the epic New Year’s Eve party she and husband Geoffrey Arend are planning, she discloses,

When we have these parties I cook for four, five days ahead of time, making the appetizers and everything, and filling my freezer with pizza dough and making all sorts of appetizers. And my husband bakes, so we work for a while; we put in a good four or five days.

Her signature recipe is goat cheese pizzas, chockablock with garlic — and, yes, on a homemade crust. In sweets, she reveals that she makes holiday cookies every year, her favorites being “my childhood favorite, dream bars. Graham-cracker crumb with walnuts, coconut, chocolate chips, sweetened condensed milk. It’s, like, the easiest cookie ever, and it’s the most delicious.”

In case you didn’t already want an invite, she makes a powerful case for her husband as house baker, “He’ll make cheese loafs or Nutella loafs, and, you know, he uses Sel Magique at the end of it, which is this wonderful fleur de sel with herbes de Provence that he puts over the top of it, and it’s mouthwatering.”

Christina Hendricks Drinks Her Scotch Neat, Whips Up Goat-Cheese Pizzas [Grub Street]