46 posts tagged “christmas”

I keep thinking there's too much space in the fridge, but that's because the ham is in the oven and the goose crown is still in the freezer.

I've got the Ginger / Wasabi salmon on Day 2. The ham is lightly wrapped in foil, on a bed of fresh bay leaves, coriander and mustard seed, and allspice berries, in a Gas Mark 4 oven. It should come out around 7:30, which gives me plenty of time to decide what to glaze / crust it with.

We went to Beanies this morning and bought several sackfuls of veg, also to Fresh Asia in Broomhill to get some interesting things for the Japanese Experiment on Christmas Eve.

My thoughts so far are:

Tonight - venison liver, parsnip rosti, redcurrant jelly, cauliflower
Tuesday - main meal out at lunchtime in town, which could be anything. If we're hungry when we come home, individual baked baby camemberts with crusty ground hazelnut topping and bread and pear wedges to dunk.
Wednesday - last minute supermarket shopping, main meal in the evening of cured salmon, braised belly pork, miso-marinated grilled chicken, fresh pickled vegetables, carrot and sesame salad, cold green tea noodles, possibly some hand-rolled sushi, maybe some steamed aubergine with peanut sauce. There are some Sekrit Treats to go with this, and some bizarre pickled substances I bought this morning.
Thursday - roast goose, roast potatoes, parsnips, baby baby sprouts, braised red cabbage and chestnuts, cornbread sage dressing, gravy, ginger sauce, pickled pears - Christmas pudding
Friday - Ham, pork pie, salad, cheese, fruit, Christmas cake
Saturday - something fresh and spicy, maybe a set of veggie curries
Sunday - I have a joint of spiced cured beef, I may do something with that
After that we're into leftovers. 

In the past we've made this, which is wonderful, but I've had in the back of my mind a more oriental version that would go well with sushi-type things rather than the traditional blinis and cream. So, today I have taken:

• 2 fillets lovely dark pink wild alaska salmon, the same size and shape and weighing about 500 gms total
• 3 heaped tablespoons caster sugar
• 2 heaped tablespoons coarse crystal salt
• 1 teaspoon wasabi powder (freshly opened)
• 1 big hand fresh ginger, very coarsely grated but not peeled.

I put one piece of salmon skin-side down on some clingfilm, mixed up the cure ingredients, and spread them on top. Whacked the other bit of salmon on to complete the sandwich (skin-side up), wrapped the package up tightly. I've put it in a deep oval dish in the fridge, with a plate and the Christmas gammon on top to weight it. Today's the 21st, I shall turn it and look after it every day, with a view to serving it for supper on Christmas Eve. I'll wipe the cure off and cut it in slices, like a thick cut smoked salmon.

Purist Japanese foodies can look away now, but I'm going to do a variety of beginner dishes from Just Hungry, with what I can easily get locally, and have a munchie buffet.

I always get a good selection of the foodie magazines at this time of year, and look at what the trends are. This year was fascinating. Although a lot of these feature spreads are planned months ago, the credit crunch was obviously in the air already. There's a definite seventies feel about the recipes - retro without being fashionable, just what 50-year-olds remember as being celebration food without expensive frills. There is no new exotic cuisine - some Thai noodle salads but those are almost domestic standards now. Lots of cheap and seasonal fruit and vegetables, fish and meat. The treats use classic Christmas treat foods - glace fruit, chocolate, smoked salmon, booze.

The main recipes were almost all:

• Smoked salmon parcels for starters (the one that bucked the trend had prawn and avocado cocktail)
• Plain turkey with plain veg - roast potatoes, sprouts, parsnips, red cabbage
• Celeriac gratin
• Jerusalem artichoke soup
• Roast root veg with different spices and coatings
  
• Roast pork as the alternative big joint
• Nut roasts for vegetarians, especially en croute
  
• Old fashioned desserts - date pudding, fruit crumble, ginger sponge, apple tart
• Yule logs / sweet roulades - mostly chocolate, some with cherries (Black Forest, yay!)
• Baked Alaskas - especially individual ones, or with special fillings (orange and chocolate)
• Cocktails
• Home made things - including a recipe for home-made "Irish Cream Liqueur", haven't seen one of those for about thirty years

There were some minor things that seemed to pop up whenever the opportunity arose:

• Parsnip crisps - bought (M&S, Waitrose), or home-made - for soup garnishes, mostly
  
• White chocolate / cranberry mix - cookies, squares, cheesecakes, even trifle
• Leeks (in soups, pies, stews, and risottos)
• Hot griddled slices of pear - with pate, as a soup garnish, with sauce as dessert

The winner of the chef who's everywhere is Anjum Anand - and the recipes are simple and homely. We're trying her spiced lambshank with chestnuts tonight, although with rice rather than the official side of parsnip mash.

Found some goose breast crowns in LIDL, weighing about a kilo each, for £8. The instructions were to roast at 200 (Gas Mark 6) for an hour, and that worked really well. I was using a single small oven this year, and that let me roast the potatoes underneath and the celery stuffing on the bottom.

Two of them gave off about a pint of good quality fat, and we carved off two whole breasts from each one, one breast per person. That was a large portion of solid meat, and there was a spare breast for slices if seconds were required.

The German meat stall at the Sheffield Christmas Market sold sealed longlife bags of shredded red cabbage cooked in apple juice, I microwaved one of them as a veg.

Dad did his oriental braised sprouts, and carrots with soy sauce and star anise. There were some steamed new potatoes, as well as the roasties.

Plain gravy made in the goose roasting tin, with some Chardonnay left over from Christmas Eve supper.

EDIT: Whoops, forgot, apple butter sauce with cloves as well

Bottle of Quinze President with main course.

A Waitrose "richly fruited" christmas pudding, with cream or white sauce, and a tiny bottle of Royal Tokay wine.

I meant to make cornbread dressing to go with the Christmas goose, but I didn't have time to make the cornbread. So I riffed it:

• 4 slices bacon, cut into small strips
• some sunflower oil
• 2 oz butter
• 1 massive rib green celery, very leafy, chopped
• 1 big onion, finely chopped
• 3 slices crumbled stollen (to replace the cornbread sweetness)
• 6 slices sourdough bread, lightly toasted and cut into rough cubes
• 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
• 1.5 tsp dried sage
• About 2/3 pint well-seasoned chicken stock (2 coffee mugs)

Fry the bacon in the oil until brown and crisp. Scoop the bacon out, add the butter to the oil and fry the onion and celery, with the leaves, until soft and the onion is browning at the edges. Take off the heat, add the bacon and the dry ingredients. Stir well, tip into a baking dish. Sprinkle with half the stock, and bake on the bottom of the oven. This had an hour at gas mark 6, under the goose and potatoes. If it starts to toast and dry out too much, add the second mug of stock about half way through.

Great cold, too. It was very green, if the celery wasn't leafy, or was blanched, I'd be tempted to bung in a bunch of roughly chopped parsley.

Good cold.

There was something about this that really reminded me of Stovetop Dressing, it was comforting and plain. John liked it and is hinting that it would be a good addition to the Christmas canon. This from someone who usually doesn't bother with bread stuffing at all. The recipe below is what I actually did, although unless I've got a vegetarian on the premises again I'll use real bacon and bacon fat next time, which the original recipe suggested.

4 slices quorn bacon, cut into shreds
4 oz butter, in two batches
2 ribs celery, finely chopped
1 big onion, finely chopped
2 cups crumbled cornbread
3 medium slices wholemeal bread, lightly toasted and cut into small squares (maybe about 1.5 cms?)
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp dried sage
About 1/3 pint well-seasoned warm stock (veggie in this case, chicken would be more usual)

Fry the bacon in one lot of butter, tip it into a big bowl and fry the veggies in the next lot. Add to the bowl with all the dry ingredients, mix up well. Pile into a baking dish (I used a heavy crockery pie dish), pour on the stock to moisten and bake at Gas Mark 5 for half an hour (into the oven once the turkey's come out would be fine).

As there's no egg or other binding it doesn't need cooking so much as warming through, the longer you cook it the more the bottom will get soft and the top crisp. If you're enough of a veggie not to want the quorn bacon, it will need more salt and possibly some fake/liquid smoke of some kind. If you're setting the oven high once the turkey's done, for roasting potatoes, you could heat this in a heavy-bottom frying pan on the hob, or if you can fit it in, put it low down in the oven and keep an eye on it. You could, of course, actually stuff the turkey with it.

I've always made this, I don't care if everyone thinks Delia invented cranberries, she can just sod off.

• Take a pack or box of cranberries.
• Put them in a saucepan and just cover with orange juice.
• Bring to the boil and simmer until the berries pop.
• Sprinkle all over with sugar, stir it in.
• Simmer until it's all syrupy.
• Put in a bowl and serve hot or cold.

There.

You can ring the changes with the liquid, although it needs some pectin / acid, and the amount and type of sugar, depending on how you like it. If you start with sugar in the liquid, the skins toughen and you will get whole berries in a thick jelly, which is fine if that's what you want, I prefer more of a jam. You can add shreds of orange peel, slivered nuts, whatever stuff takes your fancy.

Well, I'll try most things once. I wanted a small ham to go with Thanksgiving Dinner, and for lunch later on. I baked a small smoked gammon joint as normal (Gas Mark 4, about an hour a kilo and an extra quarter of an hour). Take it out, skin it, score the fat, top it and put it back for another half hour. For the topping today, I dribbled it all over with Tia Maria, slapped some muscavado sugar onto the fat, and sprinkled that with ground cloves.

It smells great.

Following this post last year, I made some sprout kebabs for a belated Bonfire Party last night. I didn't get very extravagant, I thought I'd try out the basic idea before messing with it.

I microwaved a pack of trimmed brussels sprouts for 7 minutes, which was the recommendation on the pack, and let them cool. I made a little bowl of spice mix using roughly ground black pepper, allspice, and freshly grated nutmeg. I took a rasher of smoked streaky bacon, dipped an end in the spices, and rolled it around a sprout until it had gone all the way round and little bit over to secure it. Stuck a bamboo skewer through it, and cut off the excess bacon. It worked out at two sprouts balls per rasher, and I put two on each skewer. I tried originally dunking the sprouts in the spice mix, but it didn't stick, whereas it clung nicely to the fatty bacon.

Cooking times would depend on method, I put them on a barbeque on a windy November evening, so they took a while, and didn't get really golden and crisp.

The sprouts were soft and delicate, with surprisingly little of that overcooked metallic brassica taste. The spice mixture set the whole thing off a treat. Most people tried one, which I didn't expect, and liked them as well. Alice is thinking about doing them as a vegetable / garnish at Christmas. We discussed the hot bread sauce as a dip to go with them, and that would certainly make a winter party item.

The Cuisine for December 1984 also had a retro-article on goose cookery, it's not worth writing out the recipes, they were fairly standard, but some of the ideas were a little bit different. And would do fine for duck too.

Liver - dredge with seasoned flour and cook in goose fat on a high heat, serving with a jammy sauce made with prunes soaked in Madeira, onions and tart apples, with a little marjoram at the end.

Casserole - with onions and mushrooms, finished off with double cream, french mustard and fresh parsley

Ragout with bacon, turnips, cloves, bay leaf - caramelising the turnips in goose fat and sugar before adding them

A very complex stuffing for goose, making a cornbread with crumbled Italian sausage in it, mixing that with dried orchard fruits and mushrooms. Served with chestnuts braised with celery and goose gravy until coated and caramelised, and honeyed yams. I wouldn't do all three of those, it would be far too sweet - and certainly I'd want a watercress salad on the side, or a raw cranberry relish, or something very tart and sharp.