Ann_T

Christmas Dinner - Chateaubriand for Two, served with a wine sauce. Sides were Parisienne potatoes, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, sautéed mushrooms and glazed carrots for Moe. Served with a lovely British Columbia wine, a 2022 Cabernet Franc from Fort Berens, decanted for 90 minutes.

Christmas Eve dinner. Baked two Tourtiere this year so I would have some to freeze. I froze slices last year and Moe liked having them in the freezer for breakfast or dinner. Served tonight with mashed potatoes with pork gravy, broccoli and Moe had his with the Chile Sauce I made last week.

I roasted a small rack of pork for dinner last night, just because I wanted pork gravy to serve tonight with our Christmas Eve Tourtiere . Nothing better than rich pork gravy.

Baked two pizzas early this morning. Moe's breakfast and I'm working today so will take the same for lunch. One topped with Italian Sausage, Pepperoni, mushrooms and green olives. The second one was the same minus the pepperoni. I had a dough that had been in the fridge for 6 days and decided rather than bake bread I would bake pizza.

Moe's breakfast. He scrambled eggs with grilled Italian sausage and chile sauce.

@Shelby I really love your catchup posts. Everything looks delicious. Although I don't have the same wish as you when it comes to wanting cold weather. Been loving our extended fall with just rain and temperatures in the double digits. Unfortunately the temperature is starting to drop and there is a possibility of some snow. After always living in and around the Great Lakes and don't miss real winters one bit. Praying for a green Christmas. I don't usually care for cacciatore with tomatoes, but I saw a recipe in Matty Matheson's cookbook and decided to make it. Didn't have a "Sunday Gravy" so I made just a tomato sauce. I love sauces with mushrooms and olives.

Moe's breakfast. He put in a request last night for scrambled eggs with my Chile sauce. I think he was dreaming about it. I make it to serve with our Christmas Eve Tourtiere, but he will eat it year around on eggs, ham, hot dogs, etc.

It is just a cooked chile type chutney so I don't see why you couldn't freeze it. I expect to net about 8 or 9 500ml bottles of it when I can today.

I started to just freeze leftover slices of our tourtiere. Once the slices are frozen, I vacuum package and will pull one out for Moe, often for breakfast. I also like to make small turnovers with the tourtiere filling and freeze.

Thank you so much for your kindness. If you are looking for the chile sauce recipe, it is on a blog post I made a couple of years ago. The recipe was from a friend in Toronto and she makes the original recipe to can in the summer using fresh tomatoes. She use to send Moe a jar of her sauce. So when I adapted the recipe to using canned tomatoes and reduced it in size, I knew what it should taste like. It reminds of a chile sauce that my grandmother made and would have little bowls of it on the table as a condiment to go whatever someone wanted to use it on. https://thibeaultstable.com/2023/12/21/homemade-chile-sauce/

I bought all the ingredients yesterday for the traditional chile sauce I make for Moe to have with our Christmas Eve tourtiere. It has been on simmering now for over two hours and has another 3 to go. Keeping my fingers crossed that our power doesn't go out before I get it into the jars and processed. Lots of power outages on the Island. Edited to add: 2025 batch of Chile Sauce. I ended up with 11 jars.

Sliced the sourdough sandwich bread yesterday and made hot chicken sandwiches for dinner. Rather than roast a whole chicken, I just roasted chicken breasts. "Diner food" served as always with our traditional twice fried fries and canned peas.

It was just my regular recipe that I adjusted. Basically just subbing some of the water with milk and adding butter. I used 100g of the "mini starter" with 900g of flour, 1g of yeast, 13g of salt, 300g of water and 340g of whole milk and 1/3 cup of melted butter. Autolyze, stretch and fold method. I leave the dough for an hour rest after the first mix, and then do three more stretch and folds with a 30 minute rest in between. I left the dough out on the counter over night from 8:30PM until 3:30 AM . Divided the dough in half, preshaped and left for 30 minutes before finishing shaping. Buttered the bread pans and left to proof. Baked at 375 for about 45 to 50 minutes.

Baked two enriched sourdough sandwich loaves using one of the mini starters. Dough was made last night and left on the counter overnight. Edited to add "crumb shots" .

Moe wasn't hungry for a big dinner so I made him a Prawn cocktail with a homemade cocktail sauce.