FrogPrincesse

That's the one I have. Love it!

Using the right pot will get you there faster and without overcooking the fruit. With a tall and narrow pot filled pretty full, it was easily taking 2 hours to reach the gelling point. With a large and wide pot, about 30-45 minutes. The bag in the right in the picture has the seeds (and membranes) which provide additional pectin (in addition to the fruit itself) and help the marmalade set.

Thanks for the additional details, @Kerala. That looks really good indeed! And thanks for reminding me about your foodblog, I will make sure to (re)read it!

Correct (and fixed)! 1.5 kg of sugar, as I am not a big fan of Seville soup... You are lucky to have learned from your grandfather! There is no tradition of making marmalade in my (French) family, so I learned through trial and error and with the tips from other eGulleters. For me the biggest improvement was to use the right pot! When I used a tall/narrow pot in my first attempts, getting the marmalade to set would take forever (several hours). Now it's a much faster process, thankfully.

Beautiful and mouth-watering food, everyone! Thanks for sharing your family tradition, @Kerala (and the gorgeous landscape). It sounds like you had a real feast and the ballotine looks very fancy - what did you use for the farce/stuffing? We celebrated on Christmas day and it was just the four of us. We started with some snacks: iberico bellota salami (first time trying this and I highly recommend it), cured duck prosciutto, and little florettes of tête de moine cheese. Also a few medjool dates stuffed with Gruyère (my daughter’s contribution). I was in the mood for something rustic to start the meal, and decided to go with a Corrèze garlic soup from Paula Wolfert's Cooking of Southwest France. It is made from slow-cooking garlic and onions in duck fat and stock (I used goose for both). The soup is thickened at the end with egg (sort of a French version of egg-drop soup), and livened up with a touch of red wine vinegar. It is served with a slice of rustic bread (bought at my local bakery Wildwood Flour) brushed with a touch of goose fat & sprinkled with ground pepper. I followed with a simple endive, Fuyu persimmon and nut salad (recipe from Zuni, I used walnuts instead of pecans). It was good, although a bit plain to be honest. The recipe calls for cutting the endive into thin spears, but this goes against the French custom of never cutting salad greens in your plate (it is considered impolite, and for example you are supposed to gently fold large leaves of lettuce rather than cutting them), so I just sliced them into less pretty but more manageable bite-sized pieces. 😄 The persimmons were very good; it's been a fantastic year for persimmons in California. Following the simple salad was a roast goose prepared in the Alsatian style, following Anne Willan's recipe from Country Cooking of France. I first cooked goose for the holidays a few years ago, and now my husband requests it every year. The goose is stuffed with green apples (that I realized post-meal I had forgotten to serve...) and basted with brown beer (Mammoth nut brown in this case). I served it with potatoes (cooked in the pressure cooker and then roasted underneath the goose in the goose fat) and red cabbage braised in brown beer & vinegar with caraway seeds (recipe from Tom Colicchio in Think Like a Chef). The red cabbage provided some acidity to cut the rich flavor of the goose (the green apples serve the same purpose - that is, if you don't forget to serve them 😁). The goose is first browned in the oven at high temperature, then the skin is pricked and the bird cooked upside down at lower temperature to release the fat, then cooked some more breast side up. Finally, it is massaged with butter and crisped at high temperature for a short time before resting and carving. Goose is quite rich in fat of course, and it sort of self-bastes with the fat slowly releasing and permeating the meat, so the legs in the end taste essentially like confit (very similar to duck confit, just larger) and are the best part in my opinion. My meat thermometer was, it turned out, defective so the breasts ended up a bit overdone but still very edible. I have since then treated myself to a new Thermapen! For dessert, I decided to try a local, family-owned French pastry shop for a traditional bûche de Noël. It was pretty good I thought, and the decorations were cute. More importantly, my daughter absolutely loved it! 😊

Has anyone been making marmalade lately? Here is my annual batch of marmalade. I used a dozen Seville oranges (951 g, they were on the smaller size this year), mandarin juice (1/2 glass), 2.4 L of water, and 1.5 kg of sugar. I follow the recipe from David Lebovitz in Ready for Dessert with minor modifications - I scrape the skin to remove all the membranes that I place in the seed bag (I find that if I leave the membranes in, the marmalade isn't as clear). I used 2 tablespoons of aged rhum agricole as the booze component. The marmalade gelled pretty quickly and the set is quite firm. It tastes very bright and a bit acidic but will mellow as it ages. The yield was 8 jars (6 x 8 oz jars and 2 x 13 oz "Bonne Maman" jars).

I have both types and prefer the skinny one- it’s easier to navigate around a round surface like a lemon or an orange. The paddle-shaped one is good for cheese.

I realized am a bit behind in posting meals. This one is from December 30 - someone was in the mood for scallops and I found super fresh specimens at Catalina Offshore, my local seafood shop. I prepared them scampi-style and they tasted amazing, very sweet. December 29, I was in the mood for a cheese soufflé and made this one from Jacques Pepin using Swiss gruyere. The recipe is "easy" and doesn't require to separate eggs. It was delicious (especially the crusty bits on the sides and bottom), but quite rich!. I ate it with a green salad (plenty of vinegar) on the side.

This "aged sheep's milk cheese" from Spain is pretty good (I wonder if it has a name). It's marinated in olive oil. The texture is a bit like a Manchego. The flavor is quite mild, a bit nutty.

Try Total Wine. They have it according to Wine Searcher. https://www.wine-searcher.com/find/guinness+draft+00+alcohol+free+stout+beer/0/usa-85701-20?Xsort_order=p&Xsavecurrency=Y

Continuing with the lobster theme. Local spiny lobsters… cooked on the grill with olive oil and lemon. Delicious.

Salmon in papillote with ginger and garlic using @Andrea Nguyen's recipe from Vietnamese Food Any Day (this book deserves its own thread btw). I followed the recipe as is except I didn't have any oyster sauce so I used all soy with a touch of fish sauce, and I substituted (blanched) broccolini for bok choy. This was easy and delicious.

Easy dinner with ingredients from Trader Joe's. The tikka masala sauce is pretty good, and the garlic naans are decent (from the freezer section). For the meat, I used boneless skinless chicken thighs. Not pictured - I added some non-TJ's chutneys on the side (mango and plum), and yoghurt/raita.

Traditional quiche lorraine (creme fraiche, eggs, bacon, salt & pepper, nutmeg - no cheese).

Chocolate crack cookies for a cookie exchange. Lots of them. Before baking After

Mouthwatering spread, @Duvel! For my daughter - filet mignon and fingerling potatoes. The steak was cooked sous vide and finished on the grill. The potatoes were cooked in a pressure cooker and sautéed with olive oil and herbes de Provence.

From last night, salmon pinwheels with spinach and feta, haricots verts. All items are from Trader Joe’s; the green beans are frozen and the salmon is fresh / vacuumed-sealed with the herb and feta filling. Ten minutes in the oven under the broiler, and dinner was ready! I added some olive oil and lemon juice before serving. It was very tasty and super easy.

Brittany? 😆 They got the river and the region wrong. It’s in the Mayenne valley (in the Loire region), not the Loire valley. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port-du-Salut_Abbey https://www.portdusalut.fr/et-le-fromage/

They are slightly sweet and nutty. A bit like parsnips. The texture is similar to white asparagus.

Duck breast with a honey, mandarin & garlic glaze, served with a simple lettuce & persimmon salad. The duck was from a local butcher shop (Sepulveda Meats & Provisions), and it was really delicious!

Not really. They remind me of Jerusalem artichokes a bit, but milder. I like them.

Mini Trader Joe's cheese report. "Figgy cheddar cheese" (made in the UK). This is pretty tasty, although I am not a huge fan of the soft texture (think play-doh). This baked sheep's milk ricotta from Sicily looked very promising, however it is completely tasteless and the texture is not pleasant either (it's pretty hard, and dry). I tried toasting it in the oven, adding olive oil and herbs, and it did not help. Useless. This "Gran Capitan Oliva Negra" from Spain, a hard cheese) has an ok flavor but it is way too boring and went weird/ moldy before I could finish it. The aged (anejo) Manchego at Trader Joe's is a million times better than this industrial-tasting cheese, so don't waste your money on this.

I am participating in a cookie exchange this year. I will be making chocolate crack cookies.

I made the dish a few months ago after watching the show, not realizing it had its own eGullet thread. Anyway, it took a while to fry all the zucchini so this isn't a recipe for a quick weeknight dinner. But I thought it was very good, better than the sum of its parts, and I was pleasantly surprised! I would make it again. Now, is it life-changing as Tucci claims it is? I don't think so.

Molly Steven’s All About Braising is a good one.