December Holidays Around the World: What Do You Celebrate, and What Do You Eat?

[Darienne]

We are far from home this Christmas season, but still among friends.  We are off to a friend's traditional Christmas Eve Pot Luck and so I have no idea of what we will be eating.  We are taking Fanny Farmer's Viennese Crescents drizzled with dark chocolate as our contribution. 

Tomorrow we are having Christmas dinner with another friend and much of her family and a couple of stray waifs with nowhere else to go.  Her son is bringing some kind of special ham which they all love...I am not a fan of ham...childhood story...and we are bringing a traditional French Canadian Tortiere made by DH and a Lemon Cheese Pie topped with a chocolate ganache, my old standby.  Plus some Seed Brittle. 

That's our Christmas in Moab. 

[Mjx]

Happy whatever-you-celebrate!

 

My boyfriend's parents dined with us last night, and the planning for that began a month or so ago, when I first steamed the pudding.

 

Plan A included roast goose, because it is delicious, and my boyfriend's mother enjoys watching him eat it. For me, December means an RTI with one of those robust, tearing coughs that guarantees a free seat beside you on public transit, so my hunt for a goose was not particularly energetic; in fact, when I came across a good-sized duck, I closed on it, and got that.

 

Then, I was shopping for various last-minute odds and ends at a not-cheapo supermarket, and saw this (DKK325/each):

 

 

No sane person would blow that on a goose, after dropping a wad on a duck.

 

When I got home, I drank some tea (second-to last liquorice Advent calendar offering),

 

 

and set about unwrapping the goose and hoping it would fully thaw in time.

 

After doing this and that to it, it was ready for roasting:

 

 

I set about starting the gravy and the latkes, then set the table for the traditional afternoon-preceding-Christmas-dinner coffee and tea.

Traditionally, this involves plenty of bread, cake, and sweets, so by dinner-time, you're still packed pretty solidly.

Since dinner on a full stomach never strikes me as pleasant, I discussed this with my boyfriend's mother the day before, and she fell in with my plan of having just coffee and tea, and 'a few light things to nibble' (coffee, kettle, not yet on the table):

 

 

She arrived with a substantial number of chocolates and biscuits, and also a red cabbage dish and beets, for dinner (traditional Danish Christmas dishes). My boyfriend looked at the [to him] naked table, and dumped a heap of 'fun-size' Mars, Snickers, and the like on the table.

I mused on the many, many intepretations of the concept of 'light snack', as I shuttled back and forth between the table and the various non-goose preparations.

 

Finally, after 3 hours, the goose was done, and a thing of beauty (I used the Cook's Illustrated recipe, which worked out well for me before, although I skipped the stuffing, since there was so much other food):

 

 

On the menu:

Goose with brown gravy

Latkes

Brune kartofler (small potatoes in what is essentially a butterscotch sauce)

A red cabbage dish

Pickled beets

Green salad with fennel

 

 

 

 

Traditionally, a Danish Christmas dinner concludes with cherry-sauce-garnished rice pudding that has an almond embedded somewhere in it, and the person who gets the porton with the almond gets a small gift (mandelgave). A little discussion revealed that feelings about the time-honoured and beloved rice pudding tradition ranged from 'Eh' to 'HELL no', so I got some ice cream, portioned out a number of scoops, shoved an almond into one of them, and passed that around instead (and forgot the cherry sauce).

I'd also assumed the reponsibility for the mandelgave, and decided that rather than the usual keychain, puzzle, or packet of sweets, something practical that virtually every adult could use was in order:

 

 

This was followed by dancing (read 'walking': everyone had just eaten roughly their own body weight in food, brisk cavorting would be disastrous, or at least messy, and personally, I've never seen actual dancing involved in this) around the tree and singing holiday songs, then unwrapping gifts.

 

By this time, the plum pudding was done reheating.

 

 

My boyfriend lit and poured a cupful of whisky over it (it's currently drying out a bit, since it got very soft and wet):

 

 

And that was that!

 

Next: preparing (aka 'Will fasting a day in advance mitigate the appallingly overdistended feeling that has become the norm for January 1st?') for the culinary assault that is New Year's Eve with friends who happen to have an awe-insipiring capacity for food, combined with the metabolism of a couple of racehorses.

 

 

Still a week of December left: anything doing for New Year's Eve?

[Anna N]

Michaela,

How can I tell you that your table for Christmas eve was virtually the same as what I enjoyed when my husband was still alive. Yes, goose was incredibly expensive but once a year we could handle it. A goose doesn't go too far so on our table because there were more people would have also been a pork roast. To us it was so much more interesting than a turkey. I could not have skipped the rice pudding though. That would just not have happened! Thank you for sharing and bringing back some incredibly good memories.

[ElsieD]

Yum, that looks delicious. What exactly are the brun kartofler? I am trying to imagine eating potatoes with a caramel sauce. Merry Christmas!

[Anna N]

Yum, that looks delicious. What exactly are the brun kartofler? I am trying to imagine eating potatoes with a caramel sauce. Merry Christmas!

They are amazing. Like you I was not impressed when I first heard about them. I hope Michaela will tell you how she does hers and I will tell you how I do mine. I boil or steam some peeled baby potatoes. Or if I'm feeling really ambitious I will steam them with the peel on and take it off while they are still hot. My Danish sister-in-law was an expert at doing it that way! She had asbestos fingers! I then place equal amounts, more or less, of sugar and butter in a sauté pan, wait until it has melted into golden caramel then roll the potatoes in it until they are uniformly golden and glazed with the butter and sugar.

[haresfur]

Love the name. Spring snow would work equally well if you were spawned in Ontario!

 

On the prairies, windy winter days gave us "Snirt"

[Mjx]

They are amazing. Like you I was not impressed when I first heard about them. I hope Michaela will tell you how she does hers and I will tell you how I do mine. I boil or steam some peeled baby potatoes. Or if I'm feeling really ambitious I will steam them with the peel on and take it off while they are still hot. My Danish sister-in-law was an expert at doing it that way! She had asbestos fingers! I then place equal amounts, more or less, of sugar and butter in a sauté pan, wait until it has melted into golden caramel then roll the potatoes in it until they are uniformly golden and glazed with the butter and sugar.

 

My boyfriend always takes charge of making the brune kartofler (he knows I don't really get behind the concept, and may suspect that I'll make them somehow 'different'), and his method is identical to Anna's, athough he uses pre-cooked and -peeled new potatoes, since his patience with peeling vegetables is close to zero.

[Mjx]

Yesterday, I killed off the last of the fruitcake I've been more or less living on during the past week, tarting it up with sour cherries, and dustings of cacao, smoked salt, cayenne pepper, and citric acid, because this year's fruitcake insanely sweet:

 

 

 

Today I'm essentially fasting, in order to accommodate this evening's festivities, which, per tradition, are taking place at the home of friends, one of whom is well over 6 feet tall, and has expansive ideas about the human body's capacity to hold food.

 

Our host will be serving roast lamb, soup, salad and bread, and the guests will be bringing drinks, cheese, and dessert.

 

I'm bringing the dessert, and my tentative suggestion of marshmallows (since I've pretty much fallen in love with making these squishy, bouncy things, and the seem light enough to follow a lot of heavy food) was seconded and approved. This time, they're vanilla and lemon:

 

 

Certainly the perfect pairing with the award-winning Nugan Semillon that is being served with dessert <cough> (the guy in charge of bringing the wines asked 'Anyways, what type of drink goes with marshmallows? Red soda pop?').

 

Anyone else dining out (or drinking in; I did that one year, and it was brilliant)? Any special food-related preparations for tonight's festivities (or avoidance thereof)?

[Shelby]

We are definitely in the "drinking in" group.  In fact....it's almost 3 p.m.......is that close enough to cocktail hour?     

[rotuts]

Id Say

 

If you Are In

 

not going Out

 

3 PM is a Bit Late.

 

just saying

 

It Gets Dark  here Soon.

 

dont want to Trip on a Cork ?

 

do you ?

[SylviaLovegren]

DH Ed makes his own traditional tortiere each year.  He favors allspice.  Half lean ground and half lean pork ground.  He used to make the pie crust...using 7up but now settles for premade frozen stuff. 

 

My specialty is short bread cookies...the best I've ever eaten.  The recipe was given to me by a friend who no longer wants to make them and she got it from her Mother and so on and so on.  Contains brown sugar. 

 

Otherwise we are just plain North American types.

 

Oooh, tourtiere.  Only learned about that good thing a few years ago and have made a couple of different versions, all of them pretty dang good, I thought.  Yum.

 

Now, those shortbread cookies, the best you've ever eaten.  Feel like sharing the recipe?

[SylviaLovegren]

We were going to have leftover baked ziti (my idea!) for dinner, but a stop at the St. Lawrence Market for something completely different brought a gorgeous heritage pig loin roast into my shopping basket.  It was small and it IS NYE and the budget had just enough stretch in it...  Will roast him with some carrots, onions and potatoes, then have a mixed green salad and some red wine.  Plenty of leftover chocolates, cookies, fruitcakes, etc. for dessert.  That should get us to 2015 intact and happy.  

[Anna N]

I had thought that my last meal of December 2014 would be a thick, juicy, ribeye steak with some sherried mushrooms and a green vegetable. A trip to Costco this morning convinced me otherwise. Had I the constitution of a Victorian lady I would surely have swooned when I read the price of beef. I really had no plan B until a friend turned up with a duck! My favourite protein slips back and forth between steak and duck.

Scalded, thoroughly dried and roasted at a high temperature it was duck Nirvana.

The broccoli was roasted with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper and finished with lemon zest, lemon juice and Parmesan cheese.

The duck will keep on giving and giving and giving. I chose to keep it simple so that I would have lots of neutrally flavoured duck fat. I will remove the rest of the flesh from the carcass and it will make some interesting meals over the next few days. The carcass itself will go into the stockpot, of course.

[Mjx]

Happy new year!

 

I really like seeing and hearing about what others are doing, so I'm extending this a little beyond December, in hopes of seeing what others may be doing for Epiphany/Twelfth Night. Even if/especially it is not traditional.

I'm planning on baking Befanini, a nod to La Befana, and my parents conceding a point and giving us gifts on this occasion when my siblings and were small.

 

Between now and then, the plan is to use up every perishable thing lurking in the refrigerator; anyone else do this at the beginning of the year? Or, have lots and lots of ideas for tamarind puree?

[SylviaLovegren]

Happy new year!

 

I really like seeing and hearing about what others are doing, so I'm extending this a little beyond December, in hopes of seeing what others may be doing for Epiphany/Twelfth Night. Even if/especially it is not traditional.

I'm planning on baking Befanini, a nod to La Befana, and my parents conceding a point and giving us gifts on this occasion when my siblings and were small.

 

Between now and then, the plan is to use up every perishable thing lurking in the refrigerator; anyone else do this at the beginning of the year? Or, have lots and lots of ideas for tamarind puree?

 

 

What is Befanini?  

[Mjx]

What is Befanini?  

 

They're cookies with sprinkles (dough is traditionally flavoured with flavoured with rum or anise liqueur). The name comes from La Befana (elderly woman/witch who does Santa's gig, but on Epiphany). I admit that my wanting to make befanini mostly reflects my desire to use the hell out of our new kitchen [i'm not supposed to eat them, blablabla], and I'm trying to figure out who to give them to, since my boyfriend won't eat them all.