Christmas Preparations 2023

[rotuts]

@chromedome

 

Ive never seen candles in the window growing up in norther CA.

 

they are common in N.E. , more so in the past , and upstate NY.

 

those are the only areas Im familiar with.

Edited December 26, 2023 by rotuts (log)

[Shelby]

Happy Boxing Day!  It's lightly snowed off and on all night and it's supposed to continue all day today  .  Knock on wood that we don't have to go anywhere and can just stay snug and cozy.

 

As I said before I had a small prime rib salted and resting in the fridge. Took it out of the fridge around 1 so it could come to room temp.   I put it in the CSO at 5 yesterday evening--temp of 200F.  Checked after an hour.  Continued for another 45 mins.  Perfect.  Pulled it with an internal temp of 125F.  Let it rest until around 7:30 then put it back in on broil at 500F.  Did that for about 10 mins.  

 

 

Reading last years Christmas thread I came across a recipe that @Maison Rustiquereally liked--Parmesan Mushroom Casserole .  I had a ton of cremini mushrooms --perfect idea!  Thank you Maison!!  Really delicious and went great with the prime rib.

 

 

@Norm Matthewsmade melting potatoes for his Christmas Eve meal so I copied him because they looked so good  

 

 

Broccoli salad leftover from brunch to go with

 

 

I ordered a Yule log cake from a place on Goldbelly.  I was impressed.  It was wrapped and packed so well.  Not a lick of damage from shipping

 

 

And it was super delicious

 

[liuzhou]

Very few people here celebrate Christmas at  all, but the few who at least mark it prepare by buying apples which they then give to their friends on Christmas Eve. This baffled me at first, but then I worked out that it's because in Chinese, Christmas Eve is called 平安夜 (píng ān yè), literally peaceful night, and that is also the name of the carol "Silent Night" in Chinese.

 

'Apple' in Chinese is 苹果 (píng guǒ) with the first character being pronounced identically to the first in 平安夜 (píng ān yè). In Chinese culture, these homophonic coincidences are often used to cross-allude to otherwise dissimilar concepts. There are thousands of them. The number 4 is unlucky because it is a homophone for 'death' etc.

 

Peaceful Apples

 

Every year at Christmas, my friends send me pictures of themselves holding apples. Here is a composite from the last two years.

 

 

 

Edited January 6 by liuzhou (log)

[Norm Matthews]

@Shelby I did a search and found the recipe for those potatoes after reading a discussion you had on here with some others about some kind of roasted potatoes...  😊

[Senior Sea Kayaker]

23 hours ago, chromedome said:

It had never occurred to me to wonder about it, but CBC published an article about the local tradition of candles in the window at Christmas (all but invariably faux candles now, of course). I don't recall whether I saw them or not out West.

 

Is this something that happens where you live? I'm kind of curious now.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/east-coast-tradition-christmas-window-candles-1.7066387

 

Every house in sight has at least two windows with the window candles.

 

 

[Maison Rustique]

@Shelby, I had forgotten about those mushrooms. It looks perfect for that meal! I wish now that I'd added mushrooms to my food order.

[Shelby]

11 minutes ago, Maison Rustique said:

@Shelby, I had forgotten about those mushrooms. It looks perfect for that meal! I wish now that I'd added mushrooms to my food order.

This was my favorite thing out of the whole meal!  I have a little dab left.  I need to get to it before Ronnie does lol.

[gfweb]

1 hour ago, Senior Sea Kayaker said:

 

Every house in sight has at least two windows with the window candles.

 

 

 

Just a few days after Xmas and the candles have largely disappeared in SE PA

[dans]

On 12/26/2023 at 4:53 AM, Duvel said:

In the smaller part, huge garlic-heavy pilotas (meatballs) are simmered, then renoved and a special kind of pasta (huge shell shaped) filled with sausage meat are cooked. When done, the stocks are combined again and it’s time for service.

 

 

First course (and what all are eagerly waiting for the whole year): the soup with pasta. You wont believe how much some Catalans can eat of that …

 

 

 

That looks like a great mean. Wish I was there.

 

Maybe I missed it, but does that pasta shape have a name? It it common there?  Anyone know if it available in the US?

 

Thanks

[Duvel]

5 minutes ago, dans said:

That looks like a great mean. Wish I was there.

 

Maybe I missed it, but does that pasta shape have a name? It it common there?  Anyone know if it available in the US?

 

Thanks

Here they are called galets. They are shaped like a shell / a conch. Easy to stuff with sausage or any forcemeat, which due to the shape will stay in place in the cooked product …

 

 

[rotuts]

it used to be a 12 day tradition , for Christmas.

 

times change 

 

from putting up the tree and its associated decorations 

 

on Christmas Eve , 

 

to taking them down on the 12th or 12th + 1 day.

 

then there was Xmas.    decoration up after Thanksgiving disgorged its self.

 

trees etc , on the curb , or backin the box , on Boxing day or boxing day + 1

 

times change.

 

guess that's why its called Boxing Day.

 

Edited December 27, 2023 by rotuts (log)

[dans]

@Duvel I dropped by a store that I rarely shop at and found these. I picked up a bag. Nd will give them a try. 
 

 

[TdeV]

@dans, please post your results. I, for one, am really curious!

[Kerala]

Christmas is a big deal for this Hindu family. When I was growing up in South Wales, the misery of wet cold was worse for returning to school in January where everyone was talking about their fabulous Christmas and their Christmas presents. When we had children, my sisters and I decided to make Christmas special. Every year for decades, we have tried to have the most wonderful Christmases for our children.

There were eighteen in the group this year including new in-laws and grandchild. Many of us cook. We were together for seven days, but between the cooking, the drinking and the eating, not a lot of photographic documentation. It's a pity you can't load videos directly on this site.

 

We were in Bude, Cornwall.

 

Christmas dinner we stuck to Turkey.

 

Removed the thighs to prepare a ballotine.

 

Here's a chicken liver pate being prepared with extra chicken breast

 

As I said, not many food pics over a glorious food jammed week. 

 

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, friends. May the next year be a good one.

[FrogPrincesse]

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! 😊

 

 

[Kerala]

Wow, @FrogPrincesse

That looks great! We love goose, it's a popular choice for our Christmases. I must remember to search this topic in the run-up to Christmas this Year and onwards.

 

The young man rolling the turkey thigh in the picture above is my sister's son in law. His turned out a bit neater than mine. Some of you might remember him from the first Kerala blog. He suggested removing and deboning the thighs to ballotine them, brining thighs and breast before cooking. We used shop-bought sausage meat for the stuffing.

 

 

 

The actual cooking time was only 60 minutes. Since I only helped, I don't need any false modesty- it was excellent!

Edited January 5 by Kerala
Brine details (log)

[FrogPrincesse]

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! 

[TdeV]

On 12/31/2023 at 2:33 PM, Kerala said:

Christmas is a big deal for this Hindu family.

<snip>

 

Here's a chicken liver pate being prepared with extra chicken breast

 

@Kerala, 'tis an impressive spread!

 

Could you say a bit more about how these chicken livers were prepared? And describe the final dish too, please?

[Kerala]

Sure, @TdeV

800g of chicken livers to 400g of butter is the crucial information. I cut out any manky bits or black bits from the livers then washed them, first in water then in milk. Fine sliced two medium sized brown onions and coarsely sliced six cloves of garlic. I added the leaves from a couple of sprigs of thyme and added a four bay leaves, whole. Maybe 200g of chicken breast on a friend's advice to add more body, which worked, but I won't bother next time. Finally a ladleful of brandy, say two tablespoons. All into the oven, 200C for 20 minutes, stirring halfway through to dunk the exposed bits of liver under the butter. Removed bay leaves. Pureed with a wand blender then into the fridge to set.

 

[Kerala]

I'm getting hungry again reading this thread. There was a lot of cooking. Here's a meal I didn't have a lot to do with making. I don't know much about Mexican cuisine, so I can't give much detail.

 

Refried beans.

 

Guacamole. I made this.

 

Cheddar. So shoot me!

 

Slow cooked pulled shoulder of lamb.

 

Battered and fried fish strips.

 

Assemble as desired on tortillas.

[haresfur]

That all looks great @FrogPrincesse. I may have to try beer in the red cabbage. A recipe I never got from my father and my siblings hate it so I wing it. Has to have apple and bay leaves. And cider vinegar to keep it red. I have taken to slicing the cabbage thin with a knife because I have too many childhood memories of bleeding into the box grater. And of course it is better reheated. Still working on the end of the batch.