Really Good Food

No apologies. Much of this holiday has been (and will be) focused on food.  I don't cook that much, but enough time off and wanting to spend it at home with the kids has reconnected me with the fun of it. I'm very mindful of the need for vegetables and fruit in addition to the centerpiece of meat. Unusually for us, carrots keep showing up.

Sunday: Carbonnades Flamande. Originally from Julia Child, this is a Belgian not French recipe - beef stew with onions and beer. A good dark Belgian ale is best, and I had an extra bottle for seasoning the cook. Served with rice and good bread to soak up the incredible juice, I also used a lot of carrots in the stew, and asparagus from Chile steamed with balsamic vinegar sprinkled over it.  I poached some seckel pears in a brown sugar sauce while the stew was bubbling and hid them in the fridge for later.

Monday, Christmas Eve: Boneless leg of lamb. (We're a big lamb family, both by preference and default. I minimize my purchase of beef, since I steer away from factory farmed beef and that drives the beef price sky-high. The rest of my family is not so wild for chicken, though ethically raised chickens are much easier to come by and reasonably priced so we eat it pretty often since I usually do the cooking and family dinner prep. Most lamb is from Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland, or else purely local, and I've done enough research to be ok buying it without digging deeper.)  I marinated the leg with bottled French salad dressing (our traditional family lamb recipe), re-rolled it, lined the bottom of the roasting pan with carrots (since I didn't have a rack to keep the meat off the bottom), and roasted it in a hot (400 degree) oven. Simple green beans on the side, and gravy made in the roasting pan with the carrots. I made orzo with a simple olive oil, garlic and lemon juice sauce, since my gravy skills are weak, but as it turns out the gravy was excellent.  My mother brought two types of our traditional cookies: brown sugar with a pecan on top, and almond flavored wreaths with powdered sugar.

Christmas:  This day was pure tradition, which the kids absolutely insisted on when I asked before prepping.  My oldest boy made the Julekage for the second year in a row. He is a very accomplished baker, including baking bread for a hundred people every week for his dining coop at college. Julekage is the traditional Norwegian Christmas food that we actually like (in contrast to the herring which we can pass by easily). It's a sweet yeast bread flavored with cardamom and with dried or candied fruits in it. When I asked my mother a few years ago for the family recipe she offered a couple of index cards with different recipes pasted from magazines, so every year now we just wing it on the proportions. We also had make-ahead sausage,egg and cheese casserole after the presents were opened. Then it was off to naps and to read our new books, play with our new toys, until time to stuff ourselves again.  Dinner was our traditional beef rib roast, with onions, potatoes and carrots roasted with it. I made roasted brussels sprouts with a sweet balsamic and cranberry reduction sauce served on the side (from Pioneer Woman). I made gravy, but there was not a lot of meat juice to base it on, (I supplemented with a bit of beef broth) and it was way too salty.  We had the poached pears and cookies for dessert.

My big present is an ice cream maker, something I have wanted for years. The containers had to be frozen overnight, and the ingredients also have to rest in the fridge after being mixed. I've got them ready now, so that will be some of the adventure today.  Aside from that, it's leftovers and salads from here on out!

Except for Friday... My big present to the family is we are going for a group cooking lesson!  All of the family likes to cook, and I came across a local chef who gives small cooking classes in his home. I'm pretty excited about it and the kids seem into it. I'll report back on how it goes.