Christmas 2012

As I just mentioned the day before, I sometimes cook a large feast on both Christmas Eve and Christmas day.

Usually it has always worked out to be (loosely) my maternal family and their traditions on Christmas Eve, and my paternal's on Christmas day.  I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the former being German, and the latter Norwegian... but there it is.

Anyway, so Christmas day is turkey day.  Traditional with all the traditional fixins, all cooked traditionally.  :)

Here's my raw bird (chicken in this instance, as I can't honestly serve even the smallest turkey among any less than 6 people, so chicken is the better option).  She's been brined for the last 24 or so hours.

And there she is, salted and peppered, and ready for a little bit of searing high heat.

While that was browning at high heat (~500°F), I got the roasting pan, and what would eventually form the base for the gravy (which is arguably one of the more important elements of such a feast!) all assembled.

In this case, we're going to roast the chicken on top of a ton of onion and garlic, along with some nice fresh sage leaves.

Once the chicken has browned at high heat for a few minutes, she gets laid gingerly on top of this delicious-looking bed.  I like the trick of putting some sort of citrus fruit in the cavity (when not filling with stuffing), and then I added a cup of water to the whole thing.

Slap the lid on the roaster, and the whole thing needs about an hour or two, depending on your cooking temperature.

So, while that is cooking, I got to cooking some veggies.

Although not much of a fan myself, the wife really likes brussels sprouts, so I grilled up a batch of those, along with a batch of buttered peas.

A dollop of margarine, and some sage leaves in there for flavour, but those get removed before serving.

A big drum of mashed potatoes as well.  Might as well throw some sage in there too, right?  Also to be removed before mashing. ;)

Those can be set up in advance, and then cooked later in order to time it to the roast.

Which was done about two hours later... and looked amazing!

BTW - she's not bionic-chicken, that's just my thermometer.  :)

So, she gets removed to a safe location where she'll relax for a few minutes before being carved to pieces by a sharp utensil.

Which leaves a large pot full of sage-flavoured garlic, onion, and a ton of chicken juice.  Hmmm... what to do with all that?  

GRAVY!

It's called an immersion blender people.  Go get yourselves one now if you don't already have one.  The sage was removed prior, of course.

The veggies were turned on a few minutes ago, and are now ready at the same time as everything else.

That's it!

A traditional feast for tradition's sake.

Carved the bird:

Served everything up on the table, to be dished out accordingly.

Merry Christmas indeed!

Christmas Eve 2012

For as long as I can remember, my family has made a celebratory deal out of both Christmas and Christmas Eve.

I guess it's because I'm half German?  I dunno...

But, in any case, we would have a large meal feast on both nights.  I will say, however, that they were always different.  The tradition was to do a ham and various orange vegetables (sweet potatoes, carrots, etc.) for Christmas Eve, and then the typical turkey dinner (mashed potatoes, gravy, etc.) for Christmas.

When I am not spending the holidays with my family, I rarely do both... however, this year I did.  My wife's family celebrates Christmas day with a bit more emphasis than mine, and with my mother-in-law spending the holidays with us, I figured I'd just do both.

So, here is my 2012 take on Christmas Eve dinner.

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First of all, this year I did not buy a ham.  I like ham as much as the next Gentile, but they can be a little over salted in my opinion.  So much so that you often need to work hard to infuse the meat with any flavour other than salt.  Maybe some cloves are strong enough to cut through... but that's about it.

So... this year I tried a porchetta.  

Oh man was it good.

It was like taking a super lean, tasty pork loin, and wrapping it in a huge sheet of bacon.  Yum!

So, I rubbed the whole thing down, inside and out, and then pinched it shut with some bamboo skewers.

I then seared it at high heat in the oven for a few minutes.

Which made it all cracklin' good!

Then I slow-roasted it on low heat for a little over an hour.

As for the other dishes, we had green beans, roasted heirloom carrots and sweet potatoes.

After washing and trimming the beans and carrots, I threw them into the roaster for about 40 minutes.  The sweet potatoes were boiled in salted water.  Not really a fan of sweet potatoes, so the wife took care of those.

After all was roasted, we had a delicious looking porchetta:

And it was so juicy, the veggies were cooked perfectly!

There was so much good juice leftover, I incorporated it into the mustard sauce I made.  Which is a must-have remnant from my mom's traditional Christmas Eve supper.

Anyway... this was it, for three people it was still quite a large feast!