Christmas 2022

Christmas 2022 was very quiet for us. The kids are scattered to the wind in Colorado Springs, Winston-Salem, and Philly, eliminating any chance of seeing them. My siblings and father, our only remaining parent, are in Alabama and my father was in the hospital, barely coherent since Thanksgiving and just barely hanging on. Ann, as an only child, doesn't have any other family.

Even though it was just the two of us, for once we were both at home simultaneously and not rushing around tending to an ill parent or in the process of moving as we were last year, our house sold out from under us less than two weeks before Christmas. This would be our first Christmas in our new home in Bend.

For Christmas Day, we received an invitation to visit with friends for dinner at their place, but sadly they got sick and had to cancel. While we are just fine on our own, Christmas is a time to celebrate with friends and family. Our Christmas ended up being mostly just another day, pretty anticlimactic all in all.

A bright spot was our Christmas tree, something we did not get last year in the middle of moving, and as pretty a fir as I have ever seen. We have just learned that for $5, you can cut your own tree off a National Forest and we thought to do that, but deep snow and lack of planning sent us looking for a pre-cut tree.

Next year in late summer and early fall, we will scope a couple options for stands of trees to cut that have relatively easy ingress and egress. Right now, I know where a bunch of decent trees are, but getting to the trees and getting back to the truck would be very tough.

Our Gorgeous 8' Fir

Because of our invite for Christmas Dinner, we moved our fancy dinner to Christmas Eve, a full pork rack, frenched and herb-crusted, accompanied by creamed leek scalloped potatoes.

Herb-Crusted Rack of Pork, Creamed Leek Scalloped Potatoes
Savigny-lès-Beaune Premier Cru Burgundy

While prepping, we opened a bottle of Jeeper Champagne, a house that I don't know. I bought it on spec, hoping for the best. Truth be told, it was a delightful blend with both red fruit and Chardonnay characteristics and a great buy for the price. I was impressed by this blend from parcels all over the Champagne.

With our pork roast, we opened a bourgogne rouge, a 2017 Chanson Savigny-Dominode. La Dominode is arguably the best cru of Savigny and Savigny is in my experience one of the best values in the Côte de Beaune. The combination of depth of fresh fruit against lively acidity («tension» diraient les français), coupled with tobacco aromatics and precise tannins was delightful. This is the best Pinot we have had in a long time, and having worked in the Willamette wine industry with and around some excellent Pinots, that is saying something.

Champagne, de Rigueur for a Celebration

As for our roast, although I prefer to do my own butchery, I don't have the space or refrigeration to do so like at my restaurant where we practiced whole animal butchery as a matter of course. That leaves me buying cuts at retail. The standards practiced for the retail trade would have engendered my wrath had they happened in my restaurant. A case in point: the photo below shows the shoddy work that passes for a frenched rack of pork. I spent 15 minutes cleaning up the rack such that it was suitable for presentation.

A So-Called Frenched Rack of Pork

What a Frenched Rack Should Look Like

The Herb-Crusted Rack, Resting Before Service

There are, I suppose, lots of ways to herb crust a rack. At the restaurant, we mostly crusted racks of lamb and for elegant tastings, racks of rabbit. This would involve mixing smooth Dijon mustard with herbs and seasonings appropriate for the meat and slathering that on the rack, before coating it in panko, the mustard mixture helping the panko to adhere. The leftover flavored mustard would be used at the last moment to thicken a pan sauce for the rack.

I wasn't terribly keen on a mustardy flavor for the rack of pork, mainly because I did not want to detract from either the accompanying potato dish or the red Burgundy. To that end, I mixed a scant couple of tablespoons of Dijon mustard with a good quantity of mayonnaise and added finely minced fresh rosemary, thyme, and Italian parsley. This I slathered on the top side and ends of the rack, then sprinkled it with salt and pepper. Finally, I pressed on a thin layer of panko and put the rack into the fridge for a couple of hours so that the crust could set up.

Two hours and a half hours before we wanted to eat, I heated olive oil on medium flame in a roasting pan on the stovetop and left the rack in the pan, crust side down, until it browned all over, about ten minutes. Flipping the rack over, I put it in a moderately slow oven (325F) and cooked it about 90 minutes, until the thermometer read 150F in the big end. The rack would rest for 30-45 minutes while the potatoes were finishing.

Ann wanted scalloped potatoes and I wanted creamed leeks, so I combined the two, sweating leeks in butter, then adding a touch of flour and building a nice leek béchamel with some half-and-half. I sliced the potatoes thinly and mixed in the béchamel. These went into the oven, covered, for the final 45 minutes that the pork was cooking.

Potatoes Ready for the Oven

When the pork came out of the oven, I removed the cover from the potatoes and cranked the heat to 400F and continued cooking the potatoes until they became brown on top.

Creamed Leek Scalloped Potatoes

Our Christmas Eve dinner was exceptionally good as was the amazingly beautiful bottle of Burgundy. The only thing missing was somebody to share it with.