Christmas Dinner

Ann wanted to have a small Christmas dinner on Christmas Day at our house, despite our being at Rob and Dyce's the evening before for a wonderful fondue, of which I took no photos. After a series of holiday parties with a big New Year's celebration to come within the week, it was almost too much. Next year we need to slow things down.

We thought about doing a Feast of the Seven Fishes, but consuming such a vast meal requires a small army that we are not prepared to serve in our home. Moreover, outside of the restaurant trade, finding decent seafood in this food desert is nigh on impossible.

Instead, Ann hit on the theme of three pastas, each in the color of the Italian flag: red, white, and green. In the weeks before Christmas, we set about throwing pasta dishes at the proverbial wall to see what would stick. For me, it was important that we have only one dish made at the last minute, so that I would not be chained to the stove all night. After a couple of days of kicking ideas around, we settled on three dishes.

Cookie Fairy Making Rosemary-Orange-Olive Oil Shortbreads

Ann had already decided she was making shortbreads with rosemary, orange, and olive oil for dessert. That left antipasti to figure out, one with meat and one without. The without came easily enough: a green olive olivada (tapenade less anchovies) served with crackers and a neutral double or triple cream cheese.

Olivada, Crackers, Triple Cream Cheese, Grissini

For meat, somehow we got fixated on vitello tonnato. I decided to keep the meat raw in the form of a tartare and use the tuna sauce for garnish. I thought it was a neat idea; I was alone in this thinking apparently, judging from the amount of leftovers that I turned into burgers the next day. The tonnato sauce was the best I have ever made. I think I scared people with raw meat.

Vitello Tonnato
Veal Tartare on Crostini with Tonnato Sauce and Capers

For the red pasta, I stuffed conchiglioni (large shells) with pulled short rib that I braised a couple of days before in a really intense beef stock. I mixed the short rib with ricotta to lighten it just a little and covered the whole in a quick marinara.

Here's a tip for the shells. I bought really excellent quality shells with a recommended 16- to 18-minute cook time. The day before, I boiled them for four minutes, then chilled them immediately in cold water. After tossing them in a little olive oil to keep them from sticking together, I put them in a seal top bag in the fridge overnight. The next day, they were perfect for stuffing, pliable but holding their shape rather than flopping around and closing up like fully cooked shells.

Baked Conchiglioni Stuffed with Short Rib and Ricotta
Topped with Marinara

Ann insisted on potato gnocchi which we made the day before. I rolled out and cut the gnocchi while Ann boiled them in small batches. Before people arrived, I made a speck and parmigiano cream. While the green pasta was cooking, I browned the refrigerated gnocchi and then poured the sauce over at dinner time. Everybody loved these; they were too rich for my taste.

Potato Gnocchi with Speck and Parmigiano Cream

The green pasta for me was a no-brainer, the word green sending me directly to basil for which Liguria is famous. The Ligurians serve their pesto on their traditional cut of pasta called trofie, hundreds and hundreds of pounds we rolled out at the restaurant. Not wanting to roll out trofie for this dinner, I screwed up and ordered in some dried trofie, which despite being imported from Italy, was crap. I am still kicking myself for not investing the half an hour it would have taken to make fresh trofie. Nobody but Ann and me seemed to notice; still I do not like using second rate ingredients.

Trofie al Pesto with Torn Basil and Toasted Pine Nuts

I think we were all pretty much partied out by the time Christmas Day rolled around. Unlike several prior nights, it was not a late night. I think we were all stuffed too, but fortunately, I was able to send home some of the copious leftovers.

Here's My Plate with All Three Pastas

Buon Natale!

Christmas 2024

Once again this year, with all the kids on the East Coast, two in North Carolina and one in Philly, it was a very quiet holiday season. We spent our holiday money on going to Santa Fe with Rob and Dyce and on one little splurge for the two of us here in town. And truth be told, with Rob and Dyce gone to Boulder, albeit temporarily, we were feeling a bit down.

Still, we put up a tree and decorated it with our small collection of food-related and other meaningful ornaments; the strip of bacon ornament that Ann gave me many years ago is a favorite. We brought back a few ornaments from our trip to Santa Fe. And we lost another favorite, an exquisitely detailed garlic, in putting up the tree.

One of Our Food-Themed Ornaments

Our splurge for ourselves was attending a Brovia Barolo tasting accompanied by a risotto topped with white truffles at our local wine shop, Viaggio. We brought home a couple of bottles for special occasions at the house. Nebbiolo has become our go-to grape in the last five years. We love light-bodied reds, but our palates being saturated with Pinot Noir is likely causing us to branch out to Nebbiolo (and Sangiovese, Tempranillo, and a couple other grapes). Ann is finding out that she prefers the relatively softer Barbaresco to the more structured Barolo.

Brovia Barolo Tasting

Risotto with White Truffles

We eat a diet low in simple carbs, so pasta is a big splurge for us. In celebration of the holiday season, we decided to splurge on pasta for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Ann had a particular hankering for pasta fagioli and requested that I make it for Christmas Eve.

Borlotti Stregoni Ready to Cook for Pasta Fagioli

I had ordered some Italian Borlotti from Rancho Gordo for just such an occasion. I typically make pasta fagioli with cannellini, large white kidney-shaped beans. As these borlotti cooked, they got darker, heavier looking, and super meaty, not at all the style of bean that I want for my pasta fagioli. I only used half of them in the pasta fagioli so as not to weigh it down; the remaining half became a substantial bowl of American chili when combined with a lot of Chimayo chile powder.

This year, supposedly a La Niña year that should be colder and wetter, has proved to be warmer and wetter. So, we have had more rain than snow here along the river, although they have had many, many feet of snow up at Mt. Bachelor. The rain has kept me inside far more than I have wanted, but I finally got a chance to get out for a walk along the river on Christmas Eve. This year, there seem to be many more trees along the trail decorated with Christmas ornaments. I don't know why, but these temporary decorations always warm my heart.

A Rare Day to Get Out on the Trail

For Christmas Day, at Ann's urging, I planned to make cavatelli with pancetta and sage using the cavatelli maker that I bought at the end of the summer. I was worried about its low price and it really failed to work, the crank handle stripping out after making two or three cavatelli. I think I can rig it to work, especially with a wetter dough, but I gave up on Christmas Day and converted the semolina and water dough to tagliatelle. Hopefully, the good folks of Emilia-Romagna will forgive me for making one of their classic dishes with decidedly southern-style eggless noodles.

Making Semolina Dough for Pasta

Tagliatelle with Pancetta and Sage

Brovia Barolo Villero for Christmas Dinner

And that is the tale of our muted holiday celebration for 2024. We hope for more friends and family next year though we are grateful for what we did have this year.

Christmas 2023: The Word is "Subdued"

You know what? Colds suck.

Sometimes in life, all your plans end up for naught, what in the software business we used to call "overcome by events." This holiday season was such a time in our lives for Annie and me. We had all kinds of plans to celebrate with friends, to make some great food, and to open some really nice bottles of wine, not much of which happened.

Three days before Christmas, Ann started dragging and it just got worse. By Christmas Eve, she had a full-blown cold which took until the 30th to wear off, just in time to celebrate New Year's Eve with Rob and Dyce. New Year's Eve day, Dyce called to say that on the heels of their trip to Italy, he'd been sick and now Rob was down with it. So much for New Year's Eve; we pushed our celebration out to the first weekend in January, this coming weekend. 

Ann planned to make a lot of different cookies to share with friends and neighbors, especially the lovely kids next door. She ended up only making one kind and I ended up baking them while she went to shower to try to make herself feel better. I spent an entire day making a beef ragù to stuff into paccheri pasta for a gathering at our house. We canceled that and the ragù sits in the refrigerator still. Christmas Eve, we were going to friends' house for smoked brisket and I was going to make a casserole of pommes dauphinois; we begged off.

Christmas Day, we were going to make a batch of some sort of Calabrese rolled pasta such as fileja with a spicy 'nduja sauce. That didn't happen either. Just after Christmas, we were going to Yakima to see an old friend and spend the night exploring the beer of the Yakima Valley. I ended up going by myself, fighting horrible fog both ways, jamming the trip into a single day.

We had planned to pour some nice bottles for our holiday meals; they sit untouched in the cooler.

How does the old saying go? "Man plans and Fate laughs." Truth.

Here's what we did manage to accomplish for the holidays in spite of illness.

What Ann Calls "Monster Cookies," for the Neighbor Kids

Putting a Brave Face on Feeling Miserable

Christmas Eve, we had no plans to dine at home, having been invited for brisket at our friends' house. We canceled first thing that morning, not wanting to infect anyone else. Still, Ann was trying to make herself feel better and asked me if I would get a loaf of bread and a La Tur cheese, then roast the piece of lamb shoulder that I had in the freezer. I obliged, but it just wasn't the same, the way she was feeling.

La Tur Cheese

Roasted Local Lamb Shoulder
Served with Red Wine-Whole Grain Mustard Sauce

Usually, I plan a nice brunch dish for Christmas Day, but with Ann not feeling well, I assumed breakfast was off. Later on in the day, she asked me for some eggs, so I made some creamy eggs with bacon, green onions, and Brie, stirred fairly constantly to make them medium-curd, an intermediate between the large curds that I normally do and the tiny curds of oeufs brouillés that I make every so often. These eggs were right sexy.

French Scramble with Bacon, Green Onions, and Brie

Fortunately, we got our tree the second week of December and had plenty of time to decorate it before Ann fell ill. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have bothered. We have retired all the old ornaments and are starting over with a food and drink-themed tree. If you enlarge the photo below, you can see that all of the garland is made from beads and wine corks, thanks to many years of effort by great friend Donald.

Don't You Have a Garlic Ornament on Your Tree?

Home Sweet Home!

Christmas Day, Ann and I had planned to make a spicy batch of homemade pasta for which I had ordered some 'nduja, that spicy spreadable salame from Calabria. I had given up on making dinner, just planning to graze out of the refrigerator, but late in the afternoon, Ann asked if I would make a simple, non-spicy pasta for us for dinner. And, so I obliged her with the simplest pasta I know, amatriciana, with only three ingredients: guanciale, tomato passata, and salt.

Rendering Guanciale for Amatriciana Sauce

Spicy 'Nduja, Left for Another Occasion

Did a Rat Take a Bite out of the Pecorino?
No, That's a Clear Sign that Ann Was in the Cheese

Penne Amatriciana

Delicious Sancerre Rouge

We didn't open any of the really good bottles for the holidays, but with our amatriciana, we did open a fairly obscure red Sancerre which was delicious and stylistically very different from our Oregon Pinots, the relatively big tannins and high acid working well with the pasta sauce.

So for our holidays in 2023, things just didn't go as planned. But that is life. Nothing is ever perfect and all you can do is play the hand you are dealt the best that you are able. I think Ann and I did a pretty good job making the best of our marginal hand, even if things were subdued. I'm just sorry that she felt so rotten the entire time.

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.

Savory Bread Pudding: Shiitake, Leek, and Goat Cheese

Way back in the Thanksgiving time frame, Ann expressed a desire to have a savory bread pudding for Christmas Day brunch, by way of celebrating. We haven't been eating many simple carbs at all since August and the bread pudding would be a rare treat. I proposed making one with shiitakes, leeks, and goat cheese and she agreed, further asking if I could make it with challah. So I made a loaf of challah and assembled the bread pudding on Christmas Eve, baking it in early afternoon on Christmas Day.

Savory Bread Pudding: Shiitake, Leek, and Goat Cheese

I really love doing dishes like this for brunch because I can assemble everything the night before, leaving only to pull it out of the refrigerator and put it in the oven the next day.

Starting the Flavorings: Leeks and Shiitakes

Cooking the Leeks and Shiitakes with Thyme

I started by cooking sliced leeks and shiitakes with a bit of thyme. Thyme is one of my favorite herbs and I think it pairs extremely well with shiitakes.

Measuring the Bread

When making any kind of bread pudding, I always use the baking pan to measure the bread. I keep cutting cubes until the pan is full. That way, there's no guessing. Because challah is so soft, I cut it into very large cubes so that it will not fall apart when I add the custard. I prefer to use more substantial bread for bread puddings. When using bread with more body and a tougher crust, I would cut it much smaller.

You can use any bread you like. For example, I have made bread pudding with croissants and my grandmother used to smear store-bought white bread with butter and jam and shingle (overlap) the whole slices of smeared bread the length of her baking dish.

Dry Ingredients Before Mixing with Custard

Bread Pudding Ready to Bake or Refrigerate

The custard for bread pudding can be flavored or unflavored. In the restaurant days, I would infuse the cream for the custard with garlic, herbs, spices, and dried mushrooms, among other flavorings. For this bread pudding, I did not want to take that extra step, mainly because I had just made the challah and spent three days making French onion soup for Christmas Eve Dinner. Also, I wanted to reduce the fat in the custard by using low fat milk rather than the 40% heavy cream that I used to use at the restaurant.

A decent rule of thumb is that each egg will set one cup of liquid, so each quart of liquid requires four eggs. I always use five eggs. It's always a good idea to know how much custard volume you need for the size pan you will be using. A full shallow hotel pan will take a gallon (plus 20 eggs), a half hotel will take a half gallon (plus 10 eggs), and this 9x9 pan will take a quart (plus 5 eggs).

At the restaurant, in addition to making large puddings, we used to bake bread puddings in individual molds, in which case, we'd fill each mold full of bread and then ladle custard into the mold until the mold was full.

This 9x9 pan contains, in addition in addition to the bread and custard, a leek, a half a pound of shiitakes stemmed and sliced, and four ounces of fresh goat cheese.

 

Bread Pudding Coming Out of the Oven

Baking bread puddings is a simple matter of putting them uncovered in a moderate oven (350F) and waiting for them to set up and brown on top to the degree that you want. A bread pudding of this depth will take about 90 minutes, a good bit longer than many people expect. A full hotel pan of bread pudding is going to take about two hours to set in the center and brown. If you're wanting to eat your bread pudding while it is still warm, you'll probably want it to cool for 20 minutes before you cut it so that it has a chance to solidify a bit. All this is by way of saying that you should allow plenty of time to cook and cool your bread pudding before you want to eat it.

Prosecco: A Great Match for Goat Cheese

The slightly acidic flavor of the goat cheese in the bread pudding seems to go incredibly well with Prosecco, so we put a bottle in the refrigerator and had a glass while the pudding was in the oven and another glass with the pudding.