New Year's Eve Dinner

So traditionally we have something really easy like oysters on New Year's Eve. But I had some time and decided to cook a *little* bit. As you can see, I *really* need help with my plating skills. I could have done it nicely on a bunch of little plates, but I needed to bring it in on one. Give me a big plate and a bunch of food and it looks, well....like this. But it tasted really good!

The menu is salmon baked in parchment served with sage-roasted carrot-potato blend and braised marinated celery. I was especially happy with the marinated braised celery - braised celery is something that has intrigued me since I was a kid and read about it who-knows-where, but that I'd never cooked until now. It was tangy and not at all slimy. Removing the celery from the broth as it was done (i.e. taking out the smaller pieces first) and putting the beef stock into the marinade was key.

Recipes from back to front:

Braised Marinated Celery
(Adapted from the Blue edition of the Joy of Cooking)
Serves 2 as a side

inside stalks from one bunch celery
1 c beef stock

For the Marinade, mix together:
1/4 t salt
1/2 t paprika
1/2 t cumin
1 T olive oil
1 T balsamic vinegar
(mix these, then add:)
1 T of the beef stock you simmered the celery in
1 t lemon juice
2 T olive oil
(mix again)

Use the smaller inside stalks of the celery for this recipe. Cut the larger ones into 3"-4" pieces. Simmer in the stock until done (watch this - you should remove the smaller stalks first so they don't get all mushy and let the larger ones cook a bit longer). Immediately rinse the removed celery with cold water to stop the cooking process.

Put the braised celery in the marinade and let sit 3 hours or so in the fridge. Drain and serve.


Courtney's Sage-Roasted Carrot-Potato Mix

Serves 2

2 large carrots
1 decent-sized potato (type doesn't really matter)
1T pink peppercorns (or pepper to taste)
Decent amount of fresh sage (I used 1-1/2 ounces - no need to remove it from the stem)
salt to taste
ghee or butter to grease foil

Preheat oven or grill to 350.

Chop carrots and potatoes into approximately 1" pieces. Smear the foil where the vegetables will go with ghee or butter. Put vegetables down.

Crush the peppercorns and sprinkle over. Salt to taste if desired. Put sage on top of all.

Wrap with the foil. Bake 40 - 50 min. At this point the veggies should be a bit al dente. Cook them longer if you like your root veggies soft. Remove the sage before serving.


Courtney's Easy Salmon Baked in Parchment

Serves 2

1 8oz salmon fillet (or cod or any similar fish; please use sustainably fished wild stock!)
Approx. 1/4 t paprika
Zest from 1/2 a lemon
Ghee or butter or lard to grease parchment
Capers for garnish

Preheat oven or grill to 275F. (if you make this with the veggies above, reduce the heat in the grill or oven down to 275F after the veggies have cooked 30 minutes and add the salmon after about 40 minutes)

Rip off a piece of parchment big enough to wrap the fish with at least 1-1/2" overlap. Generously coat the middle of the parchment (where the fish will sit) with your fat of choice. Put the fish on, skin side down (if your fish has skin). Dust moderately with paprika and sprinkle with lemon zest (see picture, which for some reason is irritatingly rotated 90 degrees).

Fold the parchment. I have seen instructions to secure with paper clips, but I prefer to tie with string, as you can see in the picture of it sitting in the oven. It doesn't really matter so long as it's not going to open up on the grill or in the oven. Put the package in a greased ovenproof pan (this is insurance both against breakage during cooking and if you spill any juice when you unwrap.

Bake 15-20 minutes. Do not overcook!

Unwrap and serve with juices. Garnish with capers if desired.

Mid week Dinner

Well, I was invited to contribute a while ago and am finally getting around to adding something. Holidays are rather hectic for me and this has been a time of running here and there and being less than organized. Last night was a simple low effort meal that was rather good and leaves a nice carcass for stock. I got no pictures, sorry. And, unlike my compatriot, I am not always so good with amounts in translation.

Roast chicken with Rosemary, Garlic and Lemon:
The chicken is important here, well always, but especially in a roast. That adage ‘it tastes like chicken’ to describe a generic meat is so wrong an shows what P*rdue and T*son have done to chickens, First, they are not yellow (unless being fed a diet yellow feed stuffs) and second, a good chicken has flavor. So spend more and buy from a small producer.

1 Chicken – 3 1/2 lb
5 sprigs rosemary
4 med cloves garlic
lg. Lemon
salt
pepper
olive oil
butter

Strip 4 sprigs of rosemary of leaves, mince with garlic and zest from 3/4 of lemon, (the rest is for the pasta) add a small amount of olive oil to make a paste and add salt and pepper to taste. Now you need to separate the skin from the flesh in as much of the breast and leg area as you can, be gentle and don’t rip it. Take the Rosemary/garlic/lemon mix and spread under the skin everywhere you can reach. Stick any leftover rosemary springs in chest cavity. Tie legs together.

I stuck it in a 9x9 pyrex dish with about a Tablespoon olive oil and 1-2 teaspoons butter. Bake at 350 until done, baste often once there is enough liquid to baste.

Pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and lemon
1/2 lb pasta - Pipe-Rigate
lemon zest from above
5-6 sun-dried tomatoes
4-5 T aged robusto cheese, grated
1 T butter

Chop tomatoes coarsely and mince lemon zest. Cook pasta, drain. Toss lemon, tomato and butter until well mixed, do this all while hot, add cheese and mix.

Eggplant
1 med firm eggplant
bread crumbs
Milk
Egg
Oil for frying

Peel eggplant and slice into rounds. Mix milk and egg. Process goes milk/egg/bread crumbs/fry. Cook until med brown, flip repeat add salt as desired. What you are looking for here is crisp on the outside and creamy center. Drain. Warning, these thing stay really hot in the center for quite a while.

Courtney's At-Home Lunch

Leftovers for dinner today. I'm hoping Lane posts the rosemary-under-the-skin chicken and eggplant he's threatening to make, but in case not figured I'd share my standard weekday lunch. The two staples are cottage cheese with furikake (on the left side of the plate) and kim chee (on the right). Today I added some of the Korean stir fried black bean salad; sometimes I have natto or a bit of whatever. The white stuff is buttermilk. Sometimes I drink it straight; today it was 50/50 mixed with water.

BTW, this is only lunch for when I'm working from my home office. I would not inflict kim chee on my clients or their employees! When I pack lunch to travel, it's a typical small bento - about 1/3 cup each of cottage cheese, some sort of grain, some sort of veggie or green and some celery or tomato or fruit.

Bacon-Sour Cream Cabbage Bake

OK, it looks a bit more like a mess than it tastes! (Still need my partner in culinary crime to help me with plating...) It's really a nice cabbage dish, and the generous dinner portion shown is 1/4 the total output.

The thing I like about this recipe is that the cabbage cooks through but the end result really is not at all soupy or limp.


Recipe:

Bacon-Sour Cream Cabbage Bake

Serves 4 as a main dish
1 small - medium head cabbage (red or green)
4 - 6 slices bacon
1 egg
1 c whole fat sour cream
2T curry powder
1T paprika
cayenne to taste
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 c (approximate) baked onions (or substitute 1/4 c fried onions)

Preheat oven to 350F. Generously grease 8" square glass baking dish with bacon drippings, lard or ghee.

Remove core of cabbage (will not be used in this recipe). Quarter remainder and slice into 1/2" strips. Blanch 10 minutes for red; 5 minutes for green.

Cook bacon until crisp; drain on paper towels or over rack.

Beat egg in large bowl. Add sour cream and spices. Add blanched cabbage and mix thoroughly. Pour mixture into baking dish and distribute evenly. Cover with onions. Crumble bacon over all (big crumbles are fine).

Bake 30 - 40 min. Serve hot.

Here it is leftover. Reheated 20 minutes at 275F, and refreshed with 2T sour cream and a bit of paprika on top.

Courtney's Standard Breakfast

I'm often asked what my standard breakfast is. So here it is:

Non-homogenized whole milk (sometimes have 1 oz. cheese instead)
Coffee (always)
Miso soup (always with seaweed. This also has shiitake and the little curled breadlike things I don' t know the name of)
Tomatoes (almost always)
Sliced cucumber (may have pepper or celery or something else)
1/4 - 1/3 cup grain (today's is brown rice with a few vegetables)
Natto (twice a week or so)
Sometimes I'll have a half a glass of juice, which I usually need to water down or it's too sweet for me. Also if for some reason I don't get around to making grain we will have a gluten-free toaster waffle instead.
My husband augments this with yogurt topped with muesli he soaks a bit overnight.

So that's how I start my day. I must confess it took me a while to get used to natto. When I first tried it I wanted to gag. But I did my best and kept trying, and now I really like it. Someone recommended mixing it with rice or toasted sesame to cut the slime, but I find that I like it just mixed up with the sauce they give you.

No new Food Today!

We're still cleaning out leftovers and grazing from the fridge. So, no new food today, at least from Courtney's house! Here's my dinner, a lovely yin-yang combination of Korean stir-fried black beans and cottage cheese with black sesame furikake. The furikake was from the dregs of the jar, which is why it looks so salty (it was).

Rolled Spleen for Breakfast

So! Yesterday afternoon I made the pork spleen, using the recipe in Fergus Henderson's The Whole Beast. I followed the recipe almost exactly and his book is worth a look (this link will take you to the Amazon page) so I won't reproduce it here except to note deviations. His book does not have pictures, though, and I think they will help if this is your first time working with spleen.


This is the spleen. The lacy fat pulled up just to the left, I *think* is intestinal fat and could be used to wrap a small terrine or something similar.



I have now cut off the fat and taken out the vein and sliced the spleen in half. (I did this because I did not realize you were supposed to allow one spleen per person, and I wanted each person to have a distinct roll.) I used the scissors to cut out the vein without taking any "meat." I did not remove the silver skin - I'm not sure if I was supposed to or not, but the silver skin was very fine, and even with it left on the result was was excellent, so I don't think I will in the future unless I'm given a compelling reason. BTW, almost all of the pile of scrap on the left is fat, which I froze for future rendering.

Now I have laid the sage and bacon on both pieces, and have rolled up and pinned one piece. I decided on two toothpicks so that I could more evenly pull the spleen together. The two pieces of bacon were each a little longer than their respective spleen halves, so I cut off the ends and wrapped them into the middle. Also, I used more sage than was called for, basically putting down as many leaves as fit side by side.

The spleen rolls are now out of the oven. Instead of chicken stock I used the last of my smoked turkey "consomme" to cook it in. They cooled, but we weren't hungry enough to have them for dinner last night. So I put them in the fridge, covered, overnight.

In the morning there was a good layer of fat on the top, so I put it in a 175F oven just until the fat had melted enough for me to pull out the spleen.

And this is the happy result! Rolled spleen served with scrambled eggs and potato pancakes. The whitish curls are the bacon.

Spleen is really really good. It's like the best pate I've ever had. The texture is smooth and velvety even though the spleen itself is dense. The smoky bacon and smoked turkey broth enhanced the taste without overpowering it. The dish is very rich, and we both thought half a spleen was plenty for each person. Also, it could do just as well at a state dinner as on your country breakfast plate. One slice, served on a blanched cabbage leaf or even a cracker would make a very good appetizer as part of a multi-course meal.

Try it and let me know your results!

Remaining post-Christmas Leftovers

So breakfast and lunch will finish up the leftovers from Christmas. The pictures show breakfast, in process and done. The brown bits you can barely see at the bottom of the pie plate in the first photo are the leftover solids from making ghee yesterday. The rest is diced leftover veggies plus some sage I had on hand. I use this generic egg pie recipe for making breakfast and lunch egg pies. It's really easy and incredibly flexible.

Basic Egg Pie

miscellaneous "summer" or leafy veggies - mushrooms, tomatoes, zucchini, onion, spinach, fresh herbs, almost anything of that nature
1 - 2 T butter or butter solids or ghee or lard
4 - 6 eggs
1/2 - 1 c milk or buttermilk
spices to taste
shred cheese or panko or nut meal
lard or butter to grease baking dish

If using a conventional oven, preheat to 350F.

Dice or chop the vegetables. Grease a 9" pie pan and put in the fat, cut into pieces. Add the diced / chopped veggies. Microwave on high 3 minutes. Remove from microwave.

Meanwhile, combine the eggs and milk or buttermilk. with just enough so that it is thinned but still mostly eggy. If you use buttermilk, the mixture will seem to congeal slightly.

If you are going to give the empty egg-milk mixture pan to a four-legged family member as a treat, put your spices directly on the cooked vegetables, and then pour the mixture over. Otherwise, whisk the desired spices into the egg mixture and then pour over. Be creative! Some common spices I use (not all at the same time!) are curry powder, cayenne, sage, italian spices, red and black pepper, you get the idea. For the pie in the picture, since the fresh sage still has a lot of flavor I just used some coriander, marjoram, and dry mustard.

If desired, sprinkle a light layer of shred cheese, panko, nut meal, or something similar on the top. You can also dust the top with paprika if you want it to brown slightly.

If using a conventional oven, cook until set (time will vary based on number of eggs used, etc.)

For the Advantium, cook 10 min at U=4, L=3, M=3. I use this same setting no matter what combination of eggs and veggies I have and it is fine.

Christmas Leftover Dinner

A bit of clean-up tonight. A few leftover organic roasted chestnuts from our Solstice Supper for an appetizer, followed by a millet/sweet potato melange. A repeat of the cheese cracker course from yesterday closed out the meal. Highly satisfying, although it is clear to both of us that we have had far too many carbs over the last couple of days and need to go back to our normal diet.

For the leftover Millet/Sweet Potatoes:

Put millet in a ring around the plate; put the sweet potatoes on the inside. Microwave on high for one minute. Sprinkle "heavy" (normal, Kikkoman type) soy sauce around on the millet. Garnish with fresh sage leaves (intended for eating). Serve hot.

Ghee in Pictures

After yesterday's feast, we'll be having a small supper of leftover yams, millet left over from another day, and some greens. So I decided to compensate by making ghee and posting pictures to show how easy it is. Start-to-finish cook time for a full pound of butter is about 50 minutes.

The picture above shows a pound of unsalted butter (from pasture-raised beef) cut up and ready to cook.

Now it has just started to simmer. It will bubble and pop for about 20 minutes on a low simmer, and then just settle to a calm light simmer. I'll cook it for 10 - 15 minutes after that, until it smells a little toasty and looks right (see next picture).

After post-bubble cooking for 10 - 15 minutes it is done and just pulled off the fire to cool and settle for 10 minutes. You can see how the solids at the bottom of the pan are nice and brown.

Here it is poured into glasses. These are 8 oz Mason jars, so you can see not only how nice and clear it is but also that there is very little loss of volume. Once it's cool I'll cover it and put it in the fridge. The ghee is very stable and will keep up to 6 months in the fridge, but I use it for cooking and it will not last anywhere near that long - especially if I give one of the jars away!

Christmas Dinner Course 12 - Cracker, Cheese and Coffee

We made it! All 12 courses. Started cooking at 1:00 pm. First course served at 2:40, dinner finished at 8:56 p.m. Really civilized and wonderful - feasting versus gorging. And so nice to finish on a savory note.

We can take credit for neither the cheese nor the crackers. The cheese was a really nice Roquefort - Roquefort Gabriel Doulet la Petit Cave. Creamy and sharp and with a clean aftertaste. The crackers were Mulini Reali brand, Garden Chive flavor. They are hand-rolled, which I think did make a difference in that it added some textural interest.

And the cat is our younger, Alex. He's a good dude, and has a compromised sense of smell, which is why he can pose sitting upright behind the cheese without any trouble at all.

So now it's time to sit back and pat myself on my full (but not unpleasantly so) belly and call it a night.

Merry Christmas!!

Christmas Dinner Course 11 - Fancy Cake

The fancy cake course was another cheat, I'm afraid. It was purchased from the local Whole Foods bakery. We were afraid it was going to be too sweet, but were pleasantly surprised and ate it all. The buttercream was made from real butter and there was no vegetable oil or fat in it, which I think made the difference. My only negative comment is that this was sold as a single serving. Even though it was really good there is no way one of us could have eaten both halves.

For those wondering, from bottom to top it's plain sponge cake, chocolate sponge cake, plain sponge cake, mocha sponge cake, and buttercream.

Christmas Dinner Course 10 - Cold Dessert

A cheat, I'm afraid. I'm not really a dessert person, and I had this very fun Japanese plum jelly that needs to be eaten, so... I love the Japanese presentation. It came wrapped in a beautiful outer box, surrounded by a lovely inner box complete with sakura (cherry) blossoms and a poem in calligraphy I can't decipher. And inside that were six plastic cases of plum jelly, sort of like what you might be served on an airplane, with little plastic shovels also reminiscent of air service.

Somewhat surprisingly, given all the plastic, the jelly is pretty good - not too sweet and with just the right 'bite' so that it stays jelled until you eat it and then melts beautifully on your tongue. So, no complaints putting it in the Christmas line-up. Plus, I think there is some sort of obligation to have Plum-Something!

Despite the poor lighting and cell phone resolution I think you can get the idea. The thing standing up behind the wrapped jelly dishes is the inner box - I already had thrown away the outer box - too bad! it was just as fancy. The dark shapes in the jelly are the pickled green plums that are de rigeur with this dessert.

Christmas Dinner Course 9 - Marrow Bones

Marrow has been one of my guilty secret loves since childhood. In addition to helping us lose weight and feel better, my husband and my adoption of a quasi-paleo diet has introduced marrow bones, organs, and other goodness back into my life. I can only say Huzzah!

The marrow from these bones came out cleanly in a wonderful single piece of heaven. The "recipe" is beyond simple. Preheat the oven to 450F and cook the bones upright in an ovenproof skillet until the ends start to pull back and before the marrow has melted. These 3" beef bones were in the oven for 17 minutes.

Christmas Dinner Course 8 - Carrot-Tomato-Ginger Punch

The punch course is something I've always left out or for which I've substituted a salad. But my husband, the bartender, was willing to give it a go. The result was very nice. A good meld of flavors that was as much a cold soup as a punch. He recommends pulverizing or finely grating the ginger rather than muddling it as the recipe says, although the muddled ginger left big pieces that were kind of nice as punctuation.

Also, note that raw honey will not dissolve. That's the only kind we have at our house, so we ended up using no honey at all. Carrot juice is pretty sweet in and of itself so we really didn't mind the absence of additional sweetener.


We served it with more sage leaves as garnish. Again, it was nice to take a little bite of spicy sage in between sips of the sweeter punch.

Carrot-Tomato-Ginger Punch

For each serving

70 ml carrot juice
70 ml tomato juice
1 t honey
30 ml lemon juice
2-3 thin slices fresh ginger root
1/2 t worchestershire sauce

Muddle or pulverize the ginger in the carrot and tomato juice. Add other ingredients. Stir well. Garnish with tomatoes, herbs, or similar to suit.

Christmas Dinner Course 7 - Garlic-Parmesan Yams

I absolutely hate sugared yams. I'm not a big sweet-tooth in general, but taking a perfectly good and naturally very sweet vegetable and turning into candy makes me cringe. This is my antidote. The garlic/sweet potato combination especially was really refreshing and a lot more interesting than I had expected. If you look at the amounts in the picture, there was about one more serving left over.

I'll definitely do this one again. I cooked it early and it sat in the warmer for 4 or 5 hours. The Parmesan took on a plastic note during that time. I think an hour probably would have been fine.

Courtney's Garlic-Parmesan Yam Casserole

Serves 4

2 small - medium sized yams
1 lg clove of garlic
2T unsalted butter
1/4 c shredded Parmesan
black pepper or curry powder to taste

Wash the yams and slice them into 1 cm rounds, trimming any soft or spoiled parts (do not peel the yams). Finely dice the garlic (Follow my fellow foodie Lane's advice about garlic and use a slicing, rather than an impact, action)

Dot the bottom of a 1 qt casserole with butter. Put half the yams in a layer. Top with half the garlic. Dot with half the remaining butter. Sprinkle with half the cheese. Repeat. Dust with black pepper to taste. This would also be good with curry powder.

Cover and bake at 325F until tender (about 1 hour for the batch pictured). No need to preheat oven. OK to make ahead, but not more than an hour or so if you're keeping it warm.

Christmas Dinner Course 6 - Smoked Lamb

I am indebted to my husband for really wanting a Big Green Egg. My reluctance to spend $700 on a charcoal grill has been completely overcome by the quality of food that comes out of Mechazawa-san (the Egg) and the complete no-brainer, set-and-forget nature of cooking on the Egg. Today's lamb, smoked with cherry wood, was no exception. I can take no credit for this. I just set the grill up at 2, told Mechazawa-san I wanted a slow-smoked rack of lamb, closed it off at 4 or so, and ate it at 6. Perfection.

I did do the sauce - very simple combination of a few T of Koskiusko mustard, chopped sage leaves, and 3 dashes of mint bitters. The garnish is sage leaves, and meant to be eaten to give a little extra 'bite' between the bist of lamb.

Christmas Dinner Course 5 - Eggs Florentine

Comfort food, indeed, and sort of an adult spin on the creamed vegetables that were an ubiquitous part of holiday meals in my family - although creamed pearl onions were the standard fare.

(It's now 5:20 and dark, so the picture quality from my cell phone is getting a bit dicey. But I think it's clear enough to see what's going on)








Eggs Florentine

(adapted from the Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking School 1913 Meal-a-Day recipe cards)
Serves 2

I bunch fresh spinach
2 eggs
4T shredded Parmesan
1/3 c bechamel sauce
dash paperika
dash nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a small shallow casserole.

Cook the spinach. Cool and chop.

Put into the casserole and make two depressions. Put 1T Parmesan into each depression. Crack open an egg into each depression. Sprinkle 1T Parmesan and put about a teaspoon of the sauce over each egg. Pour the rest of the sauce over the spinach around the eggs.

Cover and bake until set (approx. 15 min.). Put 1 egg and 1/2 of the spinach in each of two dishes. dust the egg with paprika; sprinkle nutmeg around on the spinach. Serve hot.

Christmas Dinner Course 4 - Crab-cucumber Salad

Another last-minute substitution. I had planned on smoked salmon, until I went to get the salmon and realized I'd eaten it several days before. So. I wanted some sort of clean, flaked seafood course. Fortunately, I had some canned Japanese snow crab on hand and made this salad.

The length of marinating is important - it should go at least a couple of hours and probably 5 or 6 is the limit. This was set marinating at about 1:00 p.m. and was eaten at 4:45.

I served these in lovely egret-decorated dishes that are supposed to be arranged together in a circle for condiments. You only get to see the egrets if you eat all your salad!


Crab-Cucumber Salad

Adapted from Japanese Home Cooking

Makes 2 side dish servings

2" piece of cucumber
2 oz snow crab
1/8 c brown rice vinegar
1/8 t salt
1/8 t msg
3/4 T light soy sauce
1 t sugar
1/4" piece of fresh ginger, grated

Wash the cucumber and slice without peeling into paper-thin rounds. Salt lightly and put in colander. Put a weighted bowl on top to press. Let stand 30 minutes.

While cucumber is pressing, combine all other ingredients in a non-reactive bowl. When the cucumber has stood for 30 min, add it to the rest and stir to combine.

Marinate until ready to serve. Before serving, drain off any extra dressing.

Christmas Dinner Course 3 - Smoked Turkey Rissoles

So the smoked turkey meat went into the rissoles. They were incredible. If I'd paid thirty bucks at a restaurant I would have felt like it was a bargain. My only quibble is that I couldn't get the edges to stay sealed (you can see in the picture that they split just a little bit). I don't have a crimping tool and had to use my hands. I thought I'd done a good job, but obviously it could have been better.

When thinking of an accompaniment I was drawn to chutney until I remembered I have some spiced pear butter I made this summer. It was perfect.

Courtney's Smoked Turkey Rissoles

Makes 16 rissoles - figure 2 per person as a side. Serve with a chutney or chunky jam or something similar - I had some spiced pear butter I made in October with it and it was absolutely perfect.

approx. 2 c cooked smoked turkey - combination of parts; can also include giblets, but exclude skin or any bones
2 large fresh sage leaves
2 large cloves garlic
black pepper and salt

1/2 c veloute sauce (made using fat and stock from the smoked turkey, if possible)
1 stem from large mushroom, diced into 1/8" pieces

1 sheet puff pastry

Preheat oven to 375F.

Snip the sage leaves into approx 1/4" pieces. Peel the garlic and slice each clove into 3 or 4 pieces.

Combine the turkey, sage, garlic, and a generous amount of black pepper in a food processor. Process until finely minced. Turn out into a bowl and add salt to taste.

When making the veloute sauce, saute the chopped mushroom stem in the butter or fat until just cooked. Then continue making the veloute as normal.

Add the veloute to the turkey mixture and combine. Cool.

Roll the puff pastry very thin. Cut into a 4 x 4 grid of squares. Put a small ball of turkey mixture in the center of each square. Fold the pastry over to make a triangle and pinch to seal. If desired, brush pastry with an egg wash (I didn't).

Place on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake for 20 minutes or until done. You can just turn off the oven and let them sit and stay warm after, they'll keep for a couple of hours no problem.

If you have leftovers, don't microwave them! Reheat at 300F for 10 minutes.

Christmas Dinner Course 2 - Smoked Turkey Consomme

I smoked a heritage turkey on the 20th and have been nomsing off it ever since. By Christmas there was just some stock (I thought!) and some meat - both "first picked" meat from the bird and meat from the stewed carcass - left. My intent was to heat and strain the stock and use it as my clear soup course.

When I took the stock out of the fridge, I was *very* pleasantly surprised to discover it was really a nice consomme. Wonderfully jelled and just gorgeous, with a layer of scrap meat at the bottom. I heated and strained it. The result was velvety and divine.

An added bonus - g0t to use my consomme cups!

Christmas Dinner - Course 1 - Shellfish

I intended to make scalloped scallops, but it just seemed that all the tarting up would mask the scallops themselves, which were really lovely. So, did this instead. Excellent idea.


Courtney's Scallops with Onion-Sherry Butter

Serves 2

2 very large sea scallops
2 - 3 T unsalted butter
2T finely diced red onion
2T dry sherry
5-6 white peppercorns

Using a mortar and pestle, crush and coarsely grind the peppercorns.

Slowly melt the butter in a small heavy frypan. When the butter is just melting and the pan hasn't yet got hot, dredge the scallops in the butter and put aside.

Raise the heat to medium. When the butter has melted and is just fragrant, add the onions. Saute for 1 min. Add the scallops. Saute 2-1/2 - 3 min on each side. The onions should now be fairly brown. Remove and plate the scallops.

Deglaze the pan with the sherry and reduce to make a sauce. Divide the sauce between the two plated scallops. Sprinkle white pepper over to taste. Serve immediately.