things to do with cold goose

Not that there is much leftover goose in my experience - fifty five quid for the bird, which fed three hungry folk on Christmas Day.  We had the other breast for lunch on Friday, with the leftover red cabbage, and a baked spud, and very nice it was too.

Yesterday, Pete stripped off the remaining meat, and there was more than we had expected.  We ate half for lunch, stir fried with some spring onion, a green pepper, mushrooms and some tired coriander leaves, served with noodles.

The rest will go into a risotto.

Brunch today will be the remaining stuffing, fried up, with mushroom, fried potato and a fried egg.

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festive fayre

My idea of a good Christmas, food wise, is to cook up a load of stuff before, cook a nice Christmas dinner, then do nothing much for a week :)  This year was no exception.

I did a gammon in ginger beer and christmas spices (star anise, cinnamon and cloves), glazed with orange juice and maple syrup.  I did a pork and spinach terrine, Nigel Slater’s christmas cake, I made cranberry and chilli chutney, I made sausage rolls for tea last night.

On The Day itself, we had roast goose, stuffed with sausagemeat, herbs from the garden, chopped shallot, nutmeg and breadcrumbs from the heel of the old loaf.  It was accompanied by red cabbage with apple, roast potatoes and parsnips, sprouts with pancetta and almonds, and glazed apples with Calvados.  Pudding followed, after a slight hiatus when I discovered that I had no brandy butter!  I’ve always bought this before, but forgot this year, and will never buy it again as it is an absolute doddle to make, even if I did use Armagnac rather than brandy!

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cranberry, apple and chilli chutney

A friend of mine blogged yesterday that she was making cranberry chutney. “That’s a nice idea”, I thought; I’ve actually never made chutney before, so I asked her for the recipe, and bought some cranberries today. And got Pete to fetch down my preserving pan from the top of the cupboard.

Of course, me being me, I decided to add three apples that were going soft. Here’s what I did.

Put two punnets of cranberries (which came to 14.25oz) and three dessert apples, peeled/cored/sliced (which came to 9.25oz) into the preserving pan. This neatly came to 23.5oz, which was as near as dammit 1.5 times the cranberries in Maureen’s recipe, so I had something to go by.

Added 3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar, juice and zest of 1.5 oranges (because I’d used half to glaze the gammon earlier), 21 fl oz of red wine, and 6oz castor sugar. And then I wondered whether a red chilli might jazz it up, so I cut one up very finely, and hurled it in.

Brought it to the boil, and then simmered it for about 1 hour 10 minutes, by which time it was going gloop in a satisfactory minute. I decanted it into a bowl to cool down, because I wanted to wash the pan and get it put away.

I sterlised four glass jars in the oven, and then transferred the chutney when it was cool enough. The chilli gives it a real kick, and it’s utterly gorgeous.

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another year over

we had a very quiet festering season, which is exactly what we wanted. We collected kalunina from Temple Meads on Friday afternoon, and apart from a brief foray to North Street for veg and brunch on Saturday, we didn’t stir out of the house again* until we returned her to Bristol Parkway (why she used two different stations, lord knows). And we saw nobody apart from Pat and Dave (WANOLJ) who popped over on Xmyth Eve with some home made gifts of fudge and damson vodka.

mostly, we cooked and ate, as follows:

• Friday: lasagne with embedded spinach, something that I tried once when we had some of the green stuff to use up, and it worked fabulously well. Just bung a load of fresh washed spinach in between the last meat and bechamel layers.
• Saturday: lunch in cafe in North Street, boeuf stroganoff and chips for supper. I know, I know: chips. In my defence, it’s Rick Stein’s idea, and it works so well …
• Sunday was 24 hour roast chili and lemon pork. I was so looking forward to this - and I was all geared up to do all the fiddly stuff on Saturday night. But it was disappointing - very dry, and no gravy juices. Don’t think I’d bother again. We had it with sweet potato/ordinary potato mash, which was delicious. And some sprouts.
• The Day bought forth roast goose with apple sauce, red cabbage, sprouts, roast parsnips, roast spuds, home made sage and onion stuffing. All cooked as a team effort, dished up right on time at 3 p.m., and all perfect. I was well chuffed. We were far too stuffed for pudding, and barely managed anything else all day!
• Boxing Day - cold cuts, including a gammon boiled and baked in spices according to the blessed Nigella, which was beautiful.

we also consumed home made sossidge rolls (go me), mince pies (dozens), walnut bread (go pete), grapes, and god knows what else.

tonight perlmonger is cooking his wonderful indian lentils with spinach - we’ve eaten *far* too well over the past few days, and we’re both suffering from it :)

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I said I wasn’t much of a baker

But I’m quite pleased with this - it’ s a work in progress, but it’s coming along nicely.

it has a sort of amateur charm, don’t you think?

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Stepford Wife

Today, I have been mostly baking. I made a fabulous gruyere and cracked peppercorn bread. Or, at least, it would have been fabulous had I had a decent loaf tin instead of the ancient old things I use. It wasn’t quite cooked through, but we toasted it, and it was delicious.

And I made some shortbread bikkies, and cut them out with my festering xmas tree and star cutters. And I made some walnut shortbread, and cut them out ditto, except the recipe said to leave the dough in the fridge for half and hour,and I left it in there for about 5 hours, and had to soften it all up again. But they’re out of the oven now, and they’re gorgeous. I’m going to bung a bit of icing and some glittery balls [fnaar] on the shortbreads tomorrow.

Tomorrow - marzipan the cake, have a bash at sausage rolls {dear god - pastry; I can’t do pastry …), maybe some banana muffins.

I got Pete to drive me up to the Kitchen Shop this afternoon (I can’t park the Thaab, try as I might) and bought two new loaf tins, and another heavy duty baking tray - now I’m doing lots of this stuff, I want better quality tins, cos it makes all the difference.

And we called in at the local off licence on the way home and picked up 26 bottles of wine (including some vintage Pelorus - hurrah, and some pink fizz just for kalunina. There are six assorted bottles of fizz on the top row of the wine rack, which should do us through to next year.)

Now I’m sitting here while perlmonger cooks me a lump of Dexter steak before settling down to the X-Factor (which the Tivo is recording.

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alas, poor Rudolph

Reindeer paté, anyone?. From www.firebox.co.uk.

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christmas cake eggstravanza

Originally posted in my LiveJournal 19 dec 2005

So … I weighed out the ground almonds, the whole nuts (whizzed briefly in the food processor), the mixed tropical fruit, the sultanas, the blueberries and cranberries, the dried apricots. I rummaged in the back of the cupboard for Cointreau and Amaretto.

I beat 225g of butter with 225g of caster sugar and 1 tsp of Madagascan vanilla essence.

I added one egg.

Then I added another egg … and *as I cracked it* I realised it was bad, but it was too late - it was on its way into the Kitchenaid. Pete heroically dealt with the revolting sugary sulphury mess, while I washed everything up.

Then I found more butter, more sugar, more vanilla essence and started again. This time I did what I usually do - but inexplicably didn’t the time before - and broke the eggs into an intermediate container, but of course they were all fine.

The cake? Well, I’m not very happy with it to be honest. I think I might go and [whisper] buy one from Waitrose …

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