It all started well enough. Just a lovely, lazy day…until I went into the kitchen. Actually, that was going okay too.
The soup was finished...
I had made the custard for the floating islands the day before. I made the meringue that morning. The recipe is at the end of this post.
I had softened onions and added spinach for stuffing.
Then I started on the boning of a nice big chicken, which I was going to stuff with the spinach mixture, roll up and tie tightly, then roast it and serve in it slices.
Don’t read this next bit if you’re squeamish.
Unfortunately, I had a run-in with a pair of kitchen scissors. As I was cutting through one of the bones on the chicken, I actually snipped right through my finger – my pinkie on my left hand. I immediately thought, I am NOT going to pull a Jamie, so I took paper towels (lots of them) and stemmed the flow (a bit) and got two bandaids on REALLY tight. I used compression and held it above my heart and it seemed to stop.
I went on with things for a while. The incompletely-boned chicken I decided would become butterflied chicken. I got that into the oven and I simmered the beginnings of the spinach stuffing in cream and called it creamed spinach. I even began the risotto.
Then I realized that the bleeding really wasn’t stopping. I took off the bandaids and it REALLY wasn’t stopping, so I summoned H and said perhaps we needed to make a little trip to the hospital. Right before we left, the chicken came out of the oven and was wrapped tightly in foil.
At the hospital, I learned that there had been many “lacerations” that day, all from preparing Christmas dinner. Someone had stabbed herself drying her knife; someone had had a rather serious run-in with a mandolin; there WAS a person who had fallen off her horse, but that was incidental to Christmas. I was the only one who had done the deed with scissors, so I felt a bit special and happy that no one could criticize my knife skills.
FOUR stitches plus one tetanus shot later...we were on our way home.
(See? I wasn’t faking and we’re talking about a tiny pinkie.)
The kids had heated up what they were supposed to and put the chicken into a hot oven for 10 minutes. Actually, (somehow) it was perfectly cooked.
The best part? The champagne, lots of it, which didn’t seem to hit me as quickly as it usually does.
I recommend it after every hospital visit.
So, ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas and please don’t become a statistic of careless kitchen deeds, like I was.
Floating
Printable recipe here
Meringue
8 whites
1 tsp. cream of tartar
1 cup sugar
Preheat oven to 250°F. Butter and sugar (very well) a large soufflé dish (about 8 cups).
Beat whites until frothy on medium speed. Add cream of tartar. Beat on high speed just until soft peaks form. Add the sugar by tablespoons, turning down the speed just as you add the sugar and then returning the mixer to high. Beat until very stiff and glossy.
Put into prepared baking dish. Bake in preheated oven for 35 minutes, or until skewer comes out clean. Cool on counter. Meringue will fall…a lot. Cool, cover and refrigerate until ready to serve. It may be baked early in the day for that night.
Prepare custard.
Custard
3 cups milk (1% is fine)
6 yolks
¾ cup plus 2 tbls. sugar (see note)
2 tsps. vanilla extract
Bring milk and cream just to the boil in a medium saucepan.
Beat yolks and sugar until pale yellow with mixer. SLOWLY, beat ½ cup hot milk and cream mixture into yolks. Keep beating. Slowly, pour in remaining hot milk and cream, whisking all the time. Rinse out saucepan and return mixture to it.
Cook over medium heat, stirring all the time, until custard measures 180°F on a candy thermometer. Strain mixture through sieve into clean bowl. Cool to room temperature and add vanilla extract. Chill for at least an hour. Overnight is fine too.
To serve, cut meringue into fat wedges and place each in shallow bowl. Pour custard around meringue. Serve immediately.
Note: One cup of sugar is a bit too sweet. ¾ cup isn’t quite sweet enough, so this is 2 tablespoons shy of a cup.
Isn’t that how the song goes?
Is your Christmas dinner menu all sorted out? I used to serve a repeat of Thanksgiving dinner every year, which made planning really easy. I don’t have a family of leftover lovers, so I don’t do a turkey redo these days. Usually, the only constant is that I start with Scallop Chowder.
Scallop Chowder (serves 4 to 6)
Printable recipe here.
1 onion, chopped
2 carrots, diced
2 tsps. unsalted butter
2 cans chopped clams
clam juice, milk and/or cream
1 large red potato, peeled and diced
6 sea scallops or ½ lb. baby scallops
Soften onions and carrots in butter until completely translucent. Drain canned clams into measuring pitcher. Set aside clams.
Add clam juice, milk and/or cream to make up to 4 cups. (I usually buy a bottle or two of clam juice, add a few spoonfuls of cream and make up the rest with milk.) Add potato and bring to the boil. Lower heat, cover and simmer 15 minutes.
Add clams and scallops. Simmer for 5 minutes, just until scallops are cooked and the soup is hot. Serve at once.
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For the main course tomorrow, I’m going to debone a chicken and stuff it with a spinach filling, then roll and tie it up to make a roulade-type thing.
I’ll serve that with my version of Ina’s “Risotto”. Remember her easy method of cooking the rice in the oven? It’s really in the style of a pilaf, but that doesn’t sound as good. (I still feel a few pangs at calling something risotto when it’s not cooked on top of the stove with constant stirring.)
This is her recipe. Here’s mine.
My Version of Ina’s Version of “Risotto”
1 onion, chopped
2 tbls. olive oil
1½ cups Arborio or carnaroli rice
1 cup white wine
4 cups vegetable of chicken stock
1 cup Parmesan cheese, freshly grated
2 tbls. butter, sour cream or mascarpone
1 cup frozen peas, thawed
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Cook onion in olive oil until soft in a large heavy-bottomed Dutch oven. Add rice and cook for one minute on medium low heat, stirring all the time.
Raise heat to medium high and stir in white wine. Bring to the boil. Stir in 3 cups of stock and bring to boil. Stir once more and cover and bake in the oven for 45 minutes.
Remove from oven and over medium/low heat, stir in one cup of stock, Parmesan, 2 tablespoons butter, sour cream or mascarpone. Lastly, stir in peas and serve hot.
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I hope you all have a wonderful day tomorrow and that Santa is greatly generous to everyone in your house. I wish I could deliver a bundle of goodies to each of you with a giant hug. Merry Christmas! Have a great one!
The day before Christmas I had made one of those lemon pudding cake thingies…the one that divides into two layers – one cake and one custard. My recipe came from the Joy of Cooking, but they’re all over the place. Here’s one from Good Housekeeping.
Anyway, I thought that would be fun to use in the place of pound cake AND I had plenty of meringue cupcakes left over, so I decided to use those as well. I also whipped some cream and folded it into some raspberry jam.
This is how I proceeded:
I spooned some meringue in the bottom of a bowl and covered that with big spoonfuls of my lemon pudding cake.
Then a layer of pastry cream went over,
and then a swirl of the raspberry whipped cream, which I made sure covered the edges.
more raspberry cream,
I called it a day with some whipped cream rosettes around the edge.
It was so rich and sooo good. The meringue gave it a little crunch.
I hope your Christmas ended on a sweet note and that you're still eating plenty of yummy leftovers and visiting with friends and family.
AND An Approximation Of
Em’s Wonderful Hors D’Oeuvres
Let’s start with those snacks. This is Em’s recipe.
Photo/ Sugar Plum
Fig and Prosciutto Tartlets
About 1/3 cup fig preserves (like this one)
15 slices brie
15 1-ish inch pieces prosciutto
15 phyllo tart shells
Spoon a bit of fig preserves in the bottom of each tart shell then top with a slice of brie. Cover with a square of prosciutto. Place in a preheated 375° F oven and bake for 5 minutes.
Note: Someone else assembled these, for which I was very grateful. However, she was really mingy with the brie. My slices would have been bigger.
I made a corn version of this soup last year.
Scallop and Clam Chowder (serves 6)
1 onion, chopped
2 carrots, diced
1 tsp. unsalted butter
1 can chopped clams
clam juice, milk and cream
1 large red potato, peeled and diced
6 sea scallops or ½ lb. baby scallops
Soften onions and carrots in butter until completely translucent. Drain canned clams into measuring pitcher. Set aside clams.
Add clam juice, milk and a little cream to make up to 4 cups. (I usually buy a bottle or two of clam juice, add a few spoonfuls of cream and make up the rest with milk.) Add potato and bring to the boil. Lower heat, cover and simmer 15 minutes.
Add clams and scallops. Simmer for 5 minutes, just until scallops are cooked and soup is hot.
Variation: For Corn and Clam Chowder, add 1 cup of corn - fresh, frozen or canned – with the clams and leave out the scallops.
Ever since I saw this show of Sunny’s, I thought about brining a turkey. On Christmas Eve, I went looking for a boneless turkey breast, but I guess I waited too long. I could only find a breast on the bone, so I bought one and boned it myself. (Go me!)
Thank goodness, Sunny mentioned removing the tenderloins and saving them for another day. I had such a hard time rolling the breast, that it would have been even more difficult with those things in it.
On Christmas Eve night, I used Sunny’s recipe as a general guide and made her brine and put the turkey breast in. I refrigerated it until the next afternoon.
I took out the breast and rinsed it under cold water and dried it. Rinsing poultry is usually not advised. All it does is to spray raw poultry water around the kitchen, which is never a good idea. But, in this case, I was rinsing off the salty brine.
I pounded the turkey breast a bit in an effort to even it out and make rolling it up easier. I added the stuffing – this recipe (not Sunny’s) with whole wheat bread, instead of cornbread - and attempted to roll it up.
It just wasn’t cooperating.
Finally, with brute force I wrested the thing into a roll and tied it up. Sunny said to use plastic wrap to help get it into a roll. Most of the stuffing had been squeezed out, so I cooked it separately in a buttered dish, covered, for 40 minutes.
As per Sunny’s directions, I seared the breast and then cooked it in a 375° F oven for about an hour and 20 minutes. I started with a 6 pound bone-in, turkey breast. I have no idea how much the boned breast weighed.
I allowed it to rest and, again, I was grateful for help, this time from H, and I let him slice it, which he did while I wasn’t looking! Big mistake! Did he think he was slicing a jelly roll or maybe a beef tenderloin?!! He made each slice an inch thick! Oh well, here’s what it looked like with the other things I served.
Letting H slice the turkey was a small mistake compared to my next one, which, I admit, not everyone thought was a mistake. When I took out the turkey breast, I had all these nice dark drippings in the bottom of the pan.
They looked so flavor-licious that I decided to pour in my-frozen-from-Thanksgiving gravy with some saved turkey stock and deglaze the pan. I strained it all and came up with a beautiful dark rich colored gravy. I tasted it. OOPS! I forgot about brining the turkey and having the drippings taste salty...really salty!
I decided not to say anything and see if anyone else noticed. My son LOVED the gravy, no one else said anything until I said, “Don’t you think it’s too salty?” They did, but were being unusually restrained. Dumb me.
I forgot that that was one of my reasons for avoiding brining in the first place. (The other one is that the turkey is too salty to stuff. It’s hard to tell if THAT was a problem with THIS breast, because I cooked most of the stuffing separately.)
Anyway, it was good, very moist and flavorful, but I will never use brined drippings again. And I’m glad I saw Sunny rolling up her turkey breast. I would have had even more trouble if I hadn’t seen her do it.
Merry Christmas!
Everyone is home. The tree is decorated…finally, and I’m watching Santa’s progress. I love him. Every time I see Santa, I never miss an opportunity to greet him enthusiastically.
Christmas Eve dinner started with Ina’s easy and wonderful chicken dish that she made on her blogger episode. Flavored goat cheese and sundried tomatoes go under the skin of chicken breasts with a bit of parsley. (Ina used basil.) Ina also used boned breasts with the skin. (I kept the bone on.)
I had never bought flavored goat cheese before, but Ina used it, so I figured it would be okay and it was! No artificial garlic flavor, just a really nice almost Boursin taste to it. In fact, Boursin would have been fine too.
I served it with a simple Gratin Potatoes. I peeled and sliced 5 big red potatoes and peeled and sliced one onion. I layered them up in an oval baking dish with salt (I actually forgot the pepper) and dots of not that much butter. Then I poured milk about the halfway up the dish. I poured a few tablespoons of cream in between the 3 rows of potatoes that I had arranged on the top.
Buttered wax paper went over and I baked the gratin in the oven with the chicken at 400°F for 45 minutes. I browned it for 2 minutes under the broiler just before serving. I also served steamed broccoli. I left a 2 inch stem on and quartered or sixth-ed each small head.
Dessert was the result of a 3 minute encounter in a bookstore with Martha Stewart’s new Cupcake book. I saw a beautiful picture of swirly meringues in the shape of cupcakes. It turns out it WAS meringues piped into muffin tins. I just had to make them.
The recipe said to split them and fill them with raspberry something or other and cream. They were easy enough to make and pipe, but I had a really hard time splitting them after they were baked. They splintered easily, but I still think they look so special that I’ll definitely make them again. (The pictures are BEFORE I attempted to fill them. Maybe I’ll take a closer look at the book and see if I did something wrong.) The other downside is that they have to bake for 3½ hours (at 225°F).
I used a standard meringue formula of 4 tablespoons of sugar to every egg white (I used 6 whites) with ½ teaspoon of cream of tartar beaten in. I added a bit of vanilla as well. 6 whites made 13 “cupcakes” and I piped them after lining the muffin tins with cupcake papers.
