Christmas Dinner in the Rearview Mirror

So, Christmas was nearly a week ago, and I’m just now getting around to writing about it. But that’s okay – the weeks leading up to Christmas were so insane that it took a good week just to come down from it all. We were fortunate enough to have two guests for Christmas dinner, which was a blessing, as guests almost always are. Here’s the menu:

Filet mignon with red wine sauce
Brussels sprouts with toasted hazelnuts
Sautéed mushrooms in cream
Scalloped potatoes
Fiery cinnamon cranberry sauce
Crème brûlée

The filet recipe is one I found in Bon Appetit probably 25 years ago and have made over and over since. I remember it was from a February issue because it had something chocolate with raspberries on the cover for Valentine’s Day. It’s a fabulous recipe which is really very simple. You marinate the steaks overnight, then sauté them and make a pan sauce, with one little twist. First the marinade, which is red wine, some cognac, chopped shallot, and chopped fresh thyme. I always marinate in ziplock bags, because I think you get the most complete coverage that way. Put in the marinade ingredients, then the steaks. Zip the bag almost all the way closed, then carefully work out all the air. Finish zipping it closed, then put the bag into a bowl (in case of leaks) and put it in the refrigerator overnight.

The pan sauce is based on a reduction of the marinade and beef stock. For six servings, the recipe calls for 3 cups of red wine, 3 tablespoons of cognac (which I frequently leave out), 3 shallots and 1 teaspoon of thyme in the marinade. Remove the steaks from the marinade, scraping any clinging bits of shallot and thyme back into the marinade as best you can, put the marinade into a pan and boil it down until it’s reduced to about a cup. Add 4 cups of good beef broth and boil the whole thing down until it’s reduced to about 1 1/4 cups. So that’s roughly 7 cups of liquid reduced to 1 1/4 cups. It makes an intense sauce. That pre-reduction is the twist to the simple pan sauce.

While the sauce is reducing, you’re going to pat the steaks dry so that they’ll brown well, and sauté them to whatever extent you like in a mixture of butter and oil. This is always challenging in our household, because I like mine barely dead and Terry wants his really well done. I usually end up butterflying his to make sure they’re done enough. It’s been my experience that filet mignon, because it has so little fat, does not conduct heat well and takes forever to cook well done. So if you’re cooking them for people and have someone who wants theirs well done, start early. Start with a hot pan so you get a good crust, but then really back off the heat so you get the interior done without turning the exterior to shoe leather. And, even liking mine as rare as I do, it surprises me how long I have to cook them.

Once the steaks are as done as you want them, transfer them to a plate and tent them with foil to keep them warm. Pour the reduced stock/marinade mixture into the sauté pan and scrape well to pick up any fond which has developed in the pan. That’s concentrated flavor and you don’t want to miss any of it. I like to reduce the sauce a bit further at this point – I want it to be thick and not a great volume. Just before you’re ready to serve, swirl in just a bit of butter to finish it. This dish was a big hit, as it has always been for me. It’s a go-to recipe when I want something very dressy to serve.

The brussels sprouts won another convert. (Yay!) One of our guests was there for the first time and he was a real skeptic who has never liked brussels sprouts. But he was game about it and tried them and really liked them. So chalk up another win for the fabulous brussels sprouts recipe. It has to be the toasted hazelnuts. How can you not like something with toasted hazelnuts all over it?

I tried a new scalloped potatoes recipe. Scalloped potatoes were not part of my life growing up. In fact, I don’t remember my mother ever cooking them. And I had found okay recipes, but never one that really did it for me. Until this year. And this one was absolute simplicity. I have the iPhone app for Mark Bittman’s cookbook How to Cook Everything, which is a fabulous free app. (If you’re not familiar with Mark Bittman, go RIGHT NOW to the NY Times website’s dining and wine page and read some of his columns. I think he’s one of the best people out there right now writing about food.) I looked up his recipe for scalloped potatoes, which is the height of simplicity. Peel and thinly slice potatoes. (I had always sliced them with a knife before, but this time I used the slicing side of my box grater. I was afraid they would be too thin, but I discovered that really thin slices just might be the essence of incredibly good scalloped potatoes. Remember, I didn’t grow up with them, so this is all fairly new to me.) Heat up cream (until it’s hot, he says, which is all he needs to say). Put a layer of potatoes in a dish. Sprinkle the potatoes with salt, pepper, and chopped fresh thyme. Top it with a layer of shredded Gruyère or Swiss cheese. Alternate layers of potatoes and cheese, sprinkling each layer of potatoes with salt, pepper and thyme. When you’re done, pour in enough cream (or half and half or milk) to come 3/4 of the way up the potatoes. Put it in a 375˚ oven for 45-50 minutes. I couldn’t find a Gruyère or Swiss that looked good to me, so I used Jarlsberg. I cannot begin to describe to you the cheesy goodness of this dish. It was potato perfection. I thought the steak was good (and it really was), but this might have been my favorite dish of the meal. I think this dish is what little potatoes dream of growing up to become. I want more of it right now just thinking about it. Thank you, Mr. Bittman, for making my Christmas so cheesy good. The important proportions for this recipe are a pound of potatoes, 1/2 cup of cheese and 2-3 cups of cream, half and half, or milk.

Those of you who read about the Thanksgiving dinner may remember that I made the same cranberry sauce for it and was disappointed because it wasn’t really hot. The recipe calls for 1 12-ounce bag of fresh cranberries and “a hot pepper”, which is pretty non-specific. I didn’t have many choices available at Thanksgiving – all they had in the store were jalapeño, serrano and habañero. I knew the jalapeño would be too mild and the habañero would be too hot, but thought the serrano might be just right. Alas, not hot enough. So this time, I was pretty determined it would be hot. I happened to get my produce for Christmas dinner at Whole Foods and they had a pretty good selection of peppers, so I got 4 little green Thai peppers. Not as hot as if they had been red, but plenty hot enough. As before, I made a simple syrup with sugar and water and cooked the peppers, this time cut in thirds instead of whole, and two cinnamon sticks for ten minutes. Then I added the cranberries and cooked for another ten minutes. I tasted it at that point and decided that, yes, indeed, it was plenty hot, and fished out all the pieces of pepper I could, as well as the cinnamon sticks, poured the sauce into a dish and let it cool overnight. By the next day, it was wonderful. It wasn’t painfully hot, but it was very cinnamony, and had a wonderful initial heat and a great back of the throat afterburn that was hot, but not painfully so.

We had a very rare white Christmas – 5 or 6 inches of snow eventually fell before stopping the next morning – so we got to look out the dining room window on a beautiful white landscape while sharing this meal with wonderful friends. And what better way to end it than with fire. That’s right – we pulled out the propane torch (not one of those wussy little kitchen torches, but a real propane torch) to caramelize the sugar for the crème brûlée. I love doing that – I like fire anyway, which, yes, is a little scary – but it’s so much fun to watch the sugar magically change color as you move the fire over it. And then you get to eat this wonderful concoction of cream and egg yolks with the crunchy caramel on top. What’s not to like?

I write this on New Year’s Eve, our last day at the beach. We’re going to have steak and baked potatoes and steamed vegetables with a nice red wine for dinner, then pack up to come home tomorrow. (We found a great little wine shop down here – Grape and Ale – where we got a wonderful bottle of Cabernet for $6. Frugal AND tasty.) So we’ve all survived another year – although this one was by the fingertips at times – and I hope you all have a lovely New Year’s Eve and a happy, peaceful and prosperous 2011. More to come in the New Year.

Dinner at the beach

Gentle (and patient!) readers – actually, not quite as patient as I had feared you needed to be. I thought I hadn’t posted since Thanksgiving, but I find it’s not quite that bad. Nearly, but not quite. It’s been so busy that not only have I not had time to write, I haven’t had time to cook to have had anything to write about! But now that we’re through the holidays, that should change.

I will eventually write about Christmas dinner, which was lovely, but tonight, I want to write about dinner at the beach. That’s right – the beach. Did I mention that we’re at the beach? (And yes, we have a housesitter, so anyone who is scanning blogs to find out who’s away from home so they can rob houses better not try ours! A housesitter and four ferocious guard cats. Okay, a housesitter. Who can dial 911 with the best of them. Oh, like we have anything anybody wants to steal anyway. Four ferocious guard cats maybe. You can have Taylor – she pees on everything.)

So we’re at the beach. We’re staying in a house which has a fairly well stocked kitchen – lots of tools, fairly decent pots and pans, a (gasp!) Jenn-Air grill. That’s been fun so far. A microwave, which I don’t have at home. Yes, I hear the shouts of dismay across the blogosphere – “No microwave?” The core problem is not that I don’t have a microwave – it’s that I don’t have any counter space and I hate to give any up for an appliance I just don’t use all that often. I do miss it for two things – bacon and asparagus, which are both great in the microwave. But I digress.

So we were at Lowes Foods down here today and I found some really beautiful sea scallops at half price. Usually a bad sign, but they looked fresh and I couldn’t smell anything off at all in the fish section. So I got a pound. When I packed to come down here, I tossed all sorts of things in a grocery bag in the kitchen, so I had a really odd assortment of stuff. I had three lemons, two oranges, some fresh ginger, a head of garlic, a shallot and every liquor bottle we had (because you never know what drinks you might want to mix at the beach). I had picked up some carrots and broccoli at the store and had brought some rice with me from home.

Now I used to be the queen of cooking rice, but then some friends gave me a rice cooker three or four years ago. Now I can’t remember the proportions for cooking rice manually. So we had gummy rice with dinner. And the microwave here doesn’t seem to cook evenly. It got one slice of bacon out of six done this morning for breakfast and about the same ratio of vegetables done correctly for dinner. But the scallops were fabulous.

They were labeled chemical free. I had read an article on the Cook’s Illustrated website about sea scallops this afternoon in looking for a way to cook them. Apparently, they’re frequently treated with sodium tripolyphosphate to increase their shelf life and retain moisture. CI says you can tell if they’ve been treated by putting them on a paper towel on a microwave safe plate and microwaving them for 15 seconds. If they’ve been treated, there will be a sizable wet spot around the scallop on the paper towel. If not, the towel will be dry. I tried this, and the towel was dry. i was happy to know that Lowes was telling me the truth, as it’s my favorite grocery store.

CI recommends putting the scallops on a couple of layers of paper towels and covering them with a couple more layers for 10 minutes to dry them off well, salting and peppering them on both sides, then cooking them for 1 1/2 to 2 minutes on one side, then about 1 1/2 minutes on the other side in a hot pan in oil and serving them with lemon juice or a sauce. I did pretty much that – I probably cooked them a little longer, as Terry likes his seafood very well done, and I’m not any too fond of underdone seafood myself. Oh, and I used butter rather than oil. There’s a surprise.

I let them dry while the rice cooked, and it was well worth the time, because they browned beautifully. They were absolutely gorgeous. Then I started looking around for something to make a pan sauce from. I decided to deglaze the pan with some Myer’s rum, then tossed in some minced garlic and fresh ginger, followed by the juice of one orange. I let it reduce some, then finished it with some butter. I strained out the garlic and ginger before pouring the sauce over the scallops. It made a nice sauce. It had a lot of flavor, but straining out the garlic and ginger kept them from overpowering the scallops. The rum and orange worked well together, and the butter evened the flavors out nicely. Even with the gummy rice and the unevenly cooked vegetables, it was a pretty good dinner.

As a side note, for Christmas, Terry gave me two sets of videos of Julia Child’s The French Chef series, which I’ve been watching while on vacation, which has been fun. It’s hard to remember that there was a time when she actually had to introduce the subject of herbs because people didn’t use them. “This is basil – you can get it dried at the grocery store. If they don’t carry it, you can ask them for it. Or it’s very easy to grow yourself.” Wow. i swear she said that. And I remember when it was a big deal and really fancy to use something like that when you cooked. It’s amazing what a difference 50 years can make.

Speaking of which, happy birthday to my big brother on his not quite 60th birthday.

Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Well, surprise! It’s snowing. It’s been snowing since about noon. And what the local weather people predicted with “we’ll be lucky to get a dusting” has dropped a couple of inches with what looks like more to come. So our plans for the evening, which included attending a voice recital that I had really been looking forward to, followed by dinner with friends, have gone up in – well, not smoke exactly. And because I didn’t think we were going to get anything, I didn’t plan on cooking tonight. So about 4:30, I had to come up with some idea for dinner.

Luckily, I always have stock in the freezer. And, also luckily, I had picked up some onions when I stopped to get milk and eggs today. (No, not in anticipation of snow, but because I needed the milk to make yogurt for breakfast for the next couple of weeks, and eggs for muffins for same.) I made some onion soup last weekend and liked it so much I thought I’d have some onions on hand to make some more some time this week. So I thought I’d start with that.

But as much as I like onion soup, it’s not a whole meal. Normally, I’d bake a nice loaf of bread to go with it. But, as I said, it was 4:30. No time for yeast bread. And because I’m cooking for a diabetic, I need to keep the carbohydrates as complex as possible, which means whole wheat whenever possible. So I did a quick search through Epicurious for whole wheat quick breads and found a recipe for a whole wheat soda bread. Nutritionally, it looks pretty good. It’s made from a mixture of white flour, whole wheat flour and oatmeal. There’s slightly more whole wheat flour than white, which is good, and it calls for 5-minute oatmeal rather than 1-minute oatmeal, which is also good.

As an aside, a very broad general rule of thumb about carbohydrates is that the longer they take to digest, the better the effect on your blood sugar. With oatmeal, the longer it takes to cook, the longer it takes to digest. So the stone-cut Irish oatmeal that takes 30 minutes to cook is better for you than 5 minute oatmeal, which is better for you than 1-minute oatmeal, which is better for you than instant oatmeal. And, again, that’s a very broad rule of thumb, right up there with the whiter the carb, the worse it is, and the darker the carb, the better.

Like most soda bread, it calls for buttermilk, and I had some left over from the last time I made fried chicken, so I was good there. So I mixed up the batter, which was a lot like mixing biscuits or scones. Mix the dry goods – white flour, whole wheat flour, salt, soda, a little brown sugar. Cut in some cold butter. Then mix in the oatmeal, and in this recipe, some sesame seeds. (Not very Irish, but I bet it gives it a good crunch.) Then stir in the buttermilk. Dump it out on a lightly floured countertop, knead a few times, shape into a ball and pop it into the oven. As with anything made with this method, you want to have a light hand with the kneading, or the final result will be tough. You want to knead the dough enough to get it to hold together, and no more. If it’s a little ragged, that’s find. With this recipe, you brush the top with buttermilk, then sprinkle on a few more sesame seeds before putting it in the oven for 15 minutes or so.

When I put it in the oven, it looked flat and lifeless, and I thought it wasn’t going to come out well at all. But I just took it out – it took 18 minutes rather than 15 to get browned a bit on top – and it’s lovely. It rose nicely and has a nice spring to it. So once the soup has had time to develop nicely, we’ll sit down and have a warm, filling dinner of soup and bread. I’m thinking a showing of White Christmas might be in order…