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.

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