Christmas

Christmas was a quieter than usual affair this year. It fell pretty early in the week which meant that a day or two off and then suddenly -- it's here! Seems like there has been more time after the holiday.

And also, I got the stomach flu and a pretty intense fever two days before Christmas so I spent Christmas Eve trying to recover.

Our reindeer have been living on this shelf year around so we added some whiskey friends. It was a good couple weeks finding some rare and special whiskeys around town. Dress up the bottles with some wine hats and scarves from H&F Bottle Shop and you're all set! A couple things have changed out since I took the picture, but it's still a great looking shelf.

This slightly off-balance pile of books represents the bulk of my loot from Christmas. The Art of Eating is at the bottom because it warped in shipping and I was trying to flatten it out.

So far, I've been moving through the books very slowly but a couple of them are already in circulation.

I also got a pressure canner, which has some disclaimers about the weight on a glass electric cooktop. Based on the weight I think I use when water bath canning, I think the pressure canner should be fine. But I'm sure I'll be pretty nervous about it the first time I use it anyway. Now I will be able to can more vegetables and stocks during the year. Sweet!

For dinner, Josh had requested prime rib and yorkshire pudding. It was my first time for both dishes, and I was pretty nervous.

There were a lot of recipes out there for prime rib and ours was smaller than most, being only two or three bones. I ended up going with the recipe from Molly Stevens' roasting book which called for dry mustard, rosemary, and salt and pepper.

Then you cook it in the oven until 120 which came really quickly.

In fact, it cooked so quickly that I ended up taking it out of the oven so we weren't eating at four and putting it back later.

Surprisingly, the meat temp didn't rise while resting and it stayed pretty red. The center was just warm, but not much. I sliced the meat off the bones and then cut it about an inch thick.

For the yorkshire pudding, Josh bought me a cute little cast iron muffin pan. The recipe I had wasn't specific about how much batter to use. I used the toaster oven since the big oven was still too low.

You start off the puddings at 450 and let them book for 15 minutes. Then you turn the pan, lower the heat to 350 and let it cook another 12 minutes.

Here you can see 1) that I dripped batter all on the door while I was filling the pan and 2) that the puddings really start to rise aggressively. I was actually a little nervous that they would get too high.

When the puddings came out, they looked rather magnificent. I thought they could have been a little more brown, but I was worried about the height, timing the sides, and then also my resting meat which didn't see to be rising in temperature.

Sadly, when they sat on the table for just a few minutes, the puddings fell. Sad day.

In the end, they were still doughy in the middle. Not quite right.

And so, here was dinner. Pretty simple for Christmas.

I made creamed spinach from the James Peterson recipe again. And I did smashed potatoes which normally is pretty easy but apparently I undercooked the potatoes so instead of just heating/browning them, I had to add water and cover it to finish the cooking. That threw things off a bit.

I also did a horseradish sauce.

I still didn't feel all that well (as you can tell by how the cooking went) so I didn't eat that much. I should do something with the leftovers.