Text 34582, 92 rader
Skriven 2015-12-27 07:55:38 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: Christmas dinner 1 719
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So this is how it all shook out. The final menu:

Spiced pecans - Annie found a pound of shelled pecans and wanted
to make another appetizer, so I suggested tossing them with a
little curry powder, easy as pie, only she found a recipe that
involved sugar, cinnamon, cumin, cloves (we omitted this), and
salt, and the oven. This resulted in sticky, weird, stuck 
together nuts. Lesson. Don't use sugar, but if you let it
caramelize like the recipe says, dust the nuts with sugar
afterward - this improves the situation. Lesson #2 - if serving
the nuts to Annie, don't use cumin, even if the recipe calls
for it.

Pate -  Anne's from down the street's specialty. It's a blend of
chicken liver and cream cheese, which means that in richness it
mimics the real thing, and it's actually quite good, but I have a 
hard time with it. Luckily I sussed this out and took a pill. An 
oddity was that Anne made a huge mound of single-serving (1 oz) 
balls and decorated the ground level ones with sprinkles of red 
and green sugar. I was off making Leberknoedelen in the my side 
kitchen, so little Charlie kept me in provisions while I worked.

Cheese pigs - you take Gourmet's Old Viennese cookbook recipe
for cheese crackers and cut them into the shapes of pigs. Then
you bake them the suggested length of time, and they come up
flabby and gross. Then you double bake them, and, guess what,
they become incredible. Thinking further on this, this might
explain an issue described further down the post.

Cocktails - Anne had root beer straight up; Annie atypically
drank gin and tonic, as did Barb. The 2 adult brothers roared 
through half a bottle of Macallan and assorted other things.
The 2 kid brothers from the next generation (barely legal to 
drink) did beers, I think. I drank Rebel Yell on the rocks.

Consomme multiple mit Leberknoedeln. This was the headache of
the year. Dan requested this, because his mother Anne serves
this whenever she has Christmas dinner at the house. Annie
said that sounded like a good idea. I didn't hear about this
until I arrived here and didn't think it a good idea at all.

Annie took a big 2 pound piece of beef shin, a couple pounds
of lamb neck bones, and five chicken drumsticks along with a
bouquet garni and some carrots and celery, covering the whole
with water. There were also a couple marrow bones, but she said 
they smelled funny, so she omitted them. She claims to have
simmered this mess for 5 hours, but the drummers were still
firm and all together and the meats still tough, so I doubt
that. Also, she failed to read the second half of the recipe,
which described the rather expensive and time-consuming
defatting and clarifying stage and for which she was totally
unprepared. We needed a couple pounds of leanest mince and
a half-dozen egg whites, so this entailed a last-minute visit
to Wegman's, where the door had closed, but people were still
sneaking in by the exit door, so our needs were fulfilled (we
also needed something green for garnish, so we got parsley
as well).

You defat the stock and then boil it for two hours with a
mixture of vegetables, the mince, and the egg whites. Then
you decant the clarified liquid (there not being any
cheesecloth in the house).

The result in this case was a medium brown sparkling clear 
liquid with a fairly appetizing aroma, which I further
reduced to a thickish texture. This was combined with a 
tot each of Cognac and Madeira before a gentle reheating.

Annie was dismayed about the small yield but noted that we
had extra chicken liver for the Wellington, see below, and
saw a recipe for Leberknoedelen, which she asked me to make.
I ignored the recipe but made the little dumplings out of my
memory bank, which other than my batter being quite a bit
too loose, so that half of them exploded on contact with
their poaching liquid, was fine. In retrospect, I should 
have started them in the microwave. I did end up with enough 
intact ones to serve two per person, and they were extremely
tender and fluffy. Tasty too. I'm glad in a way that I didn't
have all those dumplings to give away, because otherwise
there would have been an imbalance in the amount of soup vs.
that of dumplings. I had actually wanted to make pancake
shreds instead, better balance of flavors, but what Annie 
wants Annie gets.

With this, Madeira, the only brand of which available at the
state store was apparently Paul Masson, so that's what I
worked with and drank. We didn't tell anyone, but I suspect
Dan and/or Big Charlie might have noticed. This company 
offers a thin, grapy liquid that bears little resemblance
to the real thing other than the desired tinge of oxidation.
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