Christmas Dinner Menu

[thewayne]

My wife is working Christmas and New Years, so I'm making dinner at the observatory. Our friend Dave is driving down from Colorado tomorrow and staying until after New Years, so we're going to get a lot of gaming in which will be quite awesome. There's some advanced scenarios for Flash Point: Fire Rescue that I've been wanting to play that I hopeexpect we'll get to.

Anyway, on to the menu!

The main dish is Alton Brown's City Ham. This is a bit of a preparation: you take a ham, cut a shallow (about a quarter inch deep) diamond pattern in it, do a short time bake to loosen the fat, then trim the fat off. Dry it, paint it with brown mustard. Cover it with packed dark brown sugar. Spritz it with bourbon, then pack it with powdered ginger snap cookies. Bake until done, rest it for half an hour, cut and serve. Quite yummy, in fact I bought a special pump just for spritzing the bourbon. Takes about six hours between the two bakes and all the work, so it's not a quick dish.

First side dish: glazed carrots. Another Alton dish, this one is unique as it uses ginger ale as its main cooking liquid. Also contains a bit of brown sugar and a small amount of chili powder. VERY good, I made it for Thanksgiving this year and it will definitely be a regular at my table.

Second and final dish for me: German potato salad. This particular one is an Anne Burrel recipe, I've made it several times and it is very nice.

All three recipes are available on FoodNetwork.com. And the ham bone will become a lentil soup at some point in January most likely. I had originally planned on doing a turducken or a quaduckant, but it turns out we'll only have five people, so I'm doing a lot more work. Oh, well.


New Year's will be a taco bar with recipes from America's Test Kitchen.

Comments

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Sounds yummy.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Quite yummy. It's a lot of work, but it'll be feeding five or more, and it'll be leftovers for a few days plus a hambone for soup.

I like putting the effort in, it's definitely worth it. I have a big refrigerator magnet from a spice company that I frequent that says "Love people: cook them tasty food."

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

I was very tempted to do something different with the carrots, but I figured - the rest of it all is going to be so rich and tasty, the simplicity of just carrot will probably be a good thing. And it was, on both counts. ^_^ But I do want to try that kind of ginger influence sometime - it's easy to see that could work very nicely indeed.

Ooo, bourbon ham.. I may have to see if the roomie will volunteer some of his Bulleit for the purpose. ^_^

There's an actual kitchen at the observatory? Cool beans! I imagine it may be somewhat utilitarian, but still, surely a welcome feature for anyone needing to spend prolonged periods there. I will admit, I do miss the kitchen I had a couple jobs ago - the owners bought the place new in the 70s, and a few years ago, basically gutted half of it, putting in a lovely bath and shower, and a fabulously expansive kitchen, with all the space anyone could wish for - I could comfortably prepare all the vegetables and suchlike ahead of time, and then just add everything at the right point, rather than having to work out the sequencing first, and prepare and add accordingly. Hey ho.

What is this "recipe" device of which you speak? =:)