Twists on Tradition

On the eve of Thanksgiving or Christmas, I like a simple supper like oyster stew or clam chowder – not a fast, certainly, but a meatless restraint that will be thrown to the winds on the following day.  And then there are the cranberries: my husband likes them raw and chopped up with oranges, orange juice, and orange peel, while I confess I love a sweet, cooked, jellied sauce. We did not exactly break with our traditions this year, but I did put a few twists on them, and we were both pleased with the results. 

 

The first twist was the Christmas Eve soup. Rather than any kind of New England seafood meal, I went out on a cultural limb to make Spiced Chickpea Stew with Coconut and Turmeric, as featured in the New York Times on November 28, 2018. The recipe was one I’d found appealing enough to save for over two years before trying it. Chickpeas are crisped in a pan that holds garlic, onions, and ginger already cooked in olive oil until translucent and enhanced with turmeric, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper. 

To the chickpeas is added coconut milk and vegetable or chicken stock (in my kitchen on Thursday, the latter was the chicken Better Than Bouillon) and then begins a long, slow simmer, with greens added late in the game. My last-minute inspiration was to add cubed tofu, also. It worked! A good cheese and some hearty crackers are all that’s needed to make this rich, creamy, mouth-watering soup a satisfying and yet modest Christmas Eve supper, and that was good because I had other things to do on Christmas Eve. I’d been hampered by migraine the whole day before, unable to get an earlier start, and didn’t feel quite out of the woods yet, so I was working slowly, with frequent stops for rest.

The cranberries! Again, it was a recipe published years before, this one in the Thanksgiving issue of Bon Appétit, November 2017. The cranberries in this recipe were raw (a nod to husband’s preference), but no fruit was involved. Instead of oranges, walnuts were the complement, and the remaining ingredients were mustard seeds, shallot, chile (omitted), dried currants (raisins substituted), maple syrup, sherry or red wine vinegar (Balsamic vinegar substituted), allspice, and salt. Fresh parsley was to be added for serving, but He-Who-Prefers-Cranberries-Raw is not a big parsley fan, so that was left out, too. What would the single important reviewer say to the result? I got the cranberry-walnut relish done the night before our holiday dinner.

Christmas morning, after a big holiday breakfast was out of the way, there were two major kitchen jobs to be undertaken: homemade noodles and an experimental pear chutney. I’ve made noodles many times before but would be winging it this time around with the chutney. Fortunately, after looking at several recipes involving much more fruit than I had on hand (or even would have wanted at the time), I managed to reduce the various recipes to a simple formula 3:1:1. That is fruit:vinegar:sugar. My fruit was cubed fresh pears and a much smaller amount of raisins. Apple cider vinegar and a mix of granulated and brown sugar then completed the formula, with only spices left to add. A real chef, I’m sure, would not have used allspice and red pepper flakes in two recipes for the same meal, but I did, and I also repeated chopping shallots to simmer with the fruit. 

The rule for a chutney is that it’s done when you can drag a spoon through it and have a path remaining.

Choosing a pork roast instead of beef or turkey was another twist on tradition but one I knew would meet with approval in our household.

The menu, then, for Christmas dinner was as follows:

 

Pork roast

Pear chutney

Homemade noodles with mushroom gravy

Brussels sprouts with sauteed, sliced almonds

Cranberry-walnut relish

 

I’m happy to report that the dinner was a complete success, although it’s good we were alone, because the roast took much more than the 2 hours, 40 minutes I’d worked out from The Joy of Cooking. Advice to cook: Even without a meat thermometer, you don’t even have to stab the roast to see if the juices are still running red or pink if no drippings have yet run into the pan beneath the rack. No drippings means you’ve got a long way to go. So take that pasta water off the boil, and hold off on cooking your vegetable. It will be worth the wait.