When you had the turkey dinner five days earlier....

 

Stock in the making

Get up at 5 a.m. Peel and clean shrimp. Add shells and tails to chicken stock with garlic cloves, bay leaf, and a few slices of onion to boil for stock.

Roux

The roux is critical. If the recipe you're looking at says to heat oil first and then stir in flour, don't believe it. Brown the flour first in a dry skillet, or forget the whole thing.

Beautiful stock!

Now go walk the dog while your stock cools and then come back and clean your house. 

Holy Trinity

The Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking is onion, bell pepper, and celery. Sauté in butter. Add sausage and cook some more. 

Add tomatoes, bay leaves, thyme, and oregano. Hot peppers or sauce if you have the nerve. Now slow down and set the table, but do not open the wine before your guests arrive!

Before

Before company come knocking at the door, add the stock and roux to Trinity, sausage, tomatoes and herbs. Adjust for consistency with additional chicken broth if necessary.

Now it's all together except for the shrimp. and those don't need long to cook, so wait until everyone has had a glass of wine. Finally, when the time is right, add shrimp and cook until opaque. Serve. Then forget to reach for your camera and neglect to photograph the bowls of rice and shrimp-and-sausage gumbo, because it's time to eat, after you take a moment to give thanks for food and friends.

After

When everyone has left, realize that your photo-essay is incomplete. Let it go. No one cares.

Leftovers

Photograph a bowl of leftovers the next day if the spirit moves you, remembering that -- really, no one cares. Give thanks again for friends who shared your table.

It's okay to depart from menu traditions. The important traditions are being together and being thankful.

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.

Chestnuts Won't Be Rushed

It isn't home without a little clutter

The Artist and I no longer travel on holidays, not wanting to chance heavy traffic and possibly treacherous driving conditions. My son and a couple old friends were with us for Thanksgiving, which was very pleasant, but December brought winter in full strength, and all I wanted for Christmas Eve and Day was time at home in front of the fire. So after our holiday breakfast of waffles, and after I’d treated Sarah to a morning holiday bath (“Some treat!” she seemed to say with her eyes) and settled her in front of the fire with a good, fresh beef bone, and after I’d made the cranberry-orange relish and stashed it in the fridge for later, I settled down to work with chestnuts.

If there is a faster way to prepare fresh chestnuts for soup or purée, I don’t want to know about it. The slow, repetitious cutting with a knife of that little x on each nut, very carefully, one at a time, and then moving them, again one at a time, from the waiting bowl to the x’d bowl, ready for roasting, can be either meditative or sociable, depending on what’s going on in the cook’s immediate surroundings. In my case, on Christmas Eve, I was very aware of the Artist cheerfully working away in the bathroom to replace a faucet washer (he was wonderfully good-natured about it!) and our dog lying contentedly on a towel in front of the fire with her bone. I felt surrounded by and filled with love and contentment. Who would want to rush on from such a feeling?

While chestnuts are roasting in the oven, and afterward, while they’re cooling, the cook is free to do something else for a while -- and if it’s a holiday, and the rest of the family doesn’t need her attention or assistance, she may just pick up a book and read! Because, just as there was no rushing the preparation for the oven, so there is no rushing the roasting or cooling processes, either. It takes the time it takes, that’s all.

Peeling can be a little messy, but it can be done sitting at the table, and again there is no hurry involved. It’s interesting to see variations in color as roasted chestnuts emerge from their shells. Some are like ivory, veined with brown, others darker all over as if by a deep stain. The nuts are buttery soft, even before boiling.

Looks like a squirrel has been at work here

Finally, as the nuts simmer in chicken broth (simmering almost always gentler for anything than boiling, unless “a full rolling boil” is explicitly called for), the water gradually turns a soft brown, almost a cocoa color, and this will be the color of the eventual soup or puree, lightened with the addition of cream.

Somehow I neglected to photograph the final chestnut product in white china bowls. Instead we move from empty bowls to main dish prep to plated shrimp and sesame noodles. The important thing is that it all came together as planned, despite the leisurely pace of the day, and that made it an ideal holiday for the cook.