My Wee Little Christmas Dinner Tradition

(13-12-2018 12:06 PM)leefish Wrote:  My kitchen is 2.8 by 2.6 meters and I have a 4 pit gas hob, an electric oven, a fridgefreezer, a pantry cupboard, a washing machine and a sink in there. I keep one under the counter cupboard empty in a desperate attempt to prove to B that we could fit a dishwasher in the kitchen.

Lee, that sounds like our kitchen!! Only minus the washing machine because that lives downstairs. If two people are in there at once it's crowded. Needless to say, our Christmas dinner this year will be a chicken (cause it's smaller) with potatoes and only one veg so trim it down a bit.

Okay, we now have all of the ingredients for the kibbeling and the mosterdsoep! The eggs are already in my fridge (because I raise chickens), the beer is at Mom and Dad's house, the onions are also at Mom and Dad's house, we have enough salt and pepper to cover a half-dozen kibbeling servings, and the same goes for the flour. For want of "fish spice mix," I picked up some salmon seasoning, and for the 600 grams of fish, I picked up 400 grams of the traditional cod as well as 350 grams of the not-so-traditional ahi tuna, just for a dash of variety. I couldn't find any Doesburg mustard, so I substituted whole-seed, beer-infused Porter mustard instead; I hope it works out. And I picked up two leeks instead of just one, just in case; when it comes to cuisine and ingredients, too much is better than not enough.

My mother wants us to go ahead and cook some oliebollen for desert, so I reckon that I'd best get back to the grocery store now.

Tomorrow evening, the end results cometh!

...just pass me the bottle of Chateau St Michelle an' I'll be happy
Happy Christmas to you and yours! I'm looking forward to the "final result" pictures - enjoy!

This is what our dessert will be:    

(25-12-2018 05:35 PM)CatherineTCJD Wrote:  ...just pass me the bottle of Chateau St Michelle an' I'll be happy

Two conditions:
1) You have to come to East Texas.
2) We have to toast to something.

And is that blueberry pie with ice cream I see in that pic there? Always a good pairing.

(25-12-2018 05:35 PM)CatherineTCJD Wrote:  Happy Christmas to you and yours! I'm looking forward to the "final result" pictures - enjoy!

Well, if you insist....

Proto-mosterdsoep.


Proto-kibbeling. Traditional cod is on the right, not-so-traditional ahi tuna is on the left.


♫ Inside Crystal Mountain our deep fryer, kibbeling takes its form! ♫


Dinnertime! Some of the mosterdsoep is in the serving bowl to the far left (the rest was still in its pan on the stove), and the kibbeling is on the serving platter to the far right. Also featured: Cornish hens, turkey and sweet potato pie.


It smelled and tasted even better than it looked! What were you talking about, klaartje? Kibbeling's great! I should cook it up all year 'round!


Because this post needed more mosterdsoep pics....


Flaky and delicious! The fish batter was savory too. Long John Silvers and their famous fish batter can eat dirt.

So even if it's nothing particularly fancy, Dutch food was definitely a good choice for Christmas dinner this year. We didn't get around to making oliebollen, but then, we didn't really need to do that. Those two dishes alone carried the meal! We didn't even touch the Cornish hens, and we barely picked at the turkey. So now we have plenty of leftovers. I took half of the leftovers home with me, including the surviving three kibbeling nuggets. I'm eating one of the tuna nuggets as I type this. I actually like the tuna nuggets more than I like the cod nuggets, blasphemous though the notion may be.

After the feast was done, Mom, Dad and I sat down and played our first game of the game which I gave them for Christmas: Betrayal at House on the Hill. The greatest thing about this game is how it's never, ever the same game twice! The three floors (basement, ground floor and upper floor) are randomly placed and laid out — room by room — as your explorers find their way through the haunted house; ie. the kitchen was just off the foyer last game, now it's beyond the library. The cards for items, events and omens (supernatural occurences) which you find in certain rooms are random. And so is the Haunt, the supernatural event which, true to the game's name, turns one of the players into the villain, all of the remaining players into heroes and presents new objectives which the traitor and the heroes must complete in order to win the game. Each explorer has four trait scores — Might, Speed, Knowledge and Sanity — which may rise and fall as various events take place in the game; the results of certain encounters or events might hinge on a player's success or failure with one of those traits (ie. fending off an attacking werewolf with Might, interpreting a scroll with Knowledge, et al). And if any of those traits falls to zero, your explorer dies and you're out of the game. So guard your stats well!

In our christening game, Dad picked the priest (strong in Sanity), Mom picked the smart high school girl (big on Knowledge) and I played the fast-sprinting jock (with excellent Speed). We helped each other in exploring a pretty good-sized chunk of the house before my jock awoke a mummy and became the mummy's thrall, so I had to help the mummy get his hands on a holy symbol and/or a ring, as well as a young girl elsewhere in the house (whom the mummy believed to be his true love reincarnated), and they all had to be in the mummy's sarcophagus room so that the mummy could claim his bride; meanwhile, Mom's teen girl and Dad's priest had to find an ancient book elsewhere in the house and succeed in reading it, and also do some research in either the mummy's catacombs, the laboratory or the library; succeeding at both of those tasks would give them the mummy's true name and the spell with which to banish the mummy forever (and thereby win the game). The mummy got his own turn after he awoke, and I controlled the mummy. So one of the first things I did was send the mummy after Dad's priest and kill him. Meanwhile, my jock found the girl in the crypt and brought her back to the mummy, and I walked all of them back to the catacombs where the mummy's sarcophagus was. After that, all I needed to do was rob Mom's teen girl and snatch the holy symbol from her, then bring that back to the mummy as well...but first, seeing as I had slid into the basement on a one-way slide, I had to find some stairs leading back up from the basement. So that bought Mom some time to find the old book, then run to the library on the ground floor and start looking up this mummy's true name. By the time she finished all of that, I had already found the stairs out of the basement and was coming after her. So my jock chased her preppy girl up to the top floor, she lunged past me after I had her cornered and she ran all the way to the basement, and to the catacombs, where she started trying to kill the mummy. My jock had been hobbled by a few misadventures (like a chunk of plaster ceiling falling on him and pinning him to the floor), so I had trouble chasing Mom's girl to the basement and stopping her from killing the mummy and winning the game, but it turns out that the mummy didn't really need my jock's help after all; the preppie girl tried to banish the mummy with a spell from that old book and his true name, but she failed (I guess she couldn't get the words out right), then the mummy duffed Mom's girl upside her head, snatched the holy symbol from her and married the girl, so I won the game. Mom didn't like losing, but as I consoled her, at least she survived to the very end, and she got an excellent view of the wedding!

And then I teased her about the delicious irony; by going to the mummy in order to banish him, she had brought the one thing needed for the mummy to turn the tables on her and triumph. So that climactic battle between Mom's teen prodigy and the mummy (whom Mom dubbed "Pharaoh Frank") could have gone either way, really; she could have won the game then and there if the dice had decided in her favor, so I got lucky. Next time we play this game, I'd like to see us play with a full six players. Imagine the pandemonium!

Anyway, my Christmas this year rocked so good! How was yours?

Well... we are celebrating tomorrow. (Hubs who works slaves at Disney, had to uh... slave!)
But, Mom & Dad will be here tomorrow - for our tradition Christmas celebration, which culminates with Mincemeat pie and Egg Nog ice-cream (as pictured above)

Your dinner looks absolutely delicious! Congrats on it all turning out well. Now, I've gotta go check out that game you mentioned...

That's neat that you guys try a recipe from a different country every year, Pizza. I got "screwed" on the desert end of Christmas dinner this year, lol. We had pumpkin rolls and a Reese's pie...both of which had cream cheese, my mortal enemy. I love pumpkin stuff but I hate cream cheese, which is extremely inconvenient since people seem to think the two go hand in hand Even the Reese's pie betrayed me.

A question: Does anyone else do pork and cabbage/sauerkraut on New Year's Day? Dad always did, so now I do too. I know a lot of folks don't care for sauerkraut, but the way Dad always made the pork and sauerkraut is with a tomato sauce/brown sugar mix so it's not as sauerkraut-y (though we both like normal sauerkraut too). Apparently, pork and sauerkraut is a Pennsylvania Dutch thing, it's supposed to bring good luck in the new year.

Traditionally, in the US South here, we're supposed to have black-eyed peas for New Years. The only Black Eyed Peas that I like - sorta - are the singing kind, and I'm certainly not gonna eat 'em! (They're only good for one or two songs anyway...)

So, our family has changed our tradition to be either tacos or chili - with all the add-in fixin's that can be had with either of the two we choose. This, of course, is the New Years Eve fare. New Years Day - it's the best Chinese food within driving range; which is a tradition hubster's sister started for their family when she was a kid and they lived on Long island, NY. We've got a Chinese buffet up by Disney (about an hour's drive) that is exceptional - they're actually a mix of Chinese and Japanese, and have great sushi/sashimi bar. So, I'll be kickin' off the New Year with sashimi and saki. YUM!

So Christmas 2019 came. We couldn't decide on a variety of Portuguese dishes, so we ended up settling on only one: Caldo Verde, Portuguese green soup.

Soup base:


Sausage (Sweet Italian sausage, for want of linguica sausage):


Mash the potatoes while they're in the soup:


Slice the sausage and stir it in:


Add kale:


Serve and enjoy!

We only sliced and stirred in three of those sausage links; Mom and I snacked on the other two while we waited for the soup to boil. We saved a few slices of sausage for Dad whenever he woke up from his nap.

The soup is salty and sour, but not overwhelmingly so; there's a hint of tartness in there as well. Despite our substitution of Italian sweet sausage (which, I understand, isn't too far removed from the taste and texture of linguica sausage), the soup didn't seem to have any sweetness to its taste. But it's a pretty savory soup overall, and it was a big hit when we brought it over to Uncle Jerry's house; out of all the soup we cooked, I went home with a measly bowl-and-a-half of leftover caldo verde, which I'm finishing off as I type this.

It's too bad that we could only decide on one Portuguese dish, because I had my heart set on cooking two, maybe three. But Mom voted against the Pork Alentejana, the Pasteis de Nata and various Bacalhau recipes (seriously, Mom, where is it written that we can't have cod fish for Christmas dinner?), and I don't do steamed clams, Portuguese or otherwise. So Caldo Verde is all we really had left, and even then, I had to persuade Mom that yes, we can have soup for Christmas, just like we did with last year's Mosterdsoep! My mother can be so picky. But the Caldo Verde was a good choice, no doubt.

So the random country website says that we should cook Ivorian cuisine for Christmas in 2020, and so far no one has objected. It looks like we're going to Coastal West Africa for Christmas!

And now I'm skimming through Ivorian recipes. The dishes involving cow's feet and Ivorian land snails are a hard pass, but the Guinea fowl, fried bananas and maafe (meat in peanut sauce) sound good so far. Any thoughts?

Maafe sounds a lot like sate, very popular in the Netherlands

https://www.thespruceeats.com/dutch-sata...pe-1128970

I suppose that peanuts go with lots of foodstuffs. Just ask Thailand. They cook everything with peanuts.

I'll have to dig through some more Ivorian recipes. Peanut sauce might go very well with pork, and it seems that pork is a big part of the ivorian diet. And we have Guinea fowl all over Texas, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually slaughter, butcher and cook a Guinea; we mostly keep them as pets, egglayers and feathery little burglar alarms, not as meat birds. How do the Ivorians do it? How does Guinea fowl taste?