Christmas pictures

As I have already described, Christmas Eve dinner consisted of oyster bisque and crab, and Christmas dinner was rabbit with parsnips and Brussels sprouts. Between these two wonderful meals, we hung stockings and read 'Twas The Night Before Christmas; we discovered many presents below the tree the following morning; we took a lovely family walk and fed the neighborhood ducks and geese alfalfa-pellet chicken-feed (we used to bring bread for the ducks, but have since learned that this is very bad for them).

Christmas Eve and Christmas dinners

On Christmas Eve, or the day before if they will close, pick up two rabbits (about two and a half pounds each) from the butcher, along with half a pound of bacon. Have the butcher cut each rabbit into six pieces: the saddle into two, each hind leg, and the fore-section in half through the backbone (so that the forelegs are attached to the ribs). Each rabbit feeds four people, or three if they're very hungry.

From the fish market, collect live crabs (one per every two people) and oysters (small is easier; two to four per person).

Also have the following vegetables from the local organic market: lettuce for two nights, one head celery, a few carrots, some fennel, six or eight parsnips, and plenty of Brussels sprouts. I assume you have plenty of dried herbs and spices on hand, but be sure also to have some white wine for cooking, two pints of heavy cream, and your best wine for the table.

From the bakery, pick up a loaf of good bread for Christmas Eve, and another for Christmas for good measure (they'll be closed).

Early in the afternoon, prepare the rabbit. Remove the livers, hearts, and kidneys and set aside in a covered bowl in the fridge for some other project (the hearts can go in a bad labeled "soup stock", or saute them and enjoy; use the offal within a few days, says the internet). Transfer the meat to a large bowl, season generously with salt and pepper, and add ¾ cup prepared Dijon mustard, 2 teaspoons ground mustard seed, 2 cups heavy cream (or 1 ½ cup crème fraîche), 8 large garlic cloves (peeled and barley crushed), 4 bay leaves, 2 tablespoons fresh or 2 teaspoons dried thyme, and 2 tablespoons fresh chopped sage. Cut the ½ pound high-end thick-sliced bacon into ¼-inch lardons, and add to the rabbit. With your hands, smear the ingredients all over the rabbit pieces to mix and coat evenly. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Bring water to a boil in every large pot you have. Get very good at pot-juggling.

Melt a tablespoon or two butter in a medium pan. Add most of a head of celery, chopped (save the rest of the celery in a bag labeled "soup stock"). You can also add a leek if you like. Salt the celery, cover the pot, and let it saute until the celery is very tender, about twenty minutes. When ready, transfer celery and 1 cup dry white cooking wine to a blender and puree until smooth. Return to the pot. Add another cup wine and one to two cups cream, and bring to a boil. Simmer a little, adjust the salt, and keep hot.

Meanwhile, wash the oysters, and then shuck them. (Or try to anyway. Discover that the shucking knife you bought at the grocery store is useless. Call all the neighbors asking to borrow a replacement, only to discover that none of your neighbors have ever shucked an oyster. Eventually get into the oysters with an old-fashioned can opener and a large flat-head screwdriver.) Provided you do not break two many shells, prepare a platter with some of the nicer oysters for serving on the half-shell as finger food while the family waits for dinner. Save the rest of the shucked oysters and their juices in a bowl set over a little ice.

When the water is fully a boil, cook the crabs. Twenty minutes is usually the right amount of time; drain them, rinse in cold water until you can handle them, and proceed to clean them out and break the bodies into two pieces each. Save the outer shells in a bag marked "crab stock". The yellow "crab butter" is good too (if you trust that your crabs came from a clean stretch of ocean), but not so much the mustard-colored stuff near the inner organs. Don't save the inner organs — the gills in particular you should throw away, as they accumulate pollutants throughout the crab's life. At the end of the meal, gather the shells for the crab stock bag.

Wash lettuce for a salad, and thinly slice the fennel bulb into it. Dress the salad lightly with a vinaigrette made with a nice white wine or champagne vinegar.

When the crabs are about ready, return the celery puree to a full boil, and add the shucked oysters and their liquid. Poach the oysters in the bisque for three to five minutes, and then serve in small bowls or tea cups.

Serve the oyster-and-celery bisque and the crabs with a good French or sourdough bread, and a fine white wine. The meal appreciates slightly sweeter table wines; this is a good night to have that expensive Riesling you've been saving.

Happy Christmas Eve!

Begin the following day with the traditional presents rituals and a large breakfast of quince pancakes with maple syrup.

In the mid-afternoon, remove the rabbit from the refrigerator and let it begin to return to room temperature. Preheat both ovens to 400°F, and get out every glass lasagna pan you have in the kitchen.

Transfer the rabbit to two 9x13 pans. The meat should fit in a single layer but fairly snugly. Pour all the sauce and bacon over the rabbit. Bake 1 hour, checking occasionally and turning the meat as it browns. The juices should reduce a bit; if they reduce too much, add some white wine or chicken broth or rabbit broth. The rabbit should be cooked throughout and browned on top when ready; serve in its pan and juices, and set a spoon out at the table along with the meat fork.

While the rabbit is baking, halve the Brussels sprouts and slice the parsnips into ¼-inch rounds. Butter two lasagna pans, one for the sprouts and one for the roots. Add the vegetables and mix each with some dried thyme and salt. Top each pan with slices of butter. Add some broth or wine to the Brussels sprouts, and cover them with foil. Bake both Brussles sprouts (covered) and parsnips (uncovered) for thirty minutes or so; check them occasionally, and stir them if you don't feel like they're cooking evenly.

Wash lettuce for a salad. Slice up some carrots and green peppers. Dress it with plenty of olive oil and red wine vinegar.

Open a very good bottle of red wine — we had the Cakebread merlot — and enjoy the company of your family while dinner is in the oven. Set the table with enough pads to protect the table from four different hot lasagna pans. Serve the feast.

Merry Christmas!

The rabbit in mustard sauce is from the inestimable Platter of Figs by David Tanis, and was definitely the high point of quite a few meals. The rest of the two dinners did not follow published recipes, but were also delicious.

Spanish stew with chickpeas, clams, and sausage

We were four tonight at our table: joining us for dinner was Monica (of Gastromonica fame, and one of my favorite cooks and people) and her partner. A high-risk strategy for dinner, B and I decided to try a new recipe from Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook: a Spanish-style stew with chickpeas, clams, and sausage. The meal was sufficiently fantastic that we forgot to take any photographs.

The night before you want this stew, cover 1 ½ cups dried chickpeas with plenty of water, and let soak overnight (beans will double in size). In the morning or mid-day, drain the chickpeas and add a small white onion, one or two carrots, a celery stick if you have one, some bay leaf, some fresh thyme, and 1 Tbsp of salt; cover with water, bring to a boil, and simmer on low 90 minutes. Let the beans cool in their liquids. When you start cooking, drain the chickpeas and discard the veggies.

In the bottom of a large pot, brown 1 lb pork sausage (we used the breakfast links from Highland Hills, as it was all that was left when we got to the market today), crumbled or cut into small meatballs, in 1 Tbsp olive oil. Remove the meat to a bowl, and discard the liquid. Meanwhile, finely mince a large white onion, or, more easily, chop it coarsely and then puree in the food processor.

Add a little more olive oil to the pot and cook the onion until lightly browned. Meanwhile, finely mince (puree in food processor) one fennel bulb and lots of garlic, and add to the onion, along with a little salt. Cook a bit longer, and add one medium-spicy pepper, in small diced, and 1 Tbsp paprika. Also add a handful of small or two medium-large tomatoes, cut into medium dice.

Clean 3 lb manila clams while the vegetables cook.

Finally, stir in the chickpeas and the sausage, and cover and bring back to a simmer. Then add ½ cup white wine, ½ lb young braising greens or chard cut into ½-inch strips, and the clams. Cover and cook five to ten more minutes, stirring once or twice, until the clams have all opened.

While the clams cook, lightly toast some slices of a nice bread, and rub each slice with a clove of garlic. Serve the stew in shallow bowls, with a slice of bread at the bottom of each bowl and the stew spooned over it.

Accompany the stew with good company, fun conversation, and a nice Pinot Grigio (also set out the remaining bread with some butter). After the stew, serve a lettuce salad with a sherry vinaigrette as a palate cleanser.

Open a bottle of fine Moscatel, and move from the dining room table to the living room couch. Set out a plate of figs from the neighbors tree, cut into quarters with a dollop of a nice sheep's cheese on each, and sprinkled with chopped almonds and honey. Conclude the meal with macadamia-and-white-chocolate cookies.

Lunch: small lettuce salad with home-grown cherry tomatoes, Oregon cooked salad shrimp, baked beets, and kalamata olives

Steamed greens, Israeli couscous, tomatoes, and jumbo prawns

We regularly buy prawns from Mike and Yvette Hudson, and usually the prawns come without their heads but otherwise intact and weight about 1/28 lb. Last week, however, Hudson's supplier couldn't fill the order with the large prawns, and so included jumbos at the large rate. So we were treated to some very tasty, very large prawns: one pound consisted of only 14 prawns. "Shrimp" these are not.

We peeled and deveined the prawns as we usually do and boiled them in enough water to cover for a few minutes, so that the flesh turned pink throughout. Then we tossed the cooked prawns with chopped up heirloom tomatoes (a dark red one and a bright yellow one), some lemon juice and salt, and lots of diced garlic.

Meanwhile, we washed one bunch each of kale and green chard. We removed the stems from the greens, and ripped the greens into pieces. Working in batches, we steamed the greens until they were very bright green. We drained off some of the garlic lemon dressing from the prawns and used in to dress the greens.

Finally, we chopped an onion and sauteed it in some olive oil, and then added one cup Israeli couscous and 1.5 cups salted water. We cooked the couscous for five minutes, and then drained off the extant water in a sieve.

We plated the dinner in the kitchen: greens, then couscous, then tomatoes and prawns. We served the dinner with a pinot gris from Concannon; it's reasonably good, and right now Safeway is charging the same for Concannon as for Firefly Ridge, our standard nice wine (and a Safeway-owned brand).

Salad with beets, potatoes, eggs, shrimp, celery, carrots, and heirloom tomatoes

Lunch salad with watermelon agua fresca

Cut the flesh of half a yellow watermelon into pieces, and place in a blender. Pulsing, being careful not to cut up the seeds, macerate the melon, and then pass it through a sieve. Combine the watermelon juice with plenty of lime juice (this is vital), a little sugar, and some water, to taste.

Mash a shallot and some salt to a paste in the mortar and pestle; add some lemon juice and olive oil. Slice a bulb of fennel, and toss with the dressing. Divide the fennel between two shallow bowls. Pick two or three small ripe tomatoes from the vine, and add the halved tomatoes to the bowls. Divide in two and add also one carrot, sliced; one stalk celery, cut up; and an eight once tub of cooked salad shrimp.

Later, smile when B makes you a cappuccino with a heart drawn on the top.

Grilled prawn and halloumi salad

Peel and devein prawns. Collect cherry tomatoes from garden. Cut halloumi into squares. Separate the layers of a small red onion (not pictured) and cut into squares.

Put prawns, cherry tomatoes, cheese, and onions on skewers, and grill the ingredients until cooked (prawns should be pink throughout; cheese should be barely charred; tomatoes should be starting to burst; onions should be softening).

Wash and rip lettuce. Add a sliced Armenian cucumber, maybe some fresh oregano and mint, and the roasted ingredients. Toss everything with a lemon-olive-oil-garlic dressing. Serve with chardonnay or your favorite rose.

Composed salad with beets, fingerling potatoes, shrimp, capers, heirloom tomatoes, and hard boiled egg

Salad with fingerling potatoes, beets, garden cherry tomatoes, shrimp, capers, and a soft-boiled egg

Huckleberry Weekend

Friday

JB is a good friend of mine from college. She's in the area, and she joined us for a wonderful afternoon stroll through Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve, one of the East Bay Regional Parks (we're working our way south). The park is not large, but includes a beautiful two-mile nature trail, with wonderful plants. In particular, we were amazed to see the eponymous bushes filled with berries. B and I decided to make sure to go picking the following day. Here's the slide show of the park from our two days of hiking:



Saturday

We brought a picnic with us for our second trip to Huckleberry Preserve, eating at the bench by #6. The dinner consisted of kumamoto oysters from Hog Island, Fromager d'Affinois with homemade baguette, and salad.








Sunday

We filled two yogurt containers with berries — close to eight cups. We processed all the berries into preserve: huckleberry preserve from the Huckleberry Preserve. This morning (Monday) we had some of the jam at breakfast. It is, perhaps, the best jam we've made.

Niçoise salad with homemade bread

Composed salad with soft-boiled eggs, cooked shrimp, beets, orange cherry tomatoes, fava beans, yellow haricots verts, niçoise olives, and anchovies

The haricots verts, favas, and cherry tomatoes are from the garden. The baguette is homemade.

A fantastic way to cook eggs for salad is to bring water to a boil and simmer the eggs for only five to six minutes, depending on the size. Plunge the eggs into ice water to help the protein retract from the shell. Carefully crack and peel the eggs without blemishing the white, and serve them whole. The idea is that the yellow is still completely runny, so that it mixes with the lettuce when the you begin to eat the egg during the meal. (This is particularly nice for composed salads in which the lettuce is very strongly dressed — since I don't dress the rest of the veggies much, I tend to mash a clove of garlic per person into the lettuce's dressing.) For a yellow that's completely cooked through, I like to simmer my extra-large eggs twelve minutes (less time for smaller eggs).

The best way to cook beets for a salad is to remove all but half an inch of stem, wash well, and wrap the beets unpeeled and still wet in foil. Bake for at least an hour (you'll need the oven hot for the bread anyway), and then plunge in ice water. The skin should slough off easily.

We've tried various tins of anchovy fillets, and been somewhat unhappy with all of them. Part of the problem is that each tin has about twelve fillets, whereas even three fillets per person is generous. Our only really good anchovies have been from the cafe at Berkeley Bowl, but they only seem to come wholesale in tins of many hundred. In any case, this tin of anchovies-rolled-around-capers was OK, but very meaty-fishy tasting, and too overpowering for our tastes. If you have a favorite inexpensive anchovy fillet, please let me know.

Shrimp shumai

Shell and devein large prawns, and process them through a meat grinder. Mince scallions, garlic, and ginger, and mix with the prawns. You may also want to add an egg or some cornstarch — you're basically making prawn sausage filling.

Mold the shumai by putting ½ Tbsp filling in the center of a wrapper, then wetting the edge and folding it around the filling, leaving the top a little open. Place the dumplings in a steamer, and steam until the shrimp is pink throughout (I think we took ours off a little early). If you like, heat some oil (a mix of vegetable oil and a little sesame oil is nice) in a non-stick pan and fry the outsides of the shumai until crispy.

Nicoise salad with grilled tuna

S came over shortly before leaving for Austin, where she has now started law school. We made Niçoise salad, one of our favorite dinners, as readers of this blog know well. This salad featured grilled tuna in the center, surrounded by cooked shrimp, hard boiled egg, grated carrot, olives and capers, and fava beans, cherry tomatoes, and green beans all from the garden. S brought a nice bottle of wine, the merlot by Butner Cellars. We finished dinner with a blackberry pie.

Prawn-and-cheese kabobs

Begin by shelling and deveining the large prawns. Carefully slice a small red onion into large pieces. Rinse a basket of large cherry tomatoes. Cut one package of the wonderful-tasting but expensive halloumi cheese into cubes.

Assemble skewers, alternating the various ingredients. Heat up your grill, and cook the kabobs until the prawns are pink throughout. The cheese might just start to melt, but it holds to remarkably high temperatures. Meanwhile, dress arugula in lemon juice and olive oil.

Divide the salad between the plates. When the kabobs are cooked, transfer them carefully (so that the softened cheese does not come off) on top of the salad. Serve with red wine or retsina.