Christmas Eve Dinner 2008
Sunday, December 28. 2008
Christmas Eve was very different from Thanksgiving as far as cooking was concerned this year. Thanksgiving dinner I had planned out 2 weeks in advance. Christmas, I was still thinking about things on Monday. So it didn't throw me much when dinner had to be revised and revised. Also, we had a surprisingly "white Christmas" for Oregon; it snowed nonstop for several days, which is a rarity for Medford. So what did all of this snow make me think of? Why, sunny Brazil and Spain, of course!
First, I was pleasantly surprised to find Brazillian ingredients at Food4Less in Medford, OR. So I was going to do a Brazillian feast. However, then we invited over two new guests, who apparently were not used to "exotic" foods and both Pat and I thought Bahian cuisine might be going a little far. So we revised it to Spanish food: salt-crusted steelhead trout, asparagus, and tortilla. Except ... I'd forgotten about the Oregon-CA-Washington fishing ban this year. So no wild whole steelhead. So, instead ...
So, the day before, I baked a sourdough baguette using "Junior", the sourdough offspring I'd brought up from our sourdough "H.P." in San Francisco.
I also made some breadsticks which we ate that night with cracked dungeness crab. I love crab season!
Around 7:45pm, I sauteed a bunch of chantrelle mushrooms my in-laws found at a local market, with shallots, olive oil and sherry. This was set aside in the warming drawer until the guests arrived. While we waited, we indulged in manzanilla sherry, something I've gotten a taste for since my in-laws brought some home from Spain.
As soon as they got here, my mother-in-law and I quickly served it up on slices of toasted baguette. The guests brought wine with them; we had a Tobin James Tempranillo with the appetizer, which was excellent. Bizarrely, they happened to have a LaGrein by the same Paso Robles label; apparently somebody has transplanted the grape from Tirol to California! Then I started the paellas.
Yes, paellaS. See, I planned on a seafood paella, but one of our guests turned out to have a shellfish allergy. So I made two paellas -- one meat (which I wouldn't eat) and one seafood (which she wouldn't eat). Most of the guests were happy to have some of both.
If you're ever in the position of doing two paellas at once, though, mise-en-place is absolutely essential. You must have everything laid out, in order of addition and grouped by which pan it goes in. Or you're going to forget an entire ingredient.
Here's the meat paella, cooking, with the seafood-tomato-saffron stock for the seafood paella in the pot behind it. It's in a wonderful pan my mother-in-law has, which was something Caphalon made several years ago called an "everyday pan", which is a compromise wok-skillet with side handles. This is the perfect pan for paella at home, as well as baked omelets and dutch babies. Sadly, they discontinued the pan in the late 90's and they are now inobtainable. If you have one to sell, leave me a comment!
Here's the meat paella, finished. It has locally made pseudo-linguica sausage (Taylor's in Cave Junction), chicken and green beans. I had to use arborio rice because I couldn't get Valencia rice here; that turned out fine and is a substitution I'll use again in the future. I also added green olives and pimentos to the top to give the paella some Christmas color.
Here's the seafood paella. To differentiate it from the meat paella, I did a noodle paella. It contains squid, tuna, shrimp, peas, and way too many mussels. As Christmas garnish, I added some piquant mild peppers from Spain, and pimentos. The noodles there were just capellini which I broke into 2" pieces; it would have made cooking much easier if I'd broken them into 1" pieces, although I'm not quite sure how to do that.
Both paella recipes were from Janet Mandel cookbooks. We ate the main course with a 2004 Watermark Cabernet Sauvignon, which was OK but not nearly as good as the Tobin James.
Because I could only buy live Puget Sound mussels by special order of 2lbs or more (although for $5/lbs, who can complain? from The Wharf in Medford.), I had more than a few mussels left over. We made a valiant effort to finish them off the next day, but the local raccoons got about 1/3 of them.
The seafood needed a little aioli on the side, which I had whipped up that morning. I discovered two things the hard way. One, the aioli recipe in Janet Mendel's My Kitchen In Spain is probably her only badly written recipe in the book (toss, out, James Petersen to the rescue). Second, do not combine locally-farmed free-range eggs with very green virgin olive oil for aioli; the result is the rather unattractive lemon-lime color you see here, definitely not great in a condiment.
Because we needed a side dish with this (really!) I roasted 3lbs of asparagus with seasoned olive oil, sherry and red bell peppers. This was the result of my taking a Spanish recipe for green beans on the stovetop and adapting it to asparagus in the oven; recipe to follow.
And, of course, it couldn't be a true holiday meal without dessert! This is a "chocolate-marscapone cheesecake pot" (from Sticky Chewy Messy Gooey), with rosemary-butter shortbread, both made ahead of time by my wife. Mmmmmmmmm.
And what did we have on Christmas Day? Why, leftover paella of course! And mussels.
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