Debbie and I love to cook, and of course the holidays provide us with a nice opportunity to go overboard. This evening we'll be dining with our close friends Jim and Michelle, and we've been working on our feast all day long. Today was the “day of chopping” – everything we made required several herbs or vegetables to be chopped!
For our appetizers, we'll be having crab cakes made with Dungeness crab and a southwestern-style recipe with fresh thyme, Italian parsley, and ripe red bell pepper adding flavor and color. The crab cakes are chilling in the refrigerator as I post this entry. We also made an herbed tartar sauce to accompany it, and this turned out really well – both Debbie and I like this better than any tartar sauce we've ever had.
Our second course is a lovely soup; it's all done, we just have to heat it up. The soup is based on chicken stock, butternut squash, apples, and onions. It's heavily flavored with herbs, especially fresh thyme. We're planning to serve this with a dollop of sour cream in each bowl...
The entrée is smoked ham with a honey-citrus glaze. We bought a ten pound ham, so we'll have plenty of leftover sandwich meat! Along with the ham we'll have sautéed mushrooms (oyster, shiitake, and browntops) in an herbed wine sauce; the primary flavors are from fresh rosemary and thyme. For “bread”, we'll have something new to us: an odd kind of bread called “spoon bread”, based on corn meal and flavored with leeks and gruyére cheese, along with basil and thyme. We'll have champagne with the meal.
If we can possibly manage a dessert after all that, we'll be having creme brulée – a simple, plain, and outrageously rich custard flavored with vanilla beans. These are supposed to have a carmelized sugar covering; you use a blow-torch to heat the sugar to just the right point. But I just discovered that I have no propane for my blow-torch, so we may be forgoing the cover, darn it…
Merry Christmas!
