Good times, Good food

The holidays are now over and in our family that means (in addition to Christmas and New Year's Eve) Boyd, dad and I have all had our birthdays! For my mom this is a time on unending party planning and for me it is a time of non-stop yummy, fancy food! It has been way too hectic to post about all the excellent meals we have had recently, so I decided to present a blog shmorgishborg (can anyone spell that right the first time???) with pictures of all the delectable meals we had to celebrate the season.

I'll start with Christmas Eve dinner, which mom, Boyd and I made for the Thomases. We cooked a pot roast covered in bacon, of course! The beef is from my parent's share of a cow, which the Millar family bought from an extended family inlaw's farm. So it's fresh, grass-fed - all that good stuff. In addition to the beef we had Duck with REALLY good L'Organge sauce that my cousin Gabe shot. In all, a harvest feast.

After Christmas comes Boyd's birthday on December 27th. We tossed around several food ideas and finally settled on Triple Seafood Chowder with Dill (Boyd used this recipe as a guideline, adding his usual flourishes) and buttermilk biscuits. For dessert we had Creme Brulee (using our brulee torch)! The soup was epic with lots of yummy crab, cod and clams. We made so much that we had leftovers the next 3 days and even I didn't get sick of the chowder day after day.

On New Year's Eve, Boyd and I went up to Marin County to celebrate with my cousin Alicia, her fiance Jeremiah and his brother and sister. The plan was for a grand Sushi Feast! They had tried making sushi in the past with moderate success but they were ready to try again under the tutelage of Chef Boyd. Unfortunately, Alicia has all the pictures of the feast on her camera, so I can't show you exactly what it looked like - but I can describe it and use pictures from Google Images!

Our Sushi Feast included Miso Soup, Green Salad with Miso dressing, tuna sashimi, and lots of tuna and veggie sushi rolls. One of the big tricks for making good sushi is making the rice (apparently "sushi" actually refers to the way the rice is made - nice and sticky - and not to the final product, just an interesting fact). I don't really know the trick though, I just watched the How To video online with Boyd... We all helped with rolling the sushi and they turned out super professional looking. We cut them up and arranged them beautifully on a platter. We even had fancy sprouts sticking out the ends like the picture above! Everyone was super impressed (and full after the meal).

Next was my birthday (January 3rd)!! My sister Suzanne and her husband Toby got back from visiting his family in Seattle just in time for the dinner party. It's a family tradition that the birthday person gets to choose their meal and dessert and then mom (or someone else) makes it! This year I decided on Indian food - something totally different from all the other holiday meals. Boyd made a very tasty yellow chicken curry (no recipe), which we had over rice. Mom made her famous vegetable samosas (Moosewood Cookbook) and cooling raita (cucumber and yogurt salad; Joy of Cooking). Both Suzanne and I remember those samosas fondly - there was a couple times when we were kids that Mom made them for dinner and we ate them out at the beach while watching the sailboat races.

For dessert Mom made a "Buche de Noel" (aka Yule Log), which is a flourless cake (more like chocolate meringue) rolled up in a log shape with a butter cream (whipped cream) layer - she didn't use the orange that the recipe calls to use. The whole thing is then topped off with a layer of chocolate ganache! Whew! We had a slice before Christmas at Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis and since then we were desperate to have it again! We didn't have any marzipan for the traditional mushrooms on the log so we have authentic, real button mushrooms (they soon were removed from the cake). Check it out!

Well, I hope you have enjoyed reliving all my wonderful holiday meals of the 2009 Christmas/Birthday season! We certainly did have a lot of distinct flavors, rich sauces and creamy desserts. There's fresh produce here all year long (!) so who knows what our next cooking adventure will bring. Cheers!