Now I’m getting just a teeny bit excited about Christmas. I’ll be spending the day (several days) with friends and our hostess has just emailed to say what she has in mind for Christmas dinner. It will not, let me stress, include turkey.
See, her boyfriend’s brother has a smallholding and rears his own little free-range-organic piggies. And we are having (part of) one of them: roast loin, with apple ginger and orange stuffing (a Sophie Grigson recipe apparently; ooh, it’s online). Plenty of roast veg. Red cabbage in wine. Something called beef olives, which sounds very tasty. And whatever else we can think of. I believe home made ice cream was suggested for pud (I have my doubts that we’ll get organised enough for that one, but you never know…).
I am in heaven.
But I still haven’t started my Christmas shopping. Unless buying mince pies every other day counts. (Nah, I don’t think it does either.)
Piggy dinner tonight also in prospect. I want to do profgrrl’s red wine and mushroom sauce, but I’m going to have it with a pork chop instead of tofu steaks (and it’s a huge pork chop; the foodie shop didn’t have any small ones yesterday. Still, if I trim some strips off I could use them in some kind of quick noodly soup for lunch tomorrow. The crucial word there being ‘If’…).
And it’s been one of those weeks when I keep buying onions (panic while in shop: have I got any? Oh, better be safe than sorry… about three days in a row. I just have no short-term memory). So I’m going to make French onion soup over the weekend to use them up. Which would be pretty scrubbed shiny healthy of course, but The Cookery Year recipe also involves large chunks of bread and Gruyere cheese… and I have to follow the recipe, don’t I?
4 comments on “We wish you a piggy Christmas”
Ooh. Let me know how it turns out for you.
Not sure what I think of beef olives, though.
Def do homemade ice cream. Nothing like it! What flavor would you make?
I don’t know yet… (actually, for as long as I can remember her icecream maker has been non-working; maybe she’s bought a new one). The ‘beef olives’ are described by the mistress of ceremonies as “savoury dumplings wrapped in thin beef slices and poached in stock” (they’ll be a sort of alternative to the usual little sausages). So nothing to do with olives at all. There is probably going to be fish for non-meat-eaters (I don’t think we’ll have any strict vegetarians this year).
I’m looking forward to trying the recipe. I’m having to use dried shiitake mushrooms (and leave out the cremini mushrooms, but I do have a few assorted dried mushrooms to use up as well), but that should work ok for this kind of thing, I think…
It was good! I need to adjust it a bit in future (did too much mushroom! But the dried mushrooms worked pretty well, with the mushroom liquid to add extra flavour) and I’ll try it out with different accompaniments. It was going to be with mashed potatoes as in the recipe, but I discovered that the tub of what I thought was mash in the freezer… was something slightly different. Oops. Must learn to label things properly when I freeze them! So, last-minute substitution of cous-cous, which went quite well. I think rice would work fine too.
I used egg noodles and it was quite yummy. I think the starch doesn’t matter so much.
I would like to try it with mashed potatoes but I never ever make them. Maybe over the hols, when I have other eaters around.