Category Archives: Holidays

Christmas Day 2007

Yorkshire puddings ready to serve

Christmas Day and we had two guests joining us for a prime rib dinner.  Accompaniments included Yorkshire pudding made right in the roasting pan while the meat rested, fresh buttered green beans, mashed potatoes and pan gravy.  We also had, as we do each year, jellied canned cranberry sauce – the kind that looks like burgundy dog food when you slide it out of the can.  I have always loved this and prefer it to those homemade whole berry relishes that people have with their holiday meals nowadays.  Maybe this has something to do with my dislike of berries, which might be traced back to my childhood.  My parents loved to pick berries, and I hated it.  I avoided going on drives with them during the summer unless there was a specific destination in mind, because they would inevitably make a pit stop when they spied wild berry bushes by the side of the road.  I would stay in the car and roast in the heat rather than chance being accosted by stinging bugs, which I was terrified of.  I certainly don’t mind homemade cranberry sauce as long as it is jellied or aspiced, is served cold and has no whole cranberries in it — but this kind hasn’t shown up with a holiday dinner guest since 1972.  I made plenty of Yorkshire pudding, spooning out beef fat from the roasting pan into two loaf pans so I would have two small extra ones in case the large one didn’t suffice.

Christmas Eve 2007

Christmas Eve spread

Christmas Eve, a happy day, but seemed like an anticlimax what with all the activity leading up to it, which I suppose you have to enjoy in its own right.  The bottom line is we suffered from some level of wurst lameness due to not ordering early enough.  The Christmas ordering deadlines for two of the German meat processors we usually order from were a few days earlier than usual, which meant we had to rely on Karl Ehmer for most of our pork products.  Karl Ehmer is very good, but they tend to use a little too much cure for my taste and so I like to round out the evening with other products that have less of that characteristic.  Karl Ehmer has free shipping for orders over $60, which is excellent, but they raised their prices to such an extent that they may not be the best deal anymore for a number of items, gratis shipping notwithstanding.  Next year I’ll have to get on the stick.  We were particularly unhappy with the lack of variety with liverwurst, which is a nonstarter for a German on Christmas Eve.  We supplemented the cold cuts with Cacio Stagionato al Tartufo, a cheese on the soft side of hard made from both sheep’s and cow’s milk with shaved white truffles.  It’s good but I would not buy it again, mainly because truffles in any kind of quantity seem to have an nauseating effect on me.  I have the same reaction to truffle oil drizzled on something – it’s powerful to me in the same way too many roasted garlic cloves are.  After awhile – bleh!  I don’t seem to have the same problem with Délice de Bourgogne, a marriage of cow’s milk and cream, which I served this evening at its peak of ripeness, which, for me, means running out of the package at the very center and then cream-cheesy toward the rind.  I seem to be able to eat quite a bit of that.  This triple cream indecency was dreamed up by 18th century food übermensch Brillat-Savarin.  If you want to go decadent, this is your cheese.  Once again my attempt to find langostinos, small crustaceans related to crabs, for a lobster-like salad, was foiled.  Simply not to be found, which is a shame, because these guys really taste like lobster and are less expensive and hassle-free in terms of prep.  I went with a basic shrimp salad instead.  The real indulgence this year was the $60 pound of prime filet mignon we had ground into tartare.  Shortly before the evening meal we mixed in some sea salt, fresh pepper and, further tempting a dance with food poisoning, a raw, organic, egg yolk.  We figured we employed due diligence in buying the best and the rest would be fate.

I turned 46 today and it’s Halloween

Ice cream cake with pink writing

Today is birthday number 46 for me.  Oh, God.  I remember being in fourth grade and daydreaming about the future, thinking that in the year 2001 I would be 40 and that that was so old that life would pretty much be over.  I think I made some notes about this while in geography class working on textbook questions for the chapter, “Sandra and the Golden Wheat.”  The truth is that I’ve never been happier.  I’ve had a pretty good run thus far, if you overlook a few disasters and several minor catastrophes.  I would not want to be 18 again.  When I was 18 I should have been enjoying it but instead obsessed about assorted nonsense.  Let that be a lesson to all those out there who are young:  you may think things about you suck, but they don’t.  You’re golden.  They will suck, however, when you’re 46, so wait until then – though with some luck you’ll realize that excessive vanity is a gift that keeps on taking and get over it all.

Happy Easter 2007!

Salmon sides with lemon and rosemary ready to roast

The first Easter in our new house!  Jon is here, too, which has become a wonderful Easter tradition.  We had baked salmon, crab aspic, duck confit on crostini and French-style green beans.  We purchased a large, oblong, teak dining table from The Wooden Duck in Berkeley this past year, to do justice to the actual dining room we now possess.  No more squeezing into a coffee nook!  Now all diners are able to move about the room freely, without being locked into place to eat!

Christmas leftovers

Smoked pork chop in aspic german-style

We are eating Christmas leftovers now, and I am happily working through my Sulzkotelet stash.  Oh, beloved Sulzkotelets!  I ate them as a child and would be happy with nothing but pork and aspic products during the holiday season.  A Sulzkotelet is a smoked pork loin chop (Kassler Rippchen) in mildly sour aspic with a slice of egg, carrot and pickle.  All are set attractively in a little pork chop shaped mold.  They taste great with a nice sourdough or hearty rye bread or with boiled potatoes.  When the hot potatoes come into contact with the cold aspic you get some highly desirable melting action.  Karl Ehmer in Flushing, Queens, used to sell these when I was growing up.  Though the Flushing store is long gone, Karl Ehmer still has a number of retail stores in New York and also sells via mail order, though I am invariably told that they only produce this item “off and on” and have not been able to get them sent to me in California.  If you live near a Karl Ehmer retail store and like aspic products, I advise you to investigate their availability.  I generally order them from Stiglmeier’s, even  though they are skinnier and boneless, since Stiglmeier’s has other things I order anyway.  I am not sure if Schaller & Weber, another major producer of German sausages and cold cuts, carries Sulzkotelets these days. When I lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the early 1990’s, I used to get them at their retail store off 86th street (1654 2nd Ave).