Christmas dinner

Merry Christmas wherever you may be, and in whichever time zone you might be.

This year is the first year we have had Christmas dinner in London, and my plan of hibernating until the New Year is coming along nicely. I think I went a little bit overboard with provisioning, I am a bad impulse shopper with food. Marie flies out tomorrow to head back to NZ for a week, and yesterday I could barely close the door of my fridge. "Oh my god, supermarkets are going to be closed for a whole day, I'd better purchase three kinds of cream so every eventuality is covered!" That kind of thing.
My only problem right now is working out how to consume all the delicious food in my house before I head back to work on January 4th, which means my life is pretty sweet.

People over here favour turkey for Christmas dinner, but I can't really see the point of turkey.
If you want to push the boat out on a celebration meal, why not goose? Turkey tends to be around 10 quid a kilo, where goose is around 12 quid so the differential is small. Yes a turkey will yield more food than a goose of equal weight, as quite a lot of the goose will render off as fat, but geese are easier to cook - just stick in the oven and it will baste itself.
If you don't want the strong flavour of goose, why not get a premium chicken? We went for a poulet de bresse, a chicken so snobby it comes with an AOC classification.


To start, 'crayfish' on avocado toast while the chicken was roasting. The dressing was a ketchup base, with horseradish, lime juice, tabasco, and worcestershire sauce. Super easy, super tasty. Next time I might fancy it up by trimming the toast and cutting into triangles.
The crayfish was good. I don't know exactly what kind of animal it came from, it definitely tasted like lobster but was the size of shrimp. Anyway, much easier to deal with than full size crayfish, and not so much mess to clean up afterward.

Onto the chicken. The clip on the cavity in the photo below is apparently proof that this is from the AOC approved area, in the same way that only sparkling wine from around Reims can be sold as champagne.

More importantly, what does this bad boy taste like? I favour leg over breast, and the amazing thing about this leg meat was the multiple and distinct granularities and tastes of the different muscles. I stole some of Marie's breast meat, and that was the most tender chicken I have ever had. She described it as buttery, which is the best description I can think of. The roasting technique was my standard lemon + thyme stuffed inside, with thyme rubbed into the outside, so any differences were definitely due to the chicken rather than my cooking.
Sides included potatoes roasted in duck fat (why have I never cooked with duck fat before?) and brussel sprouts par boiled then fried with bacon. Bacon really does make everything better, including brussel sprouts.



There was a cheese course in there somewhere, and Marie made a pav as well. Mmm delicious.

Banana and Ginger Bread: 7/10

My team at work decided to have a week of baking, and mark each other's creations a la Come Dine with Me. My team is four guys and one girl, so this was not expected.

I haven't baked for years, and the only thing I could think of is Marie's banana bread which she calls idiot proof. Hypothesis, meet test.

I even carefully measured out ingredients using a scale, because apparently you need to do that with baking. The recipe is something like this, I halved the quantities below to do one loaf:
Mix half a pound of butter and half a pound of sugar. I was frightened by the volume of butter and sugar here, I had no idea banana bread had such a calorific starting point.
Beat in two eggs.
Sieve the following in: 3 cups flour, 3 tsp baking powder. At this point I added two tablespoons of ground ginger, my first departure from Marie's recipe.
Dissolve 2 tsp of baking soda in a little milk, and add.
Add 5-6 near rotting bananas. At this point I added a dash of vanilla extract, my second departure from Marie's recipe.
Line tin(s) with baking paper, and pour in.
Bake in a moderate oven (I used 180 fan) until an inserted knife comes out clean. This took about an hour or so for me.

The cake tasted good, and the ginger gave it a nice little kick on the end of the palate. My colleagues seemed to approve. So why only 7/10?
I think baking really does demand accuracy of ingredient measures and sticking to the recipe (at least for a novice baker). Two skills which don't really feature highly in my cooking, I have more of a "what would happen if I added this ingredient?" approach. Which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't.
Even though I tried to measure ingredients, I suspect my measuring was off by up to 20%. Electronic scales would be easier to read. And, I couldn't help adding bits and pieces (ginger) I had read on the interweb somewhere.

Maybe if there was some way to bake bread that incorporated meat. Pancakes with bacon and banana and maple syrup work, so maybe banana bread could be adulterated with bacon.