Three meals that day, though the way things were spaced out, we might think of them as four meals or more. Which is fine, really. By the time we went to bed, we felt contented, not overfed or over-wined. A good feeling.
The meals sort of started on Christmas Eve. Sort of in the sense that we set a bunch of things up: the dining table for dinner
(complete with crackers, of course!)
and the kitchen table for breakfast.
Some holiday colours in among the Fiestaware added to the spirit of it all.Breakfast. I'm not a breakfast cook, I have decided. I need more practice with eggs, but mostly it's that I don't want elaborate breakfasts. Poached eggs on dry toast are my ideal morning meal; cereal with yogurt is my usual. Christmas morning, then, it was a tasty enough but perfunctory meal of bacon, scrambled eggs (Conrad's preferred way of having them), scones gently reheated, and coffee we brewed ourselves.
We ate somewhere around 9:30, I think.
Then came stockings. A stroll in the neighbourhood (despite the rain). A nap.
Lunch took place after the nap and some phone calls. I think it was around 2:30ish. No cooking, just a plate with a bit of a goat cheese coated in herbs, some jamon serrano, a bit of bread, some nuts.
And a half bottle of a rose Champagne.
We ate and sipped in no great haste at all, and while we did so, we opened presents.More phone calls. Listening to music. A bit of tidying. Somewhere around 5, the first dinner course came out of the kitchen: a Dungeness crab salad.
We sat down at the dining table, opened the crackers, put on our crowns, and dug in. Our plan was to have with dinner a bottle of a 2003 Burgundy
that Kenn and Cliff had given us some time back, so we opened that and poured a bit to breathe. Luscious, perhaps too much so for the crab. Happily, there was a partially consumed bottle of a Beaujolais Nouveau hanging around, so we poured a glass each of that lighter wine and sipped it.Then into the kitchen with me again. For years I've been dying to try a recipe in a British magazine for salmon baked in pastry. This was the year to do it. It's a rich dish - I won't say how much butter is in it, but between the pastry and the flavoured butter (currants and crystallized ginger in it) that is slathered between the layered salmon fillets, there's a goodly amount. For a first effort at it, I was pleased with how it looked coming out of the oven.
While the fish baked, I made the sauce messine recommended to go along with it.
Wow, whipping cream. More richness. I didn't sauce the meal too heavily, and I made the simplest and lightest of side dishes: steamed red chard.
Smart move.In the end, the wine and salmon were a fine match though not an outstanding one. This is a small quibble. We ate dinner around 7:30 and continued sipping wine for a while. It was a delight, sitting with only the candlelight and the glow of the tree nearby.
Ah, but there's a little more to come: dessert! Christmas means steamed pudding to me, though I hardly wanted to make up a real Christmas pudding with hard sauce. Keep it simple. Instead, I found a recipe for an orange pudding,
and though it took a little extra encouragement to escape the mold once it was cooked, it was a good idea. In fact, I've snacked on some leftover pudding, cold, this morning. It might have been more festive to add custard sauce or whipped cream, but in truth, we only wanted a little something by this point. A small piece each with a bit of dark chocolate quickly shaved over it.
Just right!It's all too easy for us, with our love of finer foods and the like, to go overboard at Christmas. Timing was one key here, but I think I made smart food/wine choices. Our first Christmas alone together, and really, it was a lovely one through and through.
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