I made my fifth(?) cake ever. I replaced all of the milk with baileys. It came out very well. My uncle tried a piece and said it was good. Another small slice disappeared a couple hours later. Nobody else tried it, including my partner. I’m never baking again.
It’s depressing how much more random strangers on the internet care about my cooking than most of the people in my life. My partner has been spoiled (they basically never cook now and feign incompetence when I press the issue until I take over in frustration) so it’s all taken for granted at this point. My elderly parents ridicule me if I take pictures of the table. I haven’t told them that my memory is declining rapidly and I use the photos as a token to jog my memory of special moments.
Merry Christmas foodies. I’ve got some time before the fam gets here so-
19.5lbs roast is in the oven. Went with the local butcher this year who gets piedmontese beef, which is more lean/less fat but due to the generic makeup of the animal still tender. No foodie porn pics with the marbling we’re accustomed to seeing though. I buy steaks from him like once a month and they are terrific but never anything this size. Bought a backup meat thermometer just in case yesterday. Let’s see how it goes.
Starting at 250 degrees. Really unsure how long it will take to get up to temp due to the type of meat and the size of it. Let’s see if I can not screw it up.
+1 to all this. I made a pretty standard chicken soup with matzo balls but I modified my process a little to make sure I got more of a chicken stock for the broth instead of just relying on the consommé seasoning and hoo boy is it like 1000x tastier. I couldn’t find matzo meal and had to use the matzo ball mix which always made balls that were too soft and light when my mom used it but for some reason mine came out pretty solid, which is how I prefer them. Pics later if I get a chance.
USDA prime rib roast from last night, seasoned overnight, smoked on the weber kettle for bout 3.50 hrs at bout 280 F, mixture of apple and hickory woods. Rested for about 1.5 hrs, and then finished in the oven at 500 F.
Juuuuust a bit of gray in the cap, but the fat layer took most of the more-than-medium-rare cooking, which is just fine. I absolutely accept a bit more gray for the extra smoky flavor compared to an oven roast. This could hardly have been more delicious. Also pictured, Yorkshire pudding and green salad, reserve petite syrah from my favorite Napa vineyard, Vincent Arroyo.
These are interesting. They seem a little thick in the middle for some reason. Latkes that I have had in the best seemed to generally be shredded throughout.
Otherwise, I think the color and everything looks quite good.
Not shredded. My grandma on my dad’s side growing up use to make “polish potatoe pancakes”. So they were definitely in that vein.
(Side note- she use to make Xmas eve dinner and Easter bunch days in advance, layout all the food, then have the local priest come over and bless, then pack it all back up in the fridge. So we were essentially eating many days leftovers every year).
So I was going to cook a big Christmas spread yesterday, but my wife fell in love with high tea when I surprised her and the daughter with a trip to Victoria and Tea at the Empress over the summer. My wife’s mother died earlier this year and left my wife the tea cups that were on display in her childhood home. So my wife decided we’d start a new tradition of high tea on Christmas (as well as a movie - Saw Jumanji 2 and we enjoyed it). Well, we didn’t plan very well and after the tea nobody was going to be hungry for the dinner that I was going to serve before the movie. Here’s the wife’s tea spread:
Just going to say, not sure about your browser, but this is where the line break was for me, so I was temporarily weirded out until I read the next line.
It displayed fine. I just thought it was funny that I read to the end of the line, did a double-take, then realized that there was another line after that and you didn’t celebrate Christmas by watching Saw.
Tomorrow is my big Hanukkah party. Made about 120 latkes that I’ll reheat in the air fryer. I used to try to do them all during the party but all I did was cook for 3 hours and never got a chance to enjoy myself.
I started singing “My latkes bring all the goyim to the yard” but my wife shut it down pretty quick.
The pastrami is on the smoker now too. I’ll stress until morning about the smoker. It’s never failed me and I have alarms set up if it loses the fire but it still stresses me out to do an overnight smoke.
Only because you’ve mentioned in the past that you want to be corrected, in English, we translate “creme fraiche” as “sour cream,” although we also have “creme fraiche,” in which we keep the French name, and which is a higher fat sour cream.
Soup looks good. I think big pots of boiling vegetables look plenty good for this thread.
