Festive Food

Merry Christmas everyone!

Now is the time food laden with festive symbolism.

We have the festive Moussaka representing the sheep in the stable.

We have festive Tagine representing…

Erm.

The tagine wasn’t actually invented until the 8th century and is kinda associated with a different world religion, so we’re going to struggle to shoe horn this one into the Christmas story.

It looks like a roof? A roof over their head?

C’mon.  It’s about as good as the tortured allegories in the christingle!

Anyway we made a Chicken Tagine.  Partly because it’s warm and tasty, but mostly because it used up half a jar of preserved lemons we had lying around.

Basically we just jointed a chicken (the cheaper option that buying the separate parts) and browned them in some olive oil.  Then we removed the chicken and replaced it with a chopped onion.  Once that was looking nice and soft we added in 3 chopped garlic cloves, a tsp ground ginger, half a tsp coriander seeds, and a cinnamon stick.

We cooked that just enough to be aromatic, and then we returned the chicken to the pan along with 600ml of chicken stock.  Since we were feeling decadent we added a pinch of saffron to the stock about 5 minutes before we needed it, but that’s an optional luxury.

The tagine then simmered, covered, for 45 minutes, before we added 200g of green olives and half a jar (about six?) of preserved lemons, quartered, and let it go for another 15 minutes.  We took the lid off here to allow it to reduce, but your mileage will vary depending on how good the seal on your lid is.

Obviously serve with couscous.

Grown up food out the way, we’ll now move on to the true reason for the season; dessert.

It does seem slightly odd that an entire swathe of cakes and desserts are associated with one winter feast, but this is the culture we’ve been raised in so…*shrugs*

We’ll start with the Christmas cake – which is essentially just fruit cake tarted up for the occasion and given a glass of booze.  We had initially planned to do a marzipan free cake, since neither of us is much of a fan of either marzipan (outside of stollan) or fondant icing, but the cake didn’t even get that far.

It was sadly under-cooked in the middle.  Usually we’d just blame this on El failing to read the recipe properly (which was definitely part of the problem), but this was the second cake failure we’d had in a short space of time.  And both had been very dark on the outside, but squidgy inside. Hmmm.  Side-eyeing the oven a tad.

Anyway, the cake didn’t go completely to waste as we discovered that sticking slices under the grill and serving with butter made a wonderfully festive breakfast.

Continuing the festive theme we made mincemeat for the first time ever. And then, logically, we had to make Mince Pies.

Still full of suspicion for the oven, we stuck a digital thermometer in there to see if there was much difference between the settings and the actual temperature.  Turns out there’s a massive difference.  The digital probe was reading 200°C when the oven was swearing it was still at 150°C. Hmmm. 2019 may be the year of the new kitchen.

However, after I very carefully made vegetarian mince meat, Dan decided to use the blessed Delia’s pastry recipe which uses 50:50 lard and butter.  I can’t complain too much though, as the pastry was phenomenal.

We had a little bit of left over mince meat so we stuck it in the bottom of an apple crumble.  It worked rather well.

 

I also took advantage of the festive period to inflict trifle upon my friends.  Dan doesn’t like soggy bread so this rules out such delights as trifle and  summer pudding in our house.  However I had seen a recipe for Lemon Syllabub and Passion Fruit Trifle and I really wanted to try it out.  Fortunately I attend an annual xmas gathering of school friends and they are somewhat used/resigned to my ways.

 

It was…okay?  The passion fruit declined to turn up flavour-wise and it mostly just tasted on lemon.  In fact it tasted like lemon tart.

Next time I’ll just make a lemon tart.

Finally, we repeated last years Christmas Pudding recipe, took it to my Dad’s and served it on Christmas Day.  (Along with a slightly overcooked turkey and some not very crispy roast potatoes, both of which were ENTIRELY my fault).

And on that delicious bottle of champagne we hope everyone has had a fabulous winter break and hope everyone has a fantastic 2019