[Sca-cooks] Christmas Dinner?

[Jeff Gedney]

>    So, is anyone doing anything special for
>    Christmas dinner?
>
Christmas is over now, and I am just back to work reading this thread...
Lessee...

For dinner my Wife and I invited my in-laws and some special guests: my ex-wife,
her husband, and their two new kids (Only in the SCA!).

So we had about ten confirmed and a few people who said they might show up.
My In-laws love my cooking (I really wonder if that is why the said yes when I
asked if I could marry their daughter...),So I decided to really do it up.
My Wife's family insists on Roast beef ( which they also insist on calling "Who
Roast Beast" ) and Yorkshire pudding as the "traditional" Christmas dinner.

So I went to the butcher's and got a full (All 7 ribs) aged Prime Rib with
bones. I had the Ribs cut off, and the chine cracked, and then the ribs tied
back on for flavor.
About 19 pounds, altogether. (expensive - Damn expensive - but the In-Laws
happily covered the cost, so no problem.)

As the snow turned to a withering rain Wednesday morning, I Put this into a 500
degree oven, rib side up for 20 mins, then turned them over and covered them
with a mixture of chopped garlic (about a full jar) olive oil, rosemary, salt
oregano and basil, and cracked pepper and chopped mushrooms. Then setting the
oven to 200 degrees, I let it go with my probe thermo set to go off at 135
degrees. I put a double handful of garlic cloves in the roasting pan at that
time too.

Then I got to work on the rest of the dinner:
Let's see...

We also had:
Roast vegetables - cubed potatoes, cubed sweet potatoes, chunked carrots, three
whole heads of garlic, and onion quarters, roasted with olive oil and kosher
salt.

Steamed Brussels sprouts dressed only with some good vintage Modena Balsamic
vinegar.

Green beans sautéed in bacon fat( in which I fried thin slices of sweet onion),
tossed with the fried onions and bacon (fried crisp beforehand), just before
plating.

Lightly roasted asparagus spears, ( in a little olive oil and salt, just for a
few minutes to set the green. still crunchy, yum)

The Yorkshire pudding. Basic recipe.

Store bought crescent roll dough rolled up around a peeled clove of roasted
garlic.

Several bottles of good red zinfandel wine.

The meat was done to a T, I let it rest for a half hour, and it just came up to
140 degrees (medium rare) while resting.

I was going to do a salad and soup ( "French" Onion ) but, I forgot some of the
ingredients when shopping. Considering the way the cutting board was piled up
with huge slabs of Prime Rib, nicely pink and juicy, it was just as well I did
not.
It was an embarrassment of meat, there was so much it seemed positively sinful.
Even I could not believe how much I had made!
"You've never seen the like of me before!" passed through my mind every time I
looked at the cutting board absolutely overflowing with some positively
glorious, tender beef, lightly infused with garlic and rosemary flavors.


Dessert was:
Fattigman, cheese cake, assorted cookies, "Lutheran" red Jell-O - with berries
and cherries (family joke) and a cream topping, really good chocolate fudge,
vanilla ice-cream, and genuine Yemeni Sanai Mocha coffee I roasted myself just
before brewing ( a Christmas present I got myself was a real nice Coffee
Roaster- I am SUCH a coffee freak).

The only problems were weather related:
We had to ferry people to and from their homes, in our FWD vehicle, and the
evening broke up early because the high winds were blowing the smoke from the
fire back down the chimney, and we had several asthmatics present.

(Oh well. Went to bed as soon as I found out that I did not win the powerball
drawing, alas)

Brandu
(master of parentheses)

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"All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical
observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision
and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety -- and
simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate
of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through
the larynx -- or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about
it-- and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue
around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish,
we shape each passing puff into a series of loosely differentiated
plosives, fricatives, gutterals, and other minor atmospheric
disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of
sound. People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables,
words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To
understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises
into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn
issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is
suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by
emitting a series of uncontrolled high pitched noises, accompanied
by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a
seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking,
when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed."
- Bill Bryson, "the Mother Tongue, English and How It Got That Way"

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