[Sca-cooks] Re: Christmas Dinner?

[rose at got.net]

We had Christmas dinner with my in-laws, and our friend Seamus who has been
adopted by them.

My father-in-law is usually the cook, and he absolutely hates cooking turkey.
In the past 11 years, we have had turkey exactly twice -- most Thanksgiving and
Christmas dinners are pot roast, deep dish pizza, lasagne or chicken and
biscuits.

Yesterday was smoked tri-tip.  We potlucked the side dishes and desserts.
There were glazed carrots, green beans and yams with marshmallows (my brother-
in-law's favorite).  Seamus brought his famous mushrooms in madiera.

Santiago and I tried making a variant of black forest cherry cake, which turned
out ... interesting.  Santiago made very rich vanilla ice cream with egg yolks
and kirsch.  I made a chocolate sponge layer, and the idea was to fill it with
the ice cream and brandied cherries, roll it and cover it with chocolate
ganache.  The filling part was easy, but the rolling was an unmitigated
disaster.  The cake disintigrated and there was ice cream everywhere.  So we
scraped it all up and put it into a container, and stuck it in the freezer
while we brainstormed fixes.  I made another single-layer chocolate cake, cut
it in half horizontally, and then sandwiched the failed-cake ice cream inside.
Then we covered that with the chocolate ganache, whipped cream and grated
bittersweet chocolate.  It wasn't the work of art I was hoping for, but it
certainly wasn't bad!

Rose - whose cookies arrived on Christmas Eve, thanks Apollonia!

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