[Sca-cooks] My Christmas dinner & LOOT

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Robin Carroll-Mann:
>Christmas dinner was a beef roast, accompanied by roasted root 
>vegetables, and my first-ever Yorkshire pudding.  It came out well, 
>but would have been better with some gravy, I think.

Yes, it's a conundrum. If you either roast the vegetables in the same 
pan as the beef, or cook the pudding in it (some older recipes 
recommend this), gravy integrity can be compromised.

My solution was to pre-brown the seasoned vegetables in a very hot 
wok with just a touch of the beef dripping, and add them to the meat 
pan to finish cooking in much less time. I had done this successfully 
for Thanksgiving, so decided it was the way to go.

The vegetables are less likely to burn before they're done, don't 
stick to the pan as much, and leave behind some juice and some fat in 
the pan.

The pudding I baked in my usual iron skillet, with some spooned-in 
beef dripping from the meat pan, heated on the stove-top until nearly 
smoking, then filled with the batter and placed in the hot oven while 
the meat was resting, and while it was cooking, made gravy from the 
contents of the meat pan (brown roux plus beef stock used to deglaze 
the pan) and added some of the juice from the meat itself, while 
slicing...

And then, of course, I hear cloudberry preserves are also nice on 
Yorkshire pudding.

Adamantius