christmas food

For christmas, even if we don't care too much for big gatherings or presents (the kids like the latter), we still love drinking and eating well.

For starters we had gravad lax made from a salmon, our dill, which is growing like a weed at the moment, salt and sugar. This was really good served with classic swedish dill sauce made with mustard, sugar, vinegar, oil and chopped dill. We washed it down with nice chilled vodka.

For the main meal, we killed three small geese and deboned them. One was used as the "bag" for the rest and stuffed with the breasts and a forcemeat made with the rest of the meat and fresh sage and garlic.

this was then stitched into one big ballotine or sausage and then roasted in a moderate oven until done. It was crisped up on the outside in the frying pan. I served this with steamed beans - Bri is very good at forcing early green beans for christmas - and tarragon, new pink-eye potates boiled and crushed with some of the rendered goose fat and a sauce made with red-currants that Noah picked, stewed with cinnamon, cloves and a little sugar. We washed this down with a bottle of Bleasdale sparkling shiraz. Delicious!

To finish we had a summer pudding that I made a few days earlier using 750 grams of raspberries and 250 grams of redcurrants from our garden. These were briefly cooked, strained then packed, not into white bread, but pandoro which is like a panettone without the dried fruit. It's a little like a not-so-rich brioche. We finished the sparkling shiraz with this and it went really well.

after this, we fell asleep.

tapas

Somehow a meal of tapas was inevitable. We had experimentally prepared some snails from the garden by feeding them on grains and greens for 3 weeks to purge them of grit. Also, it was about the time that our jamon (or prosciutto) was ready. I prepared this last summer with a boned leg of free-range pork following the method of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It has been hanging under our verandah, covered in muslin and wire mesh since then.
I also had just bought some spanish-style blood sausage - morcilla - and really wanted to make a typical spanish dish of broad beans with morcilla.
So, we had (clockwise from the bottom), grilled home-made bread rubbed with new garlic, grilled and garlicked mushrooms from our mushroom box, pipis (Noah went down to the water to collect these) steamed with some white wine, broad beans sauteed with morcilla, jamon serrano and, in the middle, snails braised in garlic, olive oil and tomato. All that was missing was the sherry and the flamenco guitarist.