Christmas

Italian Stuffed Mushrooms1Happy Holidays! One of our favorite quick appetizers are these Italian Stuffed Mushrooms. They usually show up on the holiday table because they are so easy to make and serve.

You can even throw them together early in the day and bake them off right as guests are arriving.

Having a hot appetizer that is so easy to make is a godsend on party day. I often double the recipe because they disappear so fast.

I hope you have a great day, have to get back to cooking as I am going to be making my Lobster Bisque, it’s just not Christmas without it.

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jamieathome.jpg My son Ethan and I once tried to cook our way through Jamie Oliver’s Italy—he was going off to school and had some delusional fantasy that there would be a kitchen in his dorm (not!) and that he would be able to cook for his friends and his girlfriends and somehow simulate some of the cuisine he was accustomed to...  It was great.  Everything we made was perfect.  I don’t even like swordfish and Jamie Oliver’s swordfish is one of the best things I’ve ever had.  He thinks “fruit is lovely”, he uses words like “drizzle” and you sort of feel like he’s in the kitchen with you. 

So, I was really excited when Jamie Oliver’s new book “Jamie at Home” arrived in the mail.  And it’s xmas and it’s chaotic and I haven’t had time to even begin to cook my way through it.  But I’m really pleased that they’re allowing us to excerpt some of Jamie Oliver’s new recipes.

We’re going to try his recipe for Orchard Eve Pudding at our Xmas dinner.

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pickled-herring.jpgMy family, while I grew up in Iowa in the 1970's,  had no traditions save one.  For 364 dinner days of the year, it was my mother who performed culinary magic at home.  (Today her dinners would be heralded by food critics as tempura-style but back then it was just “frying floured foods in fat”.)   Her lipid of choice was Crisco but on Christmas Eve the can of Crisco was put away and my father took out the stew pots.

My father, who was a local politician,  positively beamed with pride at his singular culinary contribution for the year which was an appealing to no one constituency menu of homemade chili, homemade oyster stew, and store bought pickled herring.  He had taken shrapnel at the Battle of the Bulge in WWII and perhaps this affected his judgment but nevertheless he fancied himself a gourmand and this menu was his pride and joy.

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kcc6_candy_canes.jpgCandy Canes

Legend has it that in 1670, the choirmaster at the Cologne Cathedral in Germany handed out sugar sticks among his young singers to keep them quiet during the long Living Creche ceremony. In honor of the occasion, he had the candies bent into shepherds' crooks. In 1847, a German-Swedish immigrant named August Imgard of Wooster, Ohio, decorated a small blue spruce with paper ornaments and candy canes. It wasn't until the turn of the century that the red and white stripes and peppermint flavors became the norm.

In the 1920s, Bob McCormack began making candy canes as special Christmas treats for his children, friends and local shopkeepers in Albany, Georgia. It was a laborious process – pulling, twisting, cutting and bending the candy by hand. It could only be done on a local scale.

In the 1950s, Bob's brother-in-law, Gregory Keller, a Catholic priest, invented a machine to automate candy cane production. Packaging innovations by the younger McCormacks made it possible to transport the delicate canes on a large scale. Although modern technology has made candy canes accessible and plentiful, they've not lost their purity and simplicity as a traditional holiday food.

From The National Confectioners Association

 

feast-eliz.jpgThe Christmas Feast:
The Christmas feast was an elaborate affair, and in grand households, often featured an array of food beyond modern imagining: roasted swan, venison, peacocks (with spread tail and gilded beak) and – the crowning achievement – a boar’s head.  There was also a variant on mincemeat pie…a huge stuffed pastry, filled with minced meats that had been sweetened with sugar and dried fruits.  Christmas pudding was also popular, but it was a savory affair, made with meat broth, chopped tongue, raisins, fruit juice, wine and spices, thickened with breadcrumbs.  And the holidays had a special comfort food, as well: furmenty, a hot cereal made with wheat slowly stewed in milk, served with raisins, sugar and spices, was quite popular.
 
The Christmas Season:
Parliament was out of session, and upper class families retired to their country homes for the Christmas season, where they enlivened the local shire with festivities a-plenty.  In fact, it’s been said that the locals in the countryside voiced displeasure if the “great families” chose to spend the Christmas season in town (London), rather than organizing activities around their estates.  Hunting was among the most popular winter activities, and traditionally, the day after Christmas brought a festive foxhunt!

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