white winter hymnal
the holidays and their snowy aftermath
Happy New Year to those who celebrate. Our Christmas tree is still up, not because I’m in denial about the holidays being over, but because it’s alive in a pot and I don’t want to shock it by throwing it back out in the snow after a month indoors. It’s warmed up a little from our cold snap with multiple days where the temperature didn’t go above -5°C (the hand sanitizer in my car froze solid and we were wearing long underwear in the house), but it’s still much chillier, and snowier, than usual. And although the solstice has come and gone, I don’t mind the extra glow from keeping the Christmas lights up into January, a dark and dreary time almost rivalling November in the ‘shit tier’ category of months.
I can feel the collective consciousness shifting as we realise that every year in recent memory has been filled with so many horrors that we can’t possibly blame it on the year itself, but I’m not one to take away from those who are looking forward to the possibility of a fresh start or making some changes. So whatever you’re excited about in 2022, I hope you’re able to achieve it. Personally I’d like to do more of what I enjoyed in 2021: completing knitting projects, reading novels, making and eating good food, and spending quality time with family and friends (that last one seems to have been put on temporary hiatus thanks to Omicron, but I have to be optimistic it might continue one day soon).
It would also make me really happy to see some new readers of my newsletter, so if you’ve enjoyed my writing, or found my cooking tips and recipes useful, I would love if you’d share this on whatever platform you like, or pass it on to a friend! Either way, thank you so much for your support. Just below will be a recap of our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so if the holidays aren’t a good time for you or if you’re just feeling done with thinking about Christmas food, feel free to scroll down to the next divider for the following week’s meals.
We skipped our usual Christmas Eve dinner at Jeff’s mom’s house out of, as they say, an abundance of caution, but she was kind enough to bring us some chocolates and our portion of the dinner she’d made, and we had our meal together over Skype instead. Each year she makes a delicious pork wellington in puff pastry, using a tenderloin wrapped in prosciutto with a mix of mushrooms, herbs, and sausage around it. The gravy has a good amount of dijon mustard in it which adds acidity, and we usually eat it with a green salad for lightness. This is more meat than I’d usually eat in a month but because we only have this once a year, I always go back for an extra piece.
After much deliberation in the group chat about the risks, my family got together at my mom’s house for Christmas. None of us had seen my brother who lives in Victoria since Christmas of 2019, and it felt so good to all be in the same room again, talking and laughing as if no time had passed despite how different everything around us felt. We stayed up til almost 2am on Christmas Eve sitting around the kitchen table drinking eggnog and eating snacks, and at one point someone shared a childhood memory that had us literally in tears of laughter, gasping for air, which I honestly can’t remember the last time I experienced and it was so needed. The lower mainland got a rare White Christmas as well, and watching the snow fall in the backyard all day felt really magical with us finally able to be together after such a hard year.
The food on Christmas is both the point and an afterthought: our traditions revolve around it, but it generally doesn’t feel like it matters much what we eat or if it’s memorable or not, because the important thing is the companionship. This year felt extra special though because it was just our immediate family and it had been so long, and my mom has become a master of prepping as much as possible ahead of time so we can spend less time in the kitchen and more of it together. We eat yogurt and drink coffee while opening gifts together, and then make ham or smoked salmon eggs benedict and drink mimosas for brunch. Then we clean up and get dressed, and at some point set out some charcuterie for people to pick at a few hours before dinner. This year’s spread was honestly a masterpiece, and we enjoyed refilling our little plates while watching Home Alone 2 and trash talking rich people.
Jeff loves making turkey, and since we’d gone two Thanksgivings and a Christmas without one, he was happy to take it on. My mom salted it the day before, and just prior to cooking we slathered it with a thyme, sage, and dijon mustard compound butter. During the second half of cooking, the top of the turkey gets covered with bacon so the white meat doesn’t dry out. This turned out to be one of the juiciest, most flavourful turkeys we’ve ever made… or maybe they’re always like this and it’s just been long enough that we couldn’t remember.
I prepped miso-honey brussels sprouts on Christmas Eve, cooking them halfway so that they could finish with 15 minutes or so in the oven while the turkey was resting. They were a highlight for everyone who likes brussels sprouts (aka anyone who isn’t still living in the dark ages). The other fav is my mom’s extra-crispy roasted potatoes, achieved by parboiling large pieces of russet potatoes, then roasting them until the edges are craggy, brown, and perfectly crunchy. It’s so nice to have them there breaking up the texture of all the softer holiday food. And this year the stuffing was perfectly moist without being soggy, with crisp edges that weren’t too dry. We ignored the recipe and just dumped things in until it looked right, so maybe that’s the secret. No photos of dinner because we were busy ~living in the moment~ (and because most holiday food is overwhelmingly brown).
We tried not to go overboard on the baking this year since we knew there wouldn’t be as big of a crowd, so to add to my mom’s assortment of cookies I made my usual lavender snickerdoodles and ginger-molasses cookies, Jeff made zimtsterne (gluten-free by default!), and because I have to always make something new, a pan of minty brownies. I just added mint extract to this basic recipe (the dark half, obviously) and used the leftover cocoa butter icing and candy cane pieces from my birthday cake to make a brownie version of Alicia Kennedy’s fabulous peppermint bark cake. All those who are not mint-haters loved them, and said the icing texture was perfect, which it is.
I got a few nice food-related gifts, including a set of three tart pans in different sizes (so I can stop pretending all tarts are the same as a 9” pie), a canvas bag lined with beeswax to keep loaves of fresh bread soft (it works wonderfully), and a veritable pantry full of Asian snacks and treats from T&T and Dank Mart. I haven’t had the chance to try too many of them yet, but I’m really looking forward to tasting the hot and sour Cheetos and red curry Pringles.
The week after Christmas I did have to work a few days, unlike the lucky folks with a full week or more of holiday time who got to spend it at home eating various forms of sugar and forgetting what day it was. One of the days involved a hellish drive to work in over 8” of unplowed snow only to discover that our post pickup had been cancelled (understandably) due to the weather, making my journey mostly pointless. So I was glad when I got home that I’d committed to using up leftovers from the fridge and freezer that week, and got to simply put some pre-made curry chicken Jamaican patties in the oven and make a quick slaw to eat on the side. Another work night I made Smitten Kitchen’s lovely mushrooms and greens to use up a surplus of kale, some oyster mushrooms and shiitakes, the last of a loaf of bread I’d made on Christmas Eve, and some of the pepper jack cheese ball from our Christmas lunch.
I took home some of the leftover turkey and made it into a big pot of soup on Boxing Day, half of which went straight into the freezer. The day before New Year’s Eve I paid some attention to my neglected sourdough starters, making bread dough with one and pizza dough with the other. The pizza dough was left to ferment in the fridge until dinnertime the next day, when I made us a pesto pizza with sun-dried tomatoes, lots of kale, and goat feta. I had a dirty martini while I was cooking, using our new gin from Copper Penny Distilling on Esplanade (they aren’t open yet, but we got a bottle from their first batch at the Shipyards Artisan Market). Our celebratory sparkling was Stoneboat’s Piano Brut, which we drank before midnight in a French 75 and after midnight in its pure form. It has a delicious minerality that feels almost salty, with a light citrusy, peachy sweetness.
To use up the last of our bottle of Stubb’s barbecue sauce, I bought a can of jackfruit to make pulled pork-style sandwiches. The main thing to know for this purpose is that when you buy cans of jackfruit, you want the young jackfruit in water, not anything in syrup (ripe jackfruit), which obviously has a completely different flavour and texture. If you have time you can salt it a little before cooking to help it soften and absorb flavour, just like meats— young jackfruit doesn’t have a very strong flavour of its own. Once you’ve added the sauce, keep the lid on the pan to hold the moisture in, but stir it every once in awhile so it doesn’t stick to the bottom (and add splashes of water if it starts to reduce too much).
I’d only cooked with jackfruit once before, making a smoky-spicy taco filling, and the method I used here was much the same: rinse and drain the jackfruit, shred with a fork, add it to the pan after browning some aromatics and spices (I used cumin and smoked paprika), then add the sauce and let it all simmer for about 20 minutes. I accidentally made the sauce super spicy— I added a little tomato paste, soy sauce, and hot sauce to the BBQ base, but the hot sauce pulled a Heinz glass ketchup bottle on me and gushed out about three times as much as I’d planned to use. It wasn’t so spicy I couldn’t enjoy it, though! To put on top we had a cabbage slaw with lime and carrot, which tempered the spice and made for a nice crunch.
Also this week I made two meals out of a delicata squash that had been hanging around for awhile: first, another round of the hoisin-glazed squash bowl with rice and egg. This time I threw in a couple of chopped kale leaves to braise at the very end, to add a bit more substance and texture to the bowl, and it was perfect despite cooking the eggs a bit too long. I roasted the rest of the squash and a couple of golden beets to make panzanella with the remainder of a loaf of bread and some aged balsamic vinaigrette, adding feta and pickled red onion for salt and acidity. There is simply no salad that satisfies quite like the bread salad, and you can make one with almost anything you’ve got in the produce drawer.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so donations I can use towards cookbooks or future treats are much appreciated. Finally, sorry to British people including my ancestors, but when you’re right, you’re right.