I’ve got three meals I’m participating in.
Friday I’m having a small Tally family and friend party at my place where I’m roasting a Christmas goose with some apple, quince and bacon stuffing and doing some roast peas and carrots on the side.
Christmas Eve is my big extended family get together and it’s always a themed potluck. This year’s theme is Mexican cuisine. I’m THINKING about trying to replicate the Navajo-Mexican hatch green chili and roast chicken tamales I absolutely love from the Frybread House in Phoenix...but I also know how much of a %*%+ it is to wrap 40 tamales so I may do something else instead.
Christmas Day is our smaller immediate family get together with just my parents, my wife and I and my sister and her husband and I’m the sole cook on that one as well. I bought a Smithfield ham and by that I don’t mean a BS “Smithfield Company” brand ham from China that you see in Publix, I actually drove up to Smithfield, Virginia and went to the Darden Country Store to get a locally smoked and aged country ham made from a Virginia hog fed exclusively a peanut diet. So I’ll be soaking and then roasting that as the main and since it’s an artifact from colonial American history I’m making it a colonial America themed menu. So for sides I’m doing suppone or Native American “spoonbread”, an Oyster dressing, Sally Lunn bread, fire roasted collards and hominy as the “sallet”, and Apple tansey (a common sidedish then of sliced and roasted apples mixed with beaten eggs, a little sugar, cream, rose or other flower water (I’ll be using orange blossom water) and it’s then panfried to make a mildly sweet sidedish that’s not on a dessert level). For dessert I’m thinking about doing a bourbon barrel cake.
