what's for xmas dinner?

Center-cut beef tenderloin, mint sauce optional. Colcannon, glazed carrots, French country-style bread. Garden salad with pears, walnuts and Irish cheddar crumbles. Guinness.

Later, more Guinness.

 

More Gentleman Jack

 

Remarkably enough, my first true Christmas dinner seemed a lot like Thanksgiving. But it was cooked by the matriarch of my host family instead of my grandmother.

My grandmother went to her neighbors from Italy for the feast of the seven fishes last night, and is heading back today for a similarly sumptuous menu. I don't even like fish and I'm a little jealous.

 

Mint sauce on tenderloin?

 

Jagermeister + Goldschlagger = heaven.

You can never have too many Starry Nights during the winter. OK, maybe you can. But still.

 

As a condiment, not used in cooking. Just a little bit works nicely...Baxter's mint sauce. Less sugary than mint jelly.

 

Some friends and I boiled up up some pasta and made meat sauce and a salad, with cake and Jameson for dessert. We wanted to cook; we just can't.

 

I love this unintentionally funny short essay by Orwell: "In Defence of English Cooking." The mint sauce made me think of it.

http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/cooking/english/e_dec

Outside these islands I have never seen a haggis, except one that came out of a tin, nor Dublin prawns, nor Oxford marmalade, nor several other kinds of jam (marrow jam and bramble jelly, for instance), nor sausages of quite the same kind as ours.
Then there are the English cheeses. There are not many of them but I fancy Stilton is the best cheese of its type in the world, with Wensleydale not far behind. English apples are also outstandingly good, particularly the Cox’s Orange Pippin.

Hey George, you forgot Cheshire...my favorite English cheese. And not a word about ploughman's sandwich or shepherd's pie?

 

*Awww, shucks. Puts head down, hands in pocket, kicks at dirt*

Uncle Sam owns me 'til about 2015 ... but after that, I'm down.

 

It was the second-worst Chinese dinner, ever. I will never eat Chinese again, unless I book a goddamn flight to Beijing.

 

This is like saying you'll never drink again because your head hurts. You'll forget about the bad experience and be back at it soon enough.

 

Champagne and smoked salmon in the living room-followed by strip steaks, mashed potatoes, onion jam made from a recipe of an 80-year old French bistro owner (which I got from a book), green beans, merlot, then my daughter made apple pie. I cannot, should not, and see no reason to move.