Christmas Break

I blew my wad mocking healthcare last week, and although mine is a godless, heathen family, the rump Catholicism on the paternal side impels us to celebrate a loud Christmas (my second favorite of our oddball holiday celebrations, a hair-width runner-up to our raucus Passover Seder). So posting has been light and will continue to be so through next week, when I shall attempt to review The Decade.

In the meantime, the main course for this year's Christmas dinner will be a tagine of spiced lamb with dried fruit and almonds. It will be preceded by a hot-and-sweet onion soup. Our sides will be a very simple lemon risotto, root vegetables roasted with olive oil, smoked salt, and peppercorns, and wilted greens with fennel seed.

For the soup, I boil the reserved carcass of a whole roast chicken with chopped carrots, onion, green onion, lemon grass, whole cinammon, and star anise for about two hours and then strain it through a fine, double sieve. I reserve a quart or two for making the risotto. I caremalize several large red and yellow onions with a bit of garlic and shallot, deglaze the pan with a bit of red wine, pour the mixture into the soup broth, bring it to a simmer together with one more dash of wine, and then serve in wide bowls over big hunks of stale bread that I've soaked in olive oil, garnished with a few splashes of bright red chili oil.

For the tagine, I buy beautiful, cheap, fatty lamb shoulder, chop it into 3/4" cubes, marinate the meat in a mixture of raw milk yogurt, toasted, ground cumin, coriander, turmeric, cayenne powder, mustard seed, olive oil, and coarse salt for an hour or so. Then I toss it together in the tagine with roughly chopped almonds, dried dates, dried apricots, dried figs, parsley, shallots, garlic cloves, and quartered meyer lemons. I close the tagine and place it in a cool oven, which I then warm to 250. The lamb cooks at 250 for 4-5 hours. Then I uncover it, raise the temperature to 400, and let it brown on top.

For the risotto, I bring the reserved broth to a low boil and add some additional lemon grass for perfume and flavor. I melt some finely diced onion, shallot, and carrot in clarified butter over medium heat, then raise the heat and add the rice to toast. I only use broth to deglaze the pot, and then cook the risotto slowly over a once-again medium heat, adding just enough broth to keep the rice submerged at all times, until it is thick and creamy, at which point I add a few squeezes of fresh lemon juice, a bit more salt to taste, and a few pats of sweet cream butter to thicken the dish and mount the flavor.

The root vegetables are simplest of all. Chop 3-4 each turnips and rutabagas and 2-3 celery roots into even cubes, toss them all together in a ceramic baking dish with good olive oil, smoked sea salt, and cracked black peppercorns, and put them in the oven with the tagine, giving them a good 1.5-2 hours at the low temperature, then letting them likewise crisp and brown up a bit in the hotter oven.

To wilt the greens, chop them roughly, gently heat some olive oil and crushed garlic cloves in a heavy saute pan, and slowly add the greens, making certain to salt them lightly before they begin to wilt, so that the salt is evenly distributed throughout. When all the greens have wilted, roughly chop some fennel seeds and toss them in over the heat. Serve with just the slightest dash of good red wine vinegar.

And to all a good fucking night.