Firsts

[muckefuck]

It worked so well making a list of leftovers the last time we entertained on a holiday that I've done it again. Here's what we have in our refrigerator following our New Year's Day Open House:

ham (chunk & slices)
[roast] turkey breast
sauerbraten
cassoulet
caponata
sausages [smoked & garlic thueringer]
sauerkraut
gingerbread trifle
black cake
hoppin' john
spätzle
half & half
zucchini
heavy cream
greens (lettuce, herbs)
red cabbage

Obviously, not all of this was served to our guests. The sauerbraten, cassoulet, spätzle, and red cabbage I've written about before. The thueringer are leftover cassoulet fixings; we'll probably serve them with the sauerkraut for a quick meal some night.

"Sauerkraut", incidentally, hardly does that dish justice. A few days back, Miss Cleveland asked if it would be alright to bring some cheeses sent by his brother. (He and his partner both had heart scares this past year and have cut way back on the animal fats.) I said, "Of course" and told the Old Man not to buy any more. A couple days after that, he informed me that the housekeeper and the contractor had gifted him with sauerkraut and sausages, so would it be okay if he brought those too? I don't know that I've even once denied a request to bring pork products to my house, so I readily assented.

Little did I know he apparently thought he was cooking for a regiment of Hessians. I didn't realise that Calphalon even made pots that size. It was a popular dish, and now all we have left is roughly the amount monshu or I would fix if we were cooking up enough for ourselves for a week. (I think I see bigos in our near future.) They threw in potatoes, too, which could be retrieved to form the nucleus of some other dish. Perhaps the soup we plan to make with the hambone and/or turkey carcass?

By contrast, the remnants of innerdoggie's hoppin' john were modest enough to fill a single-serving container. There wasn't much more of the GWO's Da-friendly caponata (i.e. no olives or capers). But barely half of the gingerbread trifle got eaten, meaning there's now a bowl of whipped cream, lemon curd, and Scottish gingerbread bigger than your head dominating the back of the top shelf. Makes one wish there were another party to go to still. The hunk of West Indian black cake (three months in the making) may look small, but that's before you take into account that it is what happens when an ordinary cake collapses into upon itself until light has difficulty escaping. I don't know what this nonsense is about "sacramental wine" in its makeup; it's the "burnt sugar essence" the comes through most for me.

I didn't move a lot of liquor this time. There was some love for the paw paw liqueur and both kinds of ginger (the Koval and the Massenez). his_regard had a good idea for the first but ran low on sparkling wine before he could execute it properly; definitely something to keep in mind for future. There were also some interesting suggestions for the horseradish vodka brought by lhn and prilicla. "Bloody mary" is the natural candidate, but I think it could be the basis for an interesting martini. I actually convinced five fellows to down a shot of it, and it was generally deemed less intense than you would've thought. (Makes sense; horseradish, like onions, develops its bite upon exposure to air, which isn't really possible once it's been infused.)

Comments

[danthered.livejournal.com]

hoppin' john

Which, now?