Cooking for Hogmanay

Since poor monshu always ends up doing the bulk of the cooking whenever we entertain, and our New Year's Open House is our biggest regular event, I figure it's the least I can do to cook dinner on Hogmanay. The last couple of years, I've had good success with coca, but a few days ago I saw a lascivious photograph of a tarte à l'oignon alsacienne in a friend's FB feed and thought I might try my hand at Zwibbelewaie again. My previous efforts had been very hit or miss, but I thought maybe I could bring my coca experience to bear and pull it off successfully.

Then my "head cold" revealed itself to be the worst bout of flu I can remember for years and the thought of cooking anything at all seemed overly ambitious. If I really wasn't up to it, we could always fall back on the killer cassoulet the Old Man was fixing. But I managed to make it through most of a day of work yesterday, which convinced me that I could survive an hour at the stove tomorrow. monshu made some offhand comment about preparing his mother's oyster stew which sent my thoughts in a completely different direction. I liked the traditional fish theme and decided instead to reprise my father's fish chowder.

At monshu's urging, I reread the recipe to check ingredients before he went shopping and I saw the note that the soup "tastes even better after it has been allowed to stand in a cool place (such as a refrigerator) overnight". Thinking back to the last time we had it reminded me that this was absolutely true. So when I got up from my brief afternoon nap today, I diced the chunk of Hungarian bacon remaining from the time I made bigos and slow cooked the rind pieces to crispness as I minced a sweet onion. I sautéed this to translucency with the meatier cubes of bacon as I diced the potatoes, thinking all the time how lucky I was to have the leisure to prep everything exactly according my liking. (Chunkiness has its appeal, but my inclination is always to go smaller.)

At this point I hit my first snag: monshu had scored me Pacific cod fillets at Dominicks, but a few hours in the fridge wasn't long enough to defrost them. I ended up having to soak them in water until they were soft enough to chop. This meant covering the potatoes in water so they didn't brown and adding liquid to the onions so they didn't carmelise, but like I said there are definite advantages to not cooking on a tight schedule. Soon enough, everything was in the pot and I was able to start on the gluey velouté which replaces the condensed cream soup called for in the original directions.

When it came to spicing, I couldn't resist using a few of my freshly-purchased allspice berries together with pepper, bay leaf, a little mace, cayenne, and Greek seasoning. All that the house chef thought it needed was a bit of tarragon. Keeping in mind how quickly it goes bad and how much else there was in the way of leftovers, I knew we needed to freeze the balance of the chowder, which meant cleaning out the freezer to find space. This revealed that we can now, if we want, have a side-by-side comparison of monshu's cassoulet from this year, last year, and the year before that. Same for bigos, if we hadn't already polished off what I made a couple weeks back.