POST HOLIDAY RECAP NO. 2: Of Boxing Day

There was a definite "Medieval" trend in my cooking this holiday season, beginning with the Turkey and Prune tagine I made right before Thanksgiving. It continued all through Christmas and New Years and at the moment it's still going strong. It's almost certainly a direct result of my reading / watching / listening habits starting at about October. Obviously, being me, my default attention focus is early British history, and I'd been thinking a lot about dishes influenced by the Crusades and the new exposure to Middle Eastern spices and combinations.

The culinary outcome was that I used a lot dried fruit and nuts, notably in savoury dishes, a lot of "Crusade" spices like nutmeg and cinnamon and cloves (not to mention the all-important and ridiculously expensive saffron and vanilla bean), and that I made a lot of "one pot" things like stews or puddings or pies. Mind you, I have NOT progressed to full on meat pottage or offal or stewed calves heads or anything like that. Just to be clear. But I definitely opened up an untapped range of possibilities, and I ended up experimenting with a lot of new ingredients in different ways.* It turns out that, when done Beetle-style, Medieval food is not only healthy and simple, but also perfect for freezing cold and dark nights. Which I imagine was kind of the point back then. Granted, we were more huddled around Netflix than huddled around a straw-strewn hearth, but the comparison remains. 

*I'm hoping it's a simple culinary trend, really, and not a sign of things to come that will see me, by next year, wearing a wimple and slaughtering chickens in the back field.

Two of the menu choices for this Boxing Day feast actually came from one isolated podcast, a pre-Christmas "Food Programme" on BBC4 that featured THREE of my all time favourite cooks in one place: Allegra McEvedy, Yotam Ottolenghi, and Trine Hahnemann.

BOXING DAY SUPPER

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Beef & Mushroom Pie

Caramelised Brussels Sprouts (inspired by Yotam Ottolenghi)

Finnish Rye Bread

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Vanilla Rice Pudding, Blackberry Sauce (inspired by Trine Hahnemann)

BEEF* AND MUSHROOM PIE

*No beef was harmed in the making of this pie. The only thing that gave up life was a soybean. 

There is A LOT of meat pie discussion during Christmas / New Years. And for good reason. The idea of a thick, rich stew covered in an even thicker, even richer pastry crust is truly amazing, especially when it's stupid-below-zero outside and it gets dark at 3.30. That was the idea behind this pie. I operated on the assumption that beef pie was good, that beef and mushroom pie was really good, and that if I baked the whole thing inside dough brushed with heavy cream and ground sage . . . well . . . yeah.

We had guests for Boxing Day, so at least I was able to test it out on Uncle Thor and Aunt Rosemary as well as Mum. They are quite amenable to veggie meat, bless them, and generally accept that it's going to be on the menu when they come.

This entire thing is actually preposterously simple. I sauteed mushrooms and onions until they were nice and juicy and brown, then, with the heat off, mixed in the "ground beef" and don't knock it till you've tried it it's actually totally delicious. 

I took the pie-crust-mix shortcut (yeah, yeah, I know but honestly . . . ) which saved about a million hours and I bet tasted almost the same. Even Beetles have to cut corners once in a while. 

I filled up the bottom crust, slapped the top crust on it, did one of those stencil thingys (the holly one, naturally) with ground sage to make it pretty, and threw it in the oven at 375 for about 40 minutes. 

The thing about cooking with veggie meat is that you're not cooking to remove ecoli or salmonella or anything, you're just cooking for colour and temperature. My guide for the pie was to pull it out when the top was golden and the edges were crispy and just this side of burnt. 

It was pronounced a success. 

CARAMELISED BRUSSELS SPROUTS 

Sprouts are a Christmas cliche, but honestly if you do them right (aka don't boil them for 10 hours) they can be quite yummy. My dad used to saute them in butter and Parmesan cheese, and frankly I'm surprised I didn't turn into a sprout ever time that happened. 

Mum was super happy about the sprout trend, incidentally, because she said she hadn't had them in forever and had forgotten how much she liked them. 

Mind you, she might have regretted those words when I followed up the below with MORE SPROUTS (oven roasted this time but still) but she gamely worked her way through and pronounced both versions delicious. 

I wanted these to be a counterpart to the pie, crispy and slightly sweet, and so I went for the caramelised option. Brown sugar in a large frying pan, on low heat, for really almost 45 minutes. This way the sugar has time to get through all the layers and crisp them up one by one, and they get a really nice outer shell without getting burnt. 

Obviously, if they do burn, that's not a problem. There is absolutely nothing wrong with burnt fragments of sprouts coated in brown sugar. Nothing wrong at all. 

Yotam Ottolenghi LOVES sprouts, he does amazing things with them in his cookbooks, and although this is NOT the version he made on the podcast, it's still an homage to it. 

All I can offer by way of a recap on these is that I made enough caramelised Brussels sprouts to feed a large Belgian family for a year, and there were, roughly, 7 left at the end of dinner.

Yay sprouts. 

OK TIME FOR PUDDING.

VANILLA RICE PUDDING WITH BLACKBERRY SAUCE

This is straight up Trine Hahnemann's recipe, no faffing about and Beetle experimentation. The woman KNOWS her Scandinavian food. She knows the importance of potatoes and fish and heavy cream, preferably all in the same place. 

Rice pudding is traditional Scandinavian winter dessert fare (it's "risengrød" in Denmark, "riisipuuro" in Finland) and Mum remembers eating it in Helsinki when she was a girl. I was a little apprehensive, therefore, because I wanted it to be a taste she remembered. 

Basic rice pudding is short grain rice cooked in milk, then chilled, then mixed with more milk and whipped cream and chopped almonds, and served with hot berry sauce. 

Right? 

The novelty bit comes in that you hide a whole almond in in the pudding, and the person who gets THAT almond in their portion gets a prize, or good luck, or applause, or what have you. It's a game. And its a game that fully supports eating the entire bowl of pudding until the almond is found. 

One thing that Trine Hahnemann stressed specifically was that this HAS to be made with real vanilla beans, and not vanilla extract. According to her, you can totally taste the difference and the extract, basically, renders it not worth the trouble. 

This added to the pressure a little bit because vanilla beans, real vanilla beans, are bloody expensive. Even at Hannaford, which is not, say, Dean & Deluca, they charge $15.99 for two beans. The recipe uses two beans in their entirety. So if I was going to shell out, I wanted to shell out memorably.

One vanilla bean cooks with the rice, one vanilla bean is split and mixed with the pudding later on. 

The one and only thing I did differently (and out of a supply issue, not because I'm a jerkface) is that she indicates it's served with CHERRY sauce and I used BLACKBERRY. This is not, again, because I decided I know better than Trine Hahnemann. No, this is because, in rural Massachusetts, on Christmas Eve, you cannot find fresh cherries in the produce department of your local Market Basket. It's just not possible and the sooner you accept that and move on the better. 

Blackberries were on offer, and I went with those, whispering apologies to Trine in Finnish and Danish and English the whole way to the checkout line.

This was proclaimed a HUGE success. It's indicated that the pudding be chilled and the sauce hot. I served the pudding at room temperature, but the sauce smoking hot. It was mostly gone by the time coffee was ready. As a Christmas/Boxing Day dessert, especially after a very earthy and peasant-like supper, this was a light, airy, clean finish. 

Incidentally, Aunt Rosemary got the almond. She was quite happy. 

It has been requested I make this again, but this time without the whipped cream, as a rice pudding breakfast option. Mum liked the taste but said that when she sampled it before I mixed in the cream, she liked it better that way. So I'm going to make a giant amount of milky rice pudding for her before I head back up to Vermont. 

It's on the table whether I will make it with vanilla extract or vanilla beans. It's a question of what it's going to do to the food budget if this becomes a habit. I have visions of Mum sitting in a kitchen from which all the furniture has been sold, in the dark because of course they will have turned off the electricity, happily working her way through a million dollars worth of Riisiupuuro. 

She said she's open to trying it with the pedestrian extract, so we'll see. 

I guess it will just come down to priorities. 

We're not good at priorities.