The Good Plate

Posts Tagged ‘raisins’

Your Goose is Cooked!

Dickens’ Christmas Dinner Menu

• Christmas Salad
• Roast Goose with Sour Cherry Sauce
• Chestnut Stuffing
• Wild Rice
• Haricots Verts
• Christmas Pudding

I lucked out this year and got a free range goose! I was so happy when I found it that I was jumping up and down. It was going to be a Dickens’ Christmas after all!

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness¹, were the themes of universal admiration….

In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered — flushed, but smiling proudly — with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

`A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us.’
Which all the family re-echoed. `God bless us every one.’ said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens 1843

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We’re going to have a Dicken’s Christmas this year. I’m roasting a goose, and I’m serving Christmas Plum Pudding for dessert. The journey to this pudding has been long and interesting.

Getting suet was difficult. Why? Because most people don’t buy suet, so it’s hard to come by. What is suet you ask? Suet is the hard fat around the kidney of a cow or sheep. Suet has a high burning point, so it’s perfect for making such things as Christmas pudding and mince meat.

I had mince meat pie that was made with suet, and it is truly superior to that which does not have it. So many people said “Ew!” to suet that manufacturers removed it from the ingredients, thereby producing a far inferior product. It’s been so vilified that younger butchers don’t even know what it is.

I finally found a butcher who had it, and asked my friend to pick it up for me, as he was closer to the butcher shop. He brought me this mass of fat, and I put it in the refrigerator. So, today, I started actually making the pudding.

I decided to use a recipe from Housekeeping in Old Virgina. Actually, I used a combination of the various recipes. They all had the same thing in common, equal amounts of bread, suet, eggs, brown sugar, and raisins. This was some true eyeballing.

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Well, I guess The Good Plate is “poopular” because our old host said we were too busy, so we moved to a new host. Lots of things happened while we were away, and I’ll have to get you all caught up.

We had a wonderful Halloween, and quite the turn out.  I was sick all that week, but I still made Halloween happen.  I cut my hair, and you can see in this photo that I look a little pale.  I was still sick.

But, enough about me, let’s talk about food!  It’s been very cold lately, and I don’t like sending Spane off to school without a warm breakfast.  When he was a toddler, his favorite breakfast was Grape-nuts and milk warmed up, softened, in the microwave.  I don’t like hot cereal, so I never tried it.  Well, after I doctored it up, it was very good.  You have to try this!

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On September 24, 2011, I gave you the recipe for the Shabby Chic Apple Raisin Crostata, but it did not have any pictures. That crostata was so good I decided to make another one, but this time, I got a combination of raisins and dried cranberries, and instead of pie dough, I bought ready made frozen puff pasty.

This was my first time working with puff pastry, other than making Chicken Cordon Bleu a la Wellington, so this was more of an experiment that anything else. I had enough dough and filling to make a turnovers, too, but, I wasn’t paying attention, and they got a little over cooked. No problem, the others turned out fine, and the over done ones will still get eaten.

Let’s start cooking:

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A few weeks ago, I bought a package of dried apples at the local Armenian store, just to have as a snack for Spane. It’s beginning to get cold again, so I’ve been thinking about baking. I already made Apple Brown Betty that turned out a little too brown because I should have removed one of the racks in Bertha. I thought of making a Chocolate Cake with Mocha Frosting, but it got too hot to do that. So, today, I’m still thinking about baking something when I remember about the dried apples.

I also had one single pie crust left over from when I made the Scrambled Burger Quiche.

Chef Farion was visiting today, so I laid the apples and the pie crust on the counter, and I said, “I’ve got this and this. What do you think?” He gave me the inspiration for a Crostada .

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Recipes in this Post

White Chocolate Rum Raisin Cookies, I ate the broken one!

• White Chocolate Rum Raisin Cookies

Spane and his class are going on a field trip, and I volunteered to be one of the helping parents. We have to bring a bag lunch, and I decided to bring cookies for the kids.

I really like this recipe because it is so versatile, you can change the add-ins and have a completely different cookie every time. The add-ins for these White Chocolate Rum Raisin Cookies are the rum, raisins, white chocolate and walnuts.

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