The Good Plate

Posts Tagged ‘whole grain mustard’

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Recipes In This Post

• Turkey Salad Stuffed Tomato and Avocado

Paula Deen is going to be at Barnes and Noble to do a book signing this evening at 7pm. That made me think of how lucky I am to be living here in Glendale, California. We have things here that you just don’t find everywhere else.

This morning, I went to my favorite store, Best Grocery on Maple, and got two big, red tomatoes, a fat slice of smoked turkey and an avocado. I went home and made a wonderful stuffed tomato salad.

Turkey Salad Stuffed Tomato and Avocado

Ham Steak, Mashed Yams and Sweet Peas

Recipes in This Post

• Ham Steak with Blackberry Mustard Glaze
• Mashed Yams
• Southern Sweet Peas

Recipes in Other Posts

• Peaches Raleigh

School is Going to Start Soon!

I was thinking today that school is going to start soon, so it is time to start making quicker dishes, eat dinner earlier, and get Spane to sleep earlier. That way, going back to school will not be such a big adjustment.

Our dinner tonight reflected a holiday dinner, but was much simpler, and not any where near as much food. Having a ham steak lets you get a nice thick slice of ham, with the bone if you like the marrow like I do, without having to buy the whole ham.

Did you know that the long, red skinned, orange fleshed vegetables Americans call yams are in fact sweet potatoes? They are. I like the orange sweet potatoes a little bit more than I like white sweet potatoes. They have more sugar and are moister than their whiter cousins. Even though American grocers label them incorrectly, they are not even distantly related to yams.

When I was a little girl, my mother would get sweet peas in their shells, and we would sit and shell them. The peas never made it to the stove, though, we ate them as we shelled them. I have yet been able to find big fat sweet peas like those, but I did find some with smaller peas, whose shells were still soft enough to eat, and I used those.

I also had some lovely peaches in the refrigerator, ice cream and a new jar of rose preserves. I made Peaches Raleigh for dessert.

Peaches Raleigh