Monday, December 25, 2006

My Christmas Dinner 2006


** Merry Christmas **

My Christmas Eve this year was again very peaceful and relaxing. Early in the evening, I had a nice chat with a friend of mine at a coffee shop in town. Then I came home and enjoyed this Christmas Eve dinner alone until… what time? I don’t remember exactly… But I'm sure it was past midnight when I finally went to bed.

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The menu wasn’t too different from last year. I started with Freixenet Cordon Negro again, because I HAD TO watch tiny bubbles rising in the glass in the candle light. It is an important part of my Christmas ritual now. After the small (178 mL) bottle of this sparkling wine was finished, a very affordable white wine accompanied the dinner.

Canapes on Ritz crackers. Same idea as last year, but this time I had to learn a lesson. Since I didn’t feel like going through all the agonies again, I bought a small jar of chicken liver paste at the store. And I hated its taste! Never again… Also, I learned that I like smoked salmon better with rice rather than with crackers. (You’ll see what I made with leftover smoked salmon soon.) The mentaiko paste, which sounded so tempting when I read about it on the net, turned out to be too salty for me, so I mixed it with tofu-avocado dip later. Well, I’ll know better next year.

Shrimp & avocado salad and vegetable sticks. The celery sticks were good with tofu-avocado dip, but I liked them with mentaiko paste, too.





Now, this was something new this year -- Key West Chicken. The recipe is here. There was only one chicken breast in my fridge, so I HAD TO make this dish successfully if I didn’t want to have a Christmas dinner without a main dish. I read the recipe reviews more carefully than usual, and I was glad that I did, because that saved my chicken from being too salty. I doubled the amount of lime juice and honey (but not soy sauce), marinated the chicken for 6 hours, and had a success (I wouldn’t say a great success, but it was pretty good.)

My cookies this year: Gingerbread people, thumbprint cookies with cherry jam and one of my staples, matcha cookies.






But what I liked the best was this: Sablés au Citron à la Fleur de Sel… something I cannot even pronounce. ;P I wanted something with citrus flavor to balance out the flavors of other cookies, and this recipe looked ideal especially now that I have the famous Fleur de Sel. (Thanks, LPC!!) :D You know, the recipe is from Chocolate and Zucchini, and chika of She Who Eats tried it out and loved it. How could this fail? And the result was, of course -- GREAT!

These Christmas tree cookies were just something I whipped up. I mixed the leftover matcha cookie dough with plain cookie dough to make “marble” dough. With the icing, don’t they look like snow-covered forest? (BTW, what do you call these tiny silver bits? Argent?)


I baked two kinds of cakes for my Christmas dinner this year -- fruitcake and orange pound cake. The fruitcake wasn’t bad, but I didn't notice as much rum flavor as I had expected. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the rum I used was a leftover from a long time ago. The orange pound cake was my last-minute addition: I just added grated orange rind and orange curacao to whatever pound cake recipe I found on the net. It made a good contrast with the fruitcake, I think, both color-wise and taste-wise.

I hope everyone had (or is having) a wonderful Christmas time. :D




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9 comments:

Carolie said...

Your dinner looks so lovely! Your photos are always so beautiful, and I love visiting your site to see them. Maybe one day I'll make it north from Sasebo and get to meet you!

As for the silver bits, when I buy them, they're called silver dragees (with an accent mark over the first "e). I haven't been able to find them for years...where did you purchase yours, please??

Merry Christmas!

Anonymous said...

your dinner looks so lovely! and I love all the nice sweet treats you made! my kind of dinner :)

Merry Christmas!

Anonymous said...

Obachan, Merry Christmas to you! Thanks for the gift box of cookies. In my imagination, they were the best cookies ever! There's a continent and an ocean between us, but you make it feel like a small world.

Anonymous said...

Merry Xmas Obachan... That really looks like a great Xmas feast...

Take care and have a great year ahead of you...

Anonymous said...

Obachan -

Looks like you had a wonderful christmas dinner. Everything looks so tasty.

My aunt sent me the "rooftile" cookies from japan I miss so much for christmas. I was very happy. Now I am looking forward to new year's celebration - mochi and rice & red bean....

The silver balls on the cookies are called "dragees" in the USA.

Shin nen omedeto Obachan!

obachan said...

carolie
Thank you. I’m happy that my camera captured the effect of the warm candle light successfully. Yeah, it’d be great if we could meet someday.
So the silver bits are called dragees. Thanks. :D I bought them at Jusco. They were one of those TOP VALUE brand items, so it won’t be hard to find. Good luck!

k & s
Thanks. Your Christmas dinner looked so tempting, too. ;)

june
Oh, how nice of you. I’m so glad to hear that you felt that way. Yeah, it’s a small world…

pinkity
Thank you. Same to you. : )

Denise in Chicago
Yeah, I enjoyed the dinner. Thanks.
I wonder what the rooftile cookies are… but anyway, New Year’s celebration is just around the corner and it’s going to keep everyone pretty busy over here.
Wish you a happy new year.

Anonymous said...

what a gorgeous christmas dinner. wish i were there! looks like a lot of food though for just one person.

Unknown said...

What lovely cookies, and all the other christmas blog entries too! How do you do the 2 pictures in one? That is cool!

obachan said...

anonymous commenter
Absolutely! I wish you were here to help me eat. I still have lots of cookies in my cookie jar and have no idea when I can finish them...

lannae
Thanks. These photos fill me with warmth everytime I see them so I'm very happy that I was able to create something like that.
The 2 pix in one trick is called "rollover." If you want to know how to do that, email me. ;)