Doorbells and Sleigh Bells and Schnitzel with Potatoes

Easter is for ham, Thanksgiving is for turkey, and at our house, Christmas Eve is for steak. If I'm cooking other holiday meals, I like to try out new recipes. If it's a fancy dinner with out-of-town guests and a deadline (church, a concert, etc.)--what could go wrong? For Christmas one year I baked salmon with dill sauce; another time blackberry-glazed pork; and in 2007 it was Cornish hens with pomegranate and date salad (left). Two years ago for New Year's Eve I made lentil patties and black-eyed peas (of course). This year I decided to try my hand at Wiener schnitzel for the first time. I used a recipe offered by the Austrian government.

I had made chicken parmesan for the first time a few months earlier, and it turns out that the methods are similar: meat coated in flour, next egg, then bread crumbs and fried in oil/butter. Although Wiener Schnitzel is Dear Husband's favorite dish when he visits Central Europe, he didn't get to enjoy any of this, as he had an early call time. The rest of us ate schnitzeled veal scallopini, sauteed green beans, and boiled parsley potatoes. In retrospect, this kind of dish does not make a very good party dish, because it is hard to mass produce. I fried them independently in a pan and kept the cooked ones in a warm oven. Here are a few photos.

The veal scallopini were so thin that they didn't require
much application of a saran-wrapped rolling pin.

From right to left, plain flour, 2 eggs with 1 tbsp oil, Italian bread crumbs.
Add grated parmesan cheese to make chicken parmesan.

On the left are green beans in sesame oil with soy sauce and sesame seeds.
I like green beans steamed, but DH prefers them this way.

The finished products, with lemon and parsley.
And a sweet rose wine from Ohio in the background.

Then it was off to the theater to revel in a night of one of my favorite things: Broadway tunes!