Cooking with Frau Doktor Doctor: Christmas Edition

Him: "You? Freelanced? In the kitchen?"

Me: "I plead the fifth."

You see, Dear Reader, I wanted to make Creamy potato broccoli soup for our Christmas Eve dinner. Because Dear Husband is a church musician, he works on Christmas Eve, so we can't leave town to celebrate with family until at least Christmas Day (sometimes later depending on our respective work schedules). When we lived in Champaign, DH would be gone for most of Christmas Eve either rehearsing or playing for one of several church services, so I asked him to come home in between, usually for a steak dinner by the light of the unity candle we had lit at our wedding.

This year he suggested thawing the Montgomery Inn ribs his parents had sent for his birthday. Usually I would make his favorite side dish--mashed potatoes--but I came upon this plant-based recipe and decided to give it a go. Let's just say, I should have re-read the directions before starting. Here's how to prepare it, Frau Doktor Doctor style:

1. Once you've located the recipe on your phone after much fruitless searching on your laptop, put on a nice holiday movie like Love Actually, Die Hard, or ... The Beguiled (the recent Sophia Coppola version). In my defense, I thought it was a ghost story based on the trailer a couple years ago. (Ghost stories are too appropriate for the holidays; Exhibit A: A Christmas Carol.) Spoiler alert: The Beguiled is not a ghost story. It is a whole movie with a singular plot line that, when it is over, makes you wonder, Was that all? (Reader: it was.)

2. Assemble ingredients: 2 pounds Yukon gold potatoes (or whatever fingerlings are leftover in the fridge, since we were imminently leaving town), 3 garlic cloves (for the first time in my life, I actually used fewer than the recipe suggested, because the head I currently have offers enormous cloves), 1 large yellow onion (eh, I had a half leftover from something or other), 3 tbsp extra virgin oil (now this I had), 1 quart vegetable broth (oops, the carton in the pantry was chicken broth), 1/2 raw unsalted cashews (all we had were honey roasted), 1 pound frozen broccoli florets or 4 cups steamed fresh (I opted for the latter), 1 large carrot (check), 1 tsp dried thyme (ground or flaked?), 3/4 tsp dried dill (yes), 2 tsp white wine vinegar (located at the back of the cupboard), 1 tsp Dijon mustard (oui).

3. Figure that the potatoes will take the longest to cook, so chop them into a pot of boiling water.

4. Since the broccoli was supposed to be well cooked, chop that next and start to steam it.

5. Dice the onion, mince the garlic, and skip the step about stripping the potatoes of their most nutritious part (aka the peel). Sauté in olive oil.

6. Add cashews and a pinch salt. Note that you were supposed to cook the potatoes in the broth in this pot. Too late now.

7. All of the potatoes are supposed to fit into a blender?? You're making a generous batch, so figure it will have to be done in parts. Blend several spoonfuls of potatoes with a generous splash of broth and a spoonful of broccoli. 

8. Pour this into the pan with the onion and garlic. Re-read the directions again and finally comprehend that only the potatoes were supposed to be blended, not the broccoli. Whoops.

9. Jiggle the blender, plug and unplug it, and hope that the smell of burning motor doesn't mean it's dead.

10. Blend the rest of the potatoes. With the rest of the broth (works better that way).

11. Heat everything in the pot with the rest of the seasonings and "julienned" carrot strips. Decide you had selected an extra large carrot and eventually eat what's left as a cook's tax because you have plenty of carrot ribbons, and you know DH doesn't particularly them.

12. Serve hot with some crusty bread! This was the first course for our Christmas Eve dinner of ribs, homemade orange-cranberry sauce with walnuts on a bed of spinach, and rosemary roasted carrots. It was okay, definitely not as life changing as the online recipe promised. It probably could have used a little more salt and to have cooked down some. Looks like it will freeze well to have in January on a night when we don't feel like cooking.

To drink: leftover Orange Crush soda from the hospital. To watch: Downton Abbey.

We actually had a second dinner with friends after the Christmas Eve service: butternut squash soup, homemade wheat loaf, lasagna, and the green salad pictured above with red pepper, spicy pepitas, bakery-bought baguette. I had contemplated making some whipped rosemary butter but gave up for lack of time. However, I did improvise a salad dressing from this recipe, swapping a rest of a packet of sriracha sauce for the freshly grated ginger. It had just enough kick to be interesting! The special treat of course were the pomegranate seeds, which I will only spend the half hour of picky labor on for this particular hostess.

For Christmas morning brunch, I baked cinnamon waffles and made this pear compote topping. I used half as much brown sugar, included the special rum vanilla from cousin EH, and punched up the plating with cinnamon, walnut halves, and pomegranate seeds. Not only was it delicious, but it sustained us through noontime mass at the Catholic cathedral.

Here you can see what we did for Advent already. We still have to travel to Ohio to celebrate with that part of the family. New Year's will be a balancing act between work, travel, and small celebrations. With 55 degrees and rain, it could hardly be more different than Christmas 2020. This is last year's post, although what we remember most is a snowy walk late on Christmas Eve to look at lights on the houses, and a snowy walk on Christmas Day through Frick Park. I'm finishing this blog after a nice long, rather damp walk around the neighborhood to look at lights. It's time to go to bed with my new book (Atul Gawande's Being Mortal from DH), with the lights on the tree shining through the doorway. Merry Christmas!