Cooking

Christmas Eve

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Melissa and I have never spent Christmas Eve alone together. I mean, okay, it's not like we've been married for fifty years. We've only spent six Christmases together. But we were still delighted when we realized that we'd be spending Christmas Eve alone for the first time.

Melissa quickly suggested a plan, "You could make me a nice dinner." You know I hate cooking, but I relented after a half-second or so and set about planning the meal. I had the day off, so I decided to do something interesting.

For our opener, I wanted to make a salad with seared foie gras. I've made a few cold foie gras preparations over the last year, but I've never tried searing it. Michael Ginor of Hudson Valley Foie Gras argues in Foie Gras: A Passion that Americans prefer hot foie gras preparations. I'm not sure I agree with his cause and effect; I think American restaurants prefer serving foie gras hot because it's less time-consuming and safer than a terrine, and thus that's all the American public sees.

Ginor's book contains lots of creative recipes that I used to infer a basic technique for seared foie gras. Silvano Serventi's Le Livre de Foie Gras is probably a better source for techniques and preparations. I just didn't feel like translating. (By the way I think that's the first time I've ever linked to Amazon.com—even an international branch—from this site. If anyone knows of a good French bookstore I could link to and shop from, let me know.)

I cut two thick slices off a whole liver from Sonoma Foie Gras and kept them in the refrigerator while I prepped the salad (the rest of the liver became a terrine I'll bring to my mom's house on New Year's Eve). I reduced pomegranate juice by 2/3 to make a sauce, similar to the sauce for my magret salad. I sliced apples and chopped arugula coarsely (which I then dressed with Pasolivo olive oil from the gift basket that trashed my integrity). Then I heated a pan on a medium flame. I plated everything but the foie gras so that it would be properly warm when it hit the table.

When you put foie gras pieces onto a hot pan, they render fat. A lot of it. Foie gras is, after all, a normal duck liver swollen almost to the breaking point with fat. It's hard to avoid doing mental calculations of how much that fat costs as it leaks out of the foie and into the pan. I seared the pieces for about thirty to forty seconds on each side, until the pieces had a crisp exterior and a very soft, pudding-like interior. I drizzled the pomegranate reduction over the foie and the apples.

When you do a cold foie gras preparation, you often clean the liver to remove the veins that run through it (Carolyn recently sent me a link with good pictures of this process). This results in pieces of liver, which is fine if you're going to smush them in a terrine, less so if you want nicely shaped medallions. So it was odd to see the odd bit of vein in the seared piece. But I was happy with how it came out, well flavored and warm. Melissa is not super fond of foie gras, and so I took it as a good sign that she finished hers.

We had wine, but this will be yet another entry for Wine Blogging Wednesday 5 so you'll have to wait to hear about it. I'll just say it was a Bordeaux-style blend and it went well with the whole dinner.

For the main course, I went for classic winter food. I stole a page from Tom's winter party and made braised short ribs. He made Zinfandel Braised Short Ribs but I made Merlot Braised Short Ribs. When you cook wine down like I did, you lose just about any differences with other wines (on the other hand, if it's an unpleasant wine, it's just going to become more so). I bought the ribs from Potter Family Farms in the Ferry Building; this producer represents the pinnacle of beef. The cows are a closed herd, fed on grass, and the meat is dry-aged for 30 days. Of course they don't do this for free, but I'm happy to support this kind of meat. I braised the ribs in the wine (see below), and then reduced the resulting sauce by something like 75%. This produces a liquid so intensely flavored it doesn't need any sort of seasoning. At Tom's party, we made the sauce the same way, and we kept a small cup in the kitchen so that the kitchen staff could take sips from it.

I served the ribs with risotto flavored simply with Parmigianno-Reggiano and made with home made chicken stock. On the side, I served glazed turned vegetables. I missed the "turning party" at Tom's because I was making the crepes for my dish. But I loved the look of the veggies and I decided to try it on my own. As with so many things, I got the hang of it right as I finished up. Maybe I'll try it again soon. The glazing idea I took from Bouchon. It's a quintessential Thomas Keller recipe: glaze each vegetable in its own separate pan. I had neither the time nor equipment to do this, so I glazed the carrots, turnips, and radish all together. Sorry, Thomas. I'm sure it was some evil variant of the real thing.

I meant to make crème brulée for Melissa; it's a long-running joke that four or five years ago she got me crème brulée gear and I have yet to make this dish. I thought that I'd finally manage it, but time ran short, and Melissa bought us eclairs. I guess she'll have to wait until the next time we spend Christmas Eve alone.

Red Wine Braised Short Ribs
Buy some good quality short ribs still on the bone. Figure about a rib per person if you're serving other food. Leave the bone in and trim excess fat. Season with salt and pepper. Preheat the oven to 325°.

Heat a pan first over low heat for ten minutes and then over medium-high heat for another five minutes. Sear each rib on all meat sides. When all the ribs are done, degrease the pan and deglaze (off flame!) with red wine. Scrape off the fond but there's no need to reduce the wine at this point.

Put the ribs into a roasting pan (or into the same frying pan if you have just a few ribs and the pan has a lid), bone-side down. Pour in the wine from the pan, plus enough extra wine to go about 1/3 of the way up the ribs. Throw in some carrot ends if you've got them. Cover the pan well and put in the oven. If your cover is loose, you might need to replenish the wine as you go.

Cook for about three hours, but check every hour. Meat should be "fork tender" in the extreme; it should practically be falling apart. Remove ribs and reserve. You can make them earlier in the day: reheat in a low-heat oven close to service time. Strain the braising liquid into a pan, and reduce over a high flame on the stove top. Keep reducing. No, even more. Reduce until you feel like your chosen deity has spoken to you personally. If you're an atheist, reduce until you feel like you could believe in any god who allowed such a thing to exist. The sauce should be meaty and salty (but not overly so) and should make your eyes roll back in your head in ecstacy. Make this in advance if you can, and allow to cool so you can skim off the fat. Reheat over a gentle flame.

Spoon sauce over ribs and serve. Don't be shy with the sauce, but you won't have much. Serve with a pleasant red wine. You don't want a food-unfriendly tannin monster (so, no Napa wines), but you want something that can stand up to the deep flavors.

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Cooking