Pages

Friday 29 December 2017

Talking turkey

A dish of prawn cocktail and a glass of champagne
By: Mrs Robot

We had turkey for Christmas dinner this year.

"Yeah, yeah," you say, "everyone has turkey at Christmas." But we usually have goose, so this was a bit of a departure for us.

We also often have visitors on either Christmas Day or Boxing Day, but this time it was just the two of us (plus two greedy cats). It made the whole thing much more relaxed than usual. Mr Robot took over cooking duties. We started with prawn cocktail. That can sometimes be a bit of a sad dish, with teeny little prawns and some sweetener-laden glop out of a bottle, but in this case the sauce was made from scratch, covering the big, beautiful prawns we had in the freezer, and it all felt really luxurious. The prawns were so large the six we had each felt almost too much. And the hint of smoked paprika in the sauce really benefitted the whole dish. I could eat a lot of that!

After that we moved on to the classic turkey dinner.

A Christmas dinner of roast turkey, roast potatoes and roast parsnips
Beautifully roasted turkey, pigs in blankets (for any Americans reading this, over here that's sausage wrapped in bacon, not sausage wrapped in pastry), roast parsnips,  roast carrots, sprouts sauteed with bacon, red cabbage cooked with apple, and a magnificent stuffing cake: breadcrumbs, cranberries, sage, onion and sausage meat wrapped in - you guessed it, MOAR BACON - and baked. To be honest, I could have said 'We had bacon for Christmas dinner this year' and probably not told a lie. All of it was covered in delicious gravy. Mr Robot puts a lot of effort into his gravies, taking great pride in their richness and depth of flavour.
A stuffing cake wrapped in bacon.
The cats had a little dish of plain turkey each; they'd only wander round scrounging if we didn't give them anything at all.

The thing with such a big dinner is there are lots of leftovers. We don't usually get many leftovers with goose, so it's actually a bit of a treat. How can people get fed up of leftovers? It's like the best-ever kitchen challenge: one meat, redo it in as many different ways as possible. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! The stuffing cake is fantastic sliced and put in bread rolls for sandwiches, I've already turned some of the turkey into a turkey and ham pie, and tonight we'll be having a turkey curry. We've stocked the carcass so we can have a lovely turkey soup at some point. I also considered making a Vietnamese-inspired turkey salad, though I don't know if the turkey will stretch that far.
A cat sitting on a dining chair eyeing the cheese board.
Though we'd cooked a pudding, the turkey dinner was so substantial and filling we couldn't face it, so picked at the cheese board and chatted instead. Here's Pippin on Mr Robot's chair, eyeing up an impressively reeky Petit Gagny.

Merry Christmas!


4 comments:

  1. Stuffing cake on a roll sounds like the sort of thing I could live on. It all looks delicious, and worth the work. Merry Christmas and happy New Year to both of you (and the kittens).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Stuffing cake is awesome. Thinking about it, it's like having a terrine as an accompaniment.

      Delete
  2. Looks delicious & sounds fab! I miss prawn cocktails.
    Awww.......Pippin says "Just a nibble puh-leeez Mom?"
    Happy New Year!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Pippin is a terrible scrounger. Actually, they both are, being gutter cats originally. Ziggy has a 'cat tree' by the dining table and knows he's allowed to join us at the table as long as he sits on his tree. As soon as he puts a paw on the table, he gets moved to the floor.

      Delete