last adventures of the year

There is a point, at least for me, during every holiday season when all the preparation, the wishing and hoping, anticipation, and even the very real enjoyment of the exciting days and evenings begin to give way to a wish to simplify my life!  To clear away the trees, the decorations, the burnt-down candles, the needles EVERYWHERE, and put everything carefully away for next year.  The silver bells get wrapped in tissue paper and packed away…

The fragile ornaments go in their own tissue paper, the more robust things like tiny pairs of skates and ponies and fairies dressed in holiday clothes are placed carefully on just a bed of tissue paper, to spend the next 11 months discussing how they hate hanging from hooks.  The lights are wound up around John’s arm and packed away with the stockings and the tree skirt…

But before I can rest and enjoy my clean, post-holiday house, I must tell you a bit of our adventures and share a couple of recipes that will put you right back in the cooking mood, ready to pitch the last crust of pumpkin pie and start fresh.  So off we go.

Our wedding anniversary takes place on December 30, which is always a bit of an awkward day because Christmas is still fresh in our minds (especially when we celebrated it a day late to begin with!), and New Year’s is looming.  Of course in our early days we gave a great deal of thought to the perfect, secret gift for each other: cufflinks with Avery’s initials for John, tiny gold earrings for me with five diamonds in each, for our 10th anniversary.  Then, somewhere along the line, we took up a tradition of waking up on the day, saying, “Happy Anniversary” to each other in the warmest of tones, and… forgetting about it for the duration!

This year our anniversary was marked mainly by The Snowball Fight of the Century.  I wish I could tell you it was fought between equals, but… alas… Avery’s father can never find anyone his own size to pick on.

He began in fine paternal protective style, saying as she raised the first snowball, “Don’t start something you can’t finish.”  And from there it degenerated into total abandon.  She’s on the ground at his feet?  Check, cue for smashing the snow in her hair.  A big blue saucer sled appears?  Fine, he uses it to throw even greater quantities of snow in her face.  Does she give up?  No way.  Not this girl.

Tenacious is the word.

Anne and David looked on in what I think was the silence of sheer horror, as their adored toddler daughter Kate played at their feet.  Will the day come when Dave beats up his little girl in a freezing missile battle?  Time will tell.

Home we came under a perfect blue sky, to put Avery in a nice warm bath with a cup of hot chocolate.  She stayed in that bath for about three hours.  Fully deserved.   Meanwhile, John’s mom and I concocted a really delicious, exotic, sort of essentially anti-Christmas anniversary dish.  Not a clove, potato or pumpkin in sight.  Pure Asia.

Sweet and Spicy Anniversary Shrimp

(serves 4)

2 dozen large shrimp, shells on, heads off

3 tbsps toasted sesame oil

4 tbsps soy sauce

chilli sauce (to taste, depending how hot it is and hot you want your sauce)

juice of 1 lime, plus zest

2 tbsps hoisin (plum) sauce

2 tbsps Japanese mirin (rice wine)

6 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp powdered ginger

basmati rice to steam and serve with shrimp

Cut up the back of each shrimp till you get to the tail, then set all the shrimp into a large shallow bowl.

Mix all the other ingredients but the rice and pour over shrimp.  Mix them with your hands, pushing the marinade into the backs of the shrimp.  leave to marinate as long as you like (we had about an hour).

Heat a large frying pan till very hot indeed, and pour in the shrimp, standing back as it spits!  Stir fry the shrimp until just cooked, perhaps 2-3 minutes total depending on the size of the shrimp.  Serve with steamed rice and plenty of napkins.

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This dish is the perfect “Christmas is over” dish!  Savory and unusual, exotic and fun to peel, you’ll love these shrimp.

The next day I spent in the kitchen with my intrepid companion John’s mom, preparing one of my favorite dishes of all time (and now a firm favorite of our traditional New Year’s Eve guests, Anne and David – and unbelievably Kate as well!).  It was the sort of day I dream of when I’m just slogging through a day of work and domesticity in London: looking at out our snowy farmland, the red barns against the white, watching the birds on John’s feeders, and taking in a whole slate of soap operas as the day winds on.  Cozy!

Cassoulet

(serves at least 12)

for the con­fit:
4 duck legs
coarse sea salt
4 fat gar­lic cloves, finely chopped
4 bay leaves, bro­ken in half
1 cup white wine

for the cas­soulet:
4 Toulouse sausages (or mild Italian in the US)
350g/12oz belly pork, skinned and diced (just plain bacon if you’re in the US)
350g/12oz lamb neck fil­let or rolled breast, diced (shoulder chops will work)
1 large onion, chopped roughly
2 large car­rots, chopped roughly
2 cel­ery sticks, chopped roughly
400g/14oz can chopped toma­toes
1 tbsp tomato purée
2 heaped tbsp fresh flat leaf pars­ley, chopped
1 heaped tbsp fresh thyme, chopped
sea salt and pep­per
290ml/½ pint dry white wine
2 cans hari­cot or can­nellini beans, drained and rinsed
850ml/1½pt chicken stock

for the top­ping:
1 large day-old baguette (or 1 cup fresh home­made bread­crumbs)
2 fat gar­lic cloves, halved
4 tbsp but­ter
2 heaped tbsp fresh flat leaf pars­ley, chopped
1 heaped tbsp fresh thyme, chopped

Place the duck legs skin side down in a skil­let with a lid, sprin­kle with the salt, gar­lic and bay leaves and pour the white wine around. Place the lid on top and cook at the tini­est sim­mer pos­si­ble, for two hours. Of course, for real con­fit you’d pour the winey fat over the duck and pre­serve it, but no need for that step here, as you’ll be using the duck straightaway.

Mean­while, place the sausages in a 220C/425F oven and bake for 20 min­utes. Set aside to cool.

In a large stove­top– and oven­proof dish that will hold all the ingre­di­ents, place the belly pork and heat gen­tly until fat begins to be released, then raise heat and cook, stir­ring occa­sion­ally, until all the fat has been released and the pork is crisp, but not dry. Lift the pork onto a plate with a slot­ted spoon, leav­ing all the fat behind.

Add the lamb to the pork fat and cook until col­ored on all sides, then lift out with slot­ted spoon and set aside with the pork.

Add the diced veg­eta­bles to the pork fat and cook till soft. Tip the ingre­di­ents from the plate back into the dish. Add the toma­toes, tomato purée and herbs, then sea­son with sea salt and pep­per to taste.

Add the wine, hari­cot beans and chicken stock to the dish and bring to the boil. Stir, then lower the heat so the liq­uid is just sim­mer­ing. Keep the mix­ture in the same dish to cook or trans­fer it to an earth­en­ware dish.

When the duck has cooked for two hours, remove it from the wine and fat and cool to han­dle. Remove the skin from the duck, then tuck the duck legs into the cassoulet.

Peel off the sausage skins, slice the sausage­meat thickly on the diag­o­nal and add to the dish.

Cover the dish and bake for 1 hour, stir­ring once. Stir, then cook uncov­ered for a fur­ther 1–1½ hours, stir­ring halfway, until the meat is really ten­der and the sauce is thick­ened. Take the dish out of the oven and remove the duck legs. Strip the meat from the bones (it will fall off eas­ily) and return the meat to the dish. Stir and add a lit­tle water, if nec­es­sary. Sea­son if nec­es­sary, then return to the oven and bake for another 15 min­utes until all the meat and beans are very tender.

For the top­ping, cut the crusts off the baguette, tear the bread into pieces and put in a food proces­sor. Add the gar­lic and chop into coarse crumbs (you should have about a cup of gar­licky bread crumbs).

Heat the but­ter in a large fry­ing pan until siz­zling, then stir fry the bread­crumbs and gar­lic over a mod­er­ate to high heat for 7–8 min­utes until crisp and golden. Remove from the heat, toss in the herbs and stir to mix, then sea­son well with salt and pepper.

Ladle the cas­soulet in gen­er­ous serv­ings into warm bowls, sprin­kle on a bit of top­ping, and serve.

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Don’t be intimidated by the seemingly endless list of ingredients!  It’s just an assembly job, and if you have plenty of time and someone – like John’s mom – to chat with as you cook, it makes for a delightful day.  And with a salad and some baguette bites, you have a MAGNIFICENT supper.  It’s rich, each bite is slightly different from the last, it’s complex and garlicky and sustaining.  Just right to get your New Year started on a delicious note.  I didn’t take a photo because it’s not a pretty dish, it’s a peasant dish.  But the table looked lovely.

And to have our dear, beloved neighbors with us that evening, enjoying Kate’s growing conversational skills, listening to Avery’s tales of her Russian adventures, sipping hot cups of tea after dinner and just relaxing, was the sort of treat we dream of and all too rarely get to enjoy.

And we needed our energy, because that afternoon, Jill and Joel arrived to drop off Jane and Molly so they could attend their beloved (well, Joel’s beloved) Phish concert!  The next 24 hours went by in a blur of Jane’s energy, Molly’s sudden ability to say whatever comes to mind (mostly “what is THIS?” when she sees a new thing), and feeding the two insatiable children.  “Breakfast for dinner” was the requested menu, so we tucked into pancakes with my friend Judy’s homemade plum preserves, sausages and bacon.  Story after story (John reading to Molly, I to Jane) and then a rather welcome bedtime.  How embarrassing that two small children could drain four adults of all energy!  I counted Avery as an adult for the duration, and her entertaining skills were more than up to the task.

The next day brought adventures on the swingsets across the road, and a frisky game of “Fox and Geese” suggested by John’s mom.

Once we’d fed the girls a quite amazing pizza from our local pizzeria and Molly had enjoyed a nap, their parents arrived and took them home, full of the stories of their sleepover date.  And just in time because as they pulled away, another car pulled up containing Jessica, another of the kittens of the summer!  Here for a playdate with Jessamy.

Yes, that’s right, a kitty playdate.  Jessica came accompanied by her two parents, which means that for the duration of their time together that cold afternoon, there were two cats surrounded by six adults, all of us totally transfixed by the sight of the two furry sisters, trying to get to know each other again.  We are all fools, but it was great fun.

And how our entire holiday was dominated by The Puzzle That Ate Christmas!  It was my bright idea to order a personalized puzzle from Wentworth, a great company in England (there must be something similar here?) who will take your favorite and create a gorgeous wooden puzzle from it.  But beware: these puzzles are menacingly difficult!  John’s mom, Avery and I spent endless infuriating hours on it.  But here ’tis.  Well worth the torment!

I think, though, that my entire family would agree on the most wonderful moment of the Christmas season.  Remember how I told you I was planning presents that would be wanted only by the people who would receive them?  Well, no gift fit this description better than what Avery found in the mailbox, two days ago.

Are you among the lucky folks who know the satirical songwriting of Tom Lehrer?  He is a singer-pianist-performer who is also really a Harvard mathematician, and his songs, mostly from the 1960s, have been part of my personal lore since childhood, because my parents were massive fans.  “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Vatican Rag,” all his other wickedly clever works are without peer in the songwriting world.  He actually stopped performing and went back to teaching math because he got tired of repeating all his own songs!

Our family’s favorite, probably, is “The Elements,” in which he lists in perfect rhyming order all the elements of the chemical table, ending with “These are all the ones from which the news has come to Haaaaar-vard, and there may be many others but they haven’t been dis-caaaaahvered.”

It sounds crazy.  Probably he is.

But one day Avery recited this song in her chemistry class to the avowed amazement of her teacher, who mentioned it in her report card.  So I, stealthily, put it in an envelope and sent it off to Professor Lehrer with a note from me explaining Avery’s addiction to his music and asking him to sign it and send it back.  And this is what came in the mail, that frosty late afternoon of the New Year.

She is, needless to say, in a state of complete amazement.  He WROTE TO HER.  “Dear Avery.”  How cool is that?

My Christmas was complete, at that moment.

And so we slide gently into 2011, ready for whatever adventures our busy London life will contain.  But to sustain us will be memories of our happy, crazy, busy, candlelit, delicious, love-filled holiday of 2010.

And of warm fires burning, a kitty sleeping.