Not your average Christmas meal…

We couldn’t let this month go by without doing some sort of “holiday themed” post. We were scratching our head trying to come up with this months “Top 5″ contest thinking of such winners as, “Top 5 Most Friggin’ Annoying Christmas Tunes” and “Top 5 Christmas Sweaters Your Mom Owns” but settled on our original, and simple, idea of asking you to divulge your Top 5 favorite foods and/or drinks that you only really have around the holidays.

The first Christmas Jonny and I spent together was his first Christmas living in America. It was a bittersweet time for him because it was a reminder that he was really, really living in the US and not going home to the UK for awhile. It was also a serious reminder to him that he was stuck spending more time with my family than with his own. Not that there was anything wrong with him thinking this – my family is very loud, very loving and very crazy (in a good way?) and a quiet ‘ole Englishman would sometimes love to press the “mute” button on all of us every once in awhile if he could. That first Christmas, I thought I was pretty clear about our family’s traditions. We “do it up” for Christmas Eve dinner and our Christmas Day is basically spent leisurely opening up gifts and watching 5 reruns of “A Christmas Story” in a row only to be interrupted around 1PM by my mother screaming “brunch is on the table”. Brunch usually consists of some eggs, scrapple, pork roll, bagels and anything else that is found in the fridge. It’s nothing really that special, I guess.

This particular Christmas, I believe we all slept in. If memory serves correct, we all didn’t start opening up gifts till about 1PM and brunch was moved to about 3 or 3.30PM. After brunch we continued our normal Christmas Day which usually also involves a nap. Jonny and I awoke from our nap on the couch to find my sister also asleep and my mom and dad gone. They were invited to the neighbor’s house for dinner as were we. But Jonny was still in his “getting to know everyone” phase and, during this time, he was often treated as a specimen, being poked and prodded as though no one had ever encountered anyone from another country in their life. “So you really are English, Jonny, huh!? That’s soooo cool!”

A Ginger-Bling Would be a Fine, Strong Christmas Drink

Needless to say, Jonny didn’t want to go to the neighbors. He pouted as he looked around wondering what the frig was going on. “It’s Christmas! Where is everybody? When is everyone going to start cooking!?” I sat there unable to really understand why he was so upset, “Well, Jonny, we don’t really cook Christmas Day dinner. We have our big night on Christmas eve. I guess we could just go to the neighbors if you want to eat.” He couldn’t believe it… he began to get very irritated and sad… actually sad! As the night unfolded, we ended having our first disagreement based on our different Christmas traditions. I tried to do the best I could to make him feel better pouring him a huge glass of something strong and telling him we were going to make this work. WE were going to cook our own Christmas Day dinner. In my fantasy we’d start our own tradition. And then we looked in my parents fridge – nothing, not even leftovers from Christmas Eve dinner. We looked in the freezer – holy shit. Nothing but a ball of hamburger meat!!! And then I walked to the pantry with a desperate look on my face and there it was in all it’s glory – a can of Sloppy Joe mix. And that’s what I made my new love who moved across the ocean to be with me – canned slopply joe on toast. Why he’s still here I’ll never know. One thing I can tell you is that sloppy joe’s will NOT be on Jonny’s Top 5 Holiday Food list!

So, without further ado, I have based my Top 5 Favorite Holiday Food/Drink on the traditions I grew up with. You know, those things that only rear their head in December or only on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.

1. My mom’s kind of gross, but very delicious Crab Dip that is on the app table every Christmas Eve (recipe involves mayo, cream cheese, sherry and lump crab or KRAB if you must).
2. Chestnuts (roasted on an open fire – kidding, we’ve never done that at home)
3. Egg Nog (the processed kind that is local to the Philadelphia region – ie: Wawa brand)
4. This delicious appetizer that our good family friend always bring over that involves a dried apricot topped with nuts and some cream cheese. Not sure what the hell it’s called but it’s DAMN good.
5. Communion. Let’s be honest, the lord’s communion tastes better after 2 cosmo’s, 6 glasses of wine and 2 Sambuca’s before midnight mass.

Hey, Jonny, why don’t you chime in with your Top 5?

1. mulled wine (gluhwein/vin chaud). Nothing says Christmas to me like the taste and smell of the aromatic spices in mulled wine, not to mention that warm alcohol goes straight to your head.
2. brandy or rum butter/hard sauce: I actually hate this stuff with a passion, but again it’s redolent of the Christmases of my youth when my grandma (gawd bless her) would have a tiny piece of Christmas pudding topped with about a pint of hard sauce, and then pass out about half an hour later. Not sure whether it was the booze or the cholesterol.
3. mince pies: another English tradition, but this one I really like. there’s no mince (it’s dried fruit & nuts, sugar and spices) in a sweet pastry sprinkled with sugar. perfect combination is a glass of mulled wine in one hand and a mince pie in the other, possibly mumbling some Christmas carols and trying not to spit raisins and hazelnut bits everywhere.
4. cheddar cheese and pineapple cubes on cocktail sticks: the essential 1980s hors d’oeuvre that always seems to get resurrected at Christmas.
5. Christmas cake: again, I’m not that keen on this traditional cake of dried fruit, nuts, sugar and spice wrapped in marzipan (frangipane) and thick white icing which is left to improve for at least a month before Yule, especially since I have awful memories of taking my sister’s Barbie plate and destroying my mother’s perfectly smooth icing one year and making her cry.

Nominate and Win!
Tell us what your top five Holiday comestibles are and win yourself some hand-made sachets of mulling spices and enjoy the holidays with some spiced-up booze!

Usually if I’m trying to make an authentic dish, I always try to make it just that – authentic. That means that I want to use traditional ingredients and I attempt to research the many traditional ways to make that specific dish. I then decide how to combine the best bits from all those traditional recipes and create one recipe. Well, this traditional, old Castillian dish is always made with almonds – more specifically the beautiful Marcona almonds which are bigger and sweeter and more delicious (to me) than the almonds we know here in America. As Penelope Casas writes, “(Pollo en Pepitoria) combines all of the ingredients most often associated with Spanish cooking – garlic, saffron, sherry and almonds – into an unusually savory sauce.” DOH! As I began cooking, I could have sworn I had a fresh bag of almonds to work with only to find that it was a bag of fresh hazelnuts. Could I swap? Yeah… could I call it authentic on my blog… nope. What I can tell you is substituting hazelnuts in this dish for almonds does not actually change the flavor all that much. But the thing that I really decided to do to completely different from the traditional dish was to actually coat the pieces of chicken in hazelnuts and lightly saute them until crispy on the outside and finished them in the oven to keep it moist inside. You all like it moist, right? But, dear readers, you must know that traditionally you would just roll pieces of chicken with the bone in in some seasoned flour and saute them just like that in olive oil.

So, do I have a right to really call this dish Pollo en Pepitoria? Probably not. Do I hate when idiots like Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee completely remake an authentic classic an continue calling it by it’s authentic name but it doesn’t even resemble the original dish? YES. Am I being a bit of a hypocrite right now – uh-huh. Do I care? Not really. It’s only because I’ve been wanting to post this recipe for about 2 months now and it’s 75 degrees and sunny and I want to get outside. Creative juices ain’t a-flowing.

So here’s Pollo en Pepitoria “Kinda”. That’s as creative as it’s gonna get today, kids. Have a beautiful weekend!

If you’re interested, please check out one of our favorite blogs about Spain, all things Spanish and life in Spain – Notes from Spain – a few years ago they posted a recipe for Pollo en Pepitoria.

POLLO EN PEPITORIA “KINDA” – CHICKEN IN A SAFFRON, FINO AND HAZELNUT SAUCE (serves 6)

Ingredients:

• 6 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 1 cup flour (seasoned with a bit of salt)
• 2 eggs, beaten + tablespoon of water
• 1 1/2 to 2 cups chopped hazelnuts (to coat chicken) + 1/4 cup of finely ground hazelnuts (to add to sauce)
• olive oil or vegetable oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced or sliced
• 1 carrot, chopped
• 1/4 cup of dry sherry (fino)
• 1 bay leaf
• 3/4 cup chicken broth
• pinch of fresh grated nutmeg
• pinch of saffron
• salt and pepper
• Optional: 2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped, for garnish

What to do:

1. Heat your oven up to 425 degrees and season your chicken breasts with salt and pepper.
2. Make sure you slightly crush or run a sharp knife through your hazelnuts (the 1 1/2 to 2 cups called for to coat the chicken) in order to make sure they are able to stick to the chicken breasts. Have your ‘coating station’ ready by putting flour on the first plate, the beaten egg mixed with water on the second plate and the chopped hazelnuts spread out on the third plate.
3. Heat up about 1/4 inch of oil in an oven-safe pan or skillet on medium heat. Dip each chicken breast first in the flour (dust off any major excess), then the egg and finally roll around in the crushed hazelnuts. Add to your hot oil and cook on each side for about 1 to 2 minutes on each side. You want the hazelnuts to seal on to the chicken, but not to burn. Check after a minute and then, if necessary, continue to saute for another 30 seconds or so. If there’s not enough room in your pan to cook all the chicken breasts at once (don’t overcrowd!!), do it in batches and just reserve the chicken on the side until all are sauteed.
4. When the chicken has been cooked on both sides and the hazelnuts have adhered, put in your 425 degree oven and allow to cook for another 10-13 minutes, depending on the thickness of your chicken. If the chicken is done before you sauce, just remove from oven and allow to chill out on the side for a bit. It’s ok if it gets cool.



5. Make your sauce by adding the chopped onion, garlic and carrot to some olive oil in a pan and allow to saute on medium to medium-low for about 4 or 5 minutes till they get a bit soft.
6. After they cook till they are a bit softer, add your fino and scrape up some of the bits on the bottom of the pan. After about a minute, add your chicken broth, nutmeg, saffron, bay leaf and a pinch of salt and pepper. Simmer for 10 minutes.



7. While the vegetables are busy getting soft, in a blender or food processor (or with a good old mallet), blitz the 1/4 cup of hazelnuts till finely ground… I mean finely kids! Remove to a bowl until they are needed.
8. Optional: Boil two eggs for 8 minutes to hard-boil. When done, remove and place in cold water, allowing them to cool. De-shell and chop up for the garnish.
9. When 10 minutes or so has passed and you’ve tested the carrots for softness, REMOVE THE BAY LEAF and add everything from the pan to a blender or food processor. Blitz this mixture until smooth. Add the blitzed sauce back to the pan and keep warm on low-medium heat. Add the finely ground hazelnuts to the sauce and stir in – this will act as a thickener.

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10. Add your hazelnut-coasted chicken breast to the sauce and place back in your oven for 4 minutes to allow the chicken to come back to temperature if necessary. When it’s out of the oven, sprinkle the top with the chopped hard-boiled egg and enjoy!

Check out these other posts you may enjoy:

• WATERCRESS & RICOTTA RAVIOLI WITH A RADICCHIO BUTTER SAUCE
• GNOCCHI DI PATATE WITH A BROWN BUTTER, SAGE, BREADCRUMB SAUCE
• ITALIAN-STYLE SLOW ROASTED PORK SHOULDER WITH SALSA VERDE
• Truffled Butter: A Prince Among Ideas
• Pork Roll and Scrapple – The Dirty Culinary Pride of South Jersey/Philly
• Diversity Finally Comes to The Food Network

Regular readers will know that we are big fans of the phenomenon that is cabrales cheese (non-regular readers should read this post before proceeding any further with this one, as it’s important to know the ingredient you’re dealing with) but we’ve yet to include it in any of our cooking. Here was an opportunity to incorporate perhaps the world’s wildest cheese into a dish so cunning that, to mix a metaphor, you could cut yourself on it.

Seriously, you might think I’m exaggerating here, but quite apart from that not being what we do here at We Are Never Full (we keep it real, believe), I am not exaggerating one bit. This was the best salad I’ve had in a very, very long time. And, while we wouldn’t normally insult your intelligence by pretending to tell you how to put a salad together, we’re asking you to bear with us here and read on. You’ll be glad you did.

We’ve decided to submit this recipe to Kalyn at Kalyn’s Cooking (a most excellent blog) for her Weekend Herb Blogging series. This time around it’s being hosted by Jugalbandi, so head over there before 3PM today to submit yours!

Ensalada de Cabrales (for 2 people)

Ingredients

1 large apple – gala, fuji, granny smith, golden delicious, but not McIntosh type

2oz strong cabrales or your favorite blue cheese

3 hazelnuts (shelled, roasted, but unsalted)

1tbsp good cider vinegar

3tbsp your best olive oil

1 tsp finely chopped chives

salt & black pepper

Recipe

Peel and core apple, then using a mandolin (if you have one, otherwise your trusty chef’s knife will suffice) slice the apple to a uniform thickness of about 1/4 inch (1/2cm)

Arrange apples on serving dish however you like and crumble over the cheese. Feel free to use more, but you easily be over-generous with cabrales, so beware.

Combine oil, vinegar, salt & pepper (as a vinaigrette) and spoon liberally over apples and cheese.

Then, take your microplane grater or the fine side of your box grater and grate your hazelnuts. Sprinkle this “hazelnut salt” followed by the chives over your salad and serve immediately.

CHECK OUT SOME OTHER POSTS YOU MAY ENJOY:

• SWEET ANISE-FLAVORED SALMON IN A POUCH (SALMON EN PAPILLOTE)
• CLAMS WITH WHITE WINE AND CHORIZO
• WINE-BRAISED LAMB SHANKS WITH ROSEMARY AND THYME IN PRESSURE COOKER GNOCCHI DI PATATE WITH A BROWN BUTTER, SAGE, BREADCRUMB SAUCE
• Fabada: A Mortal and Corporal Sin – But Worth It!
• Jamon, Jamon
• Vermut (Vermouth): Rediscovering an Old Classic