I hope you all had some great holiday feasts over the past Holiday week. I know mine was filled with lots of amazing food.
My Week of great food intake started out Christmas eve when my family was invited to the Italian Christmas Eve tradition of the "Feast of the Seven Fishes". Traditionally there are seven seafood dishes served at this holiday meal. Since it was a small group, there were only five. Awe shucks. Only five different seafood dishes for a seafood lover. Poor me right? What a meal!!! We started out with Linguine topped with Lobster sauce. The Lobster started off alive like most crustaceans do before cooking them. The Lobster is Quartered (which is slightly barbaric when you think about it. You have to quarter it alive.) Then it is sautéed in some oil and garlic. After it gets that nice rich red color, crushed tomatoes are added. That's all. Just simmer it for about 30 minutes you have lobster sauce. It was so delicious.
Next we had both Shrimp and Scallops fried in oil with just a simple covering of flour for color and flavor. Also served was Baccala which I believe is a salted cod. This fish has to be soaked in some sort of liquid to wash off all the salt. when that is done, it is simply reheated and served. If you like salt, you will like this dish. the final dish was a seafood salad that had Octopus, Calamari, and Shrimp in a pasta salad. it was very refreshing but you have to like the chewy seafood proteins of the octopus or calamari.
It was great experiience for me and my family and I was so grateful to have been invited to this tradition.
A few days later the family went up to Vermont to join the Christmas Eve family at the home of our friends. Since we are all foodies, we each took a night. the first night was Italian Ragu night. The very thick sauce that layed atop fresh Cavatelli pasta was made with three different cubed meats cooked down and added to a crushed tomato sauce. this is a true meat lovers dream. The sauce was rich with flavor as you tasted sausage, veal and beef. I would like to try to make this one day since it's so hearty.
The next night was mine so I went with the Mexican theme. first we made the kids tacos with chopped meat and all the fixins, For the Adults, I had marinated skirt steaks for Fajitas. As the kids were eating, I sautéed peppers and onions and grilled skirt steaks. I made a crucial mistake of not adding salt to the marinade so it was lacking in flavor. with a few hits of salt it helped the dish but it was still sub par. I had made fresh guacamole and had a few assortments of salsas. All of this was washed down with two different types of Margarita. One your easy margarita mix and tequila and the other we looked up was equal parts of Tequila, triple sec (we used grand mariner) and fresh lime juice. Those really kicked our butts.
The final meal together was New Years Eve. We started out with a drink I discovered over the summer that we have called Koo-Koo Juice. It's a mix of Passion Fruit Juice and Rums. Have two big glasses of this and you will live up to the name. Dinner was the elegant Filet Mignon. Our host does a simple covering of olive oil and crushed garlic and the roast goes on the grill and cooked indirectly. The simple garlic and oil coating is all this tender steak needs. But our host kicks it up with a fresh made Bearnaise sauce. Personally I'm not a fan of sauces on steaks but this one is good. He served the steak with a great potato dish. Red potatoes were roasted with sliced onion and everything was tossed in a ground mustard sauce he made. Very Tasty.
All in all a great week of eating as the holidays usually are. I hope each of you had a great holiday week and got some great gadgets and tools for your kitchen creations.
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