Today is the day where I drag my children hither and yonder to buy all of the groceries for our holiday meals. Oh yes, there will be tears. But hopefully there will also be free samples and Christmas cheer in the market aisles.
We plan on hitting several stores, including Whole Foods for salmon (I’m going to make my own gravlax!), a liquor store for some quality hard cider, the supermarket for sugar (I started to make the almond lace cookies from Bon Appetit this morning and realized we were out of sugar!), and finally my butcher (notice how I call him “my” butcher?) to pick up the centerpiece of our Christmas dinner: a beef tenderloin, which I plan on serving with an herb crust and a cognac and mustard sauce.
Above is the running list my butcher has been keeping of all his holiday meat orders–he has a large piece of poster board on the wall where he writes down the names of people reserving everything from crown roasts, to prime rib, whole goose, and spiral ham.
Apparently my butcher will be working until midnight tonight filling orders–he told me to stop by after I put the kids to bed…sounds romantic, no?
For the rest of the menu so far I’m thinking:
French cheese puffs or Parker House rolls, gravlax, sweet potato and gruyere gratin, mushroom stuffing, braised fennel, maybe a raw beet salad, and the beef tenderloin. For dessert the beautiful Paris-Brest pastry in this month’s Martha Stewart Living…or the buche de noel, if I have the courage.
For Christmas Eve everything is up in the air: Maybe sandwiches of roast ham with fresh Parker House rolls, maybe frites and mussels, maybe a delicious shrimp bisque soup, maybe crab cakes…I am so up in the air on that one.
What are you making?
