Christmas Dinner 2: The Kugel Strikes Back

Clockwise, starting at top: cornbread, cranberry-beet sauce, quick-pickled collards, mushroom-leek kugel, mashed potatoes, gingered collards, and turnips in mustard sauce.

This was the sequel to last week's Christmas dinner. Like all good sequels, it is primarily derivative of the first dinner, but with a few new twists. In addition to the gingered collards, we made a quick pickle (more or less this, but without the pineapple). We also substituted Tokyo turnips in mustard sauce for the red cabbage. In this dish, the turnips are fried until lightly browned, braised in stock, and finally tossed in a thickened mustard-stock sauce.

And with that, we put Christmas dinner 2009 to a rest...or did we??

Christmas Dinner 1

Clockwise from top: mushroom-leek kugel, gingered collard greens with fried cashews, cranberry sauce, cornbread, Lukas's red cabbage, and mashed potatoes.

We had a few friends over for an early Christmas dinner at our apartment, the first of two. (When you have a small apartment, it takes multiple Christmas dinners to accommodate all your friends. We suppose there are worse problems to have.) Many of the dishes above are familiar holiday fixtures, but a few deserve further comment.

Faithful readers will remember the pumpkin kugel that we made at Thanksgiving. The mushroom-leek kugel above was a variation in which we substituted sauteed leeks and mushrooms for the pumpkin puree and added two types of soft cheese, ricotta and fromage blanc. Finally, thyme and chopped sage were mixed in. We found this semi-original creation more interesting than the pumpkin version.

Lukas's cabbage is a recipe given to us by a former roommate. It's sort of a sweet-and-sour quick pickle of red cabbage. The cabbage is cooked with green apple, red onion, a little sugar, and a lot of balsamic vinegar.

Saturday: Spelt Soup

Spelt-leek soup with grated Parmesan cheese.

As our faithful readers no doubt recall, we purchased what we thought was local farro at the Morningside greenmarket. After a bit of research, we realized that what we actually had was probably spelt.

In our defense - if you aren't too appalled at our ignorance to continue reading - spelt and farro are quite similar grains. Both are close relatives of common wheat, and they bear a strong family resemblance. Spelt, however, takes significantly longer to cook - which is how we realized that it's what we had.

Sunday: Wintry comfort food

Classic leek and potato soup.

We make this at least once a year; it's one of Giselle's favorite winter comfort foods. Chopped-up leek and potato are simply sauteed in some oil; then broth is added and it all simmers for under a half hour. Serve with crusty bread.