HEY 2024!
What We Cooked (and Ate!) to Close Out 2023...
WISHING YOU ALL A VERY HAPPY 2024! We both laid low for the holidays this year, and neither of us can say that was a mistake. In this day and age, it feels like such a luxury to come back from some time off and actually feel refreshed and reenergized! Hope you are feeling fresh for the new year, too.
We’re excited to keep cooking up new recipes to share with you in 2024, but in the meantime, we thought it would be nice to show a few highlights of what we cooked during our two-week break...
AU: Even though it was just me and Josh for the holidays this year, I started the holiday break by making my Hash Brown Breakfast Bake. And I must admit, it’s quite the “banger” as the kids say! It’s like a Spanish Tortilla goes to brunch with a member of the Fort Worth Junior League. So that was a delicious way to wake up most mornings, and fortified us for any activities (or lack thereof) for the day.
After making SOOOO MANY COOKIES, it was great to lean into some savory cooking… and honestly, a joy to just cook for myself! No need to write down every measurement, visual cue, or timing for other people to make the recipe successfully.
Quick Aside re: Cookies ~ My friend, who’s a fancy Hollywood hair stylist, made the Salted Brown Butter Cereal Bars for his salon’s cookie swap, and Emmy-and-Tony-Award-winner Sean Hayes said they were the best he’s ever had.
So that was a fun surprise to hear!
✋ Just Jack! 🤚
AU: When it came to Christmas Eve, we kicked off the day with a pitcher of margaritas and some plant-based Mexican food on the sunny patio at Gracias Madre with some dear pals. It was fab, and so unlike me to not be cooking all day to get ready for Christmas dinner. We spent Christmas Eve doing what most Texans do, eating tamales and queso. Because it’s tradition in my family, I also bought a tiny ham (pron: “hayam”) for us to make li’l dinner roll ham sandwiches with mustard, gruyere, chutney, and pickles. I photographed zero, so you’re welcome.
AU: For Christmas Day, we started the meal with some excellent warm Gougères. I used Dorie Greenspan’s recipe, and it was so easy and delicious! I can’t wait to play with pâte à choux dough some more and really dial in my own platonic ideal of gougères.
EK: I also made Gougères! Before the holidays, I attended an industry event where MIT-trained biomedical engineer turned pastry chef, Winnette McIntosh Ambrose, gave her tried and true recipe and technique for making pâte à choux . What intrigued me was that she used a food processor to “blitz” the eggs all at once into the very warm dough. I scribbled down the recipe and decided to try it over the holiday break. The good news is that her technique worked perfectly and I’ll follow it from now on.
It made me think that there is so much that we could do with the base recipe, so keep your eyes open for a deep-dive into Gougères-land this year…I see some homemade profiteroles in our future too!
AU: And if you’ve never sipped champagne with a warm crispy-on-the-outside-but-soft-and-airy-in-the-center gougères, you’ve got to try it. I especially loved the Brézé Crémant de Loire, a sparkling wine in the style of champagne, that Mandy Oser sent in my Ardesia Wine Club box.
AU: The main course for Christmas Dinner was this Pot Roast by Hailee Catalano. It was so flavorful and fork-tender! You sear the roast on all sides, then throw in a boatload of shallots and garlic. Deglaze with a hefty amount of dry Sherry and beef stock, and braise until it almost falls apart. Then you puree the softened veg with the braising liquid, and add a beurre manié (a paste made of softened butter and flour) to thicken it into a silky gravy.
I served it over a (cali-king sized) bed of mashed potatoes, and a simple salad of parsley, dill, horseradish, and lemon juice like Hailee suggests. C’est magnifique!
EK: That is my kind of pot roast! and I can almost taste it with your silky mashed potatoes. Puree of potatoes were such a thing in NYC and I can tell from the photo that yours rivaled some of the great fine dining versions!
AU: I hadn’t made mashed potatoes since we moved from NYC to California, 6 years ago! I think the very best way to make them is to STEAM your peeled potatoes and then rice them for a silky smooth puree. I have this Oxo Potato Ricer, and it’s worth its weight in gold. The key is adding HOT MILK and COLD BUTTER to keep your mash from getting gluey. (If you’re one of those psychopaths who mashes potatoes with a hand mixer, you clearly love to ingest wallpaper paste).
AU: A day or two later, I made/rolled out some fresh pasta dough and turned the leftover pot roast into a Beef Ragu with Pappardelle. It was the Christmas meal that kept on giving, because I had leftover mashed potatoes, too. (One might be questioning why there were ANY “leftover mashed potatoes,” and the only thing I can say is “I am sorry I failed you.”). Those became lunch the next day in the form of…
AU: Potato-Leek Soup! If you didn’t know, making a restaurant quality Potato-Leek soup isn’t quite as simple as just pureeing all the ingredients after they’ve bubbled away in the soup pot. As I mentioned above, potato starch becomes incredibly gluey if you blend it, so most potato soups you find in good restaurants are potatoes that have been pressed through a tamis or “drum sieve.”
I sweat some cleaned, chopped leeks in a little butter until they were soft, but not browned. Then I added some chicken stock and simmered everything until the leeks became very, very soft. I pureed the mixture until it was homogenous.
Then, instead of boiling potatoes in the pot along with the leeks and removing them to pass through a sieve, I SIMPLY WHISKED IN MY LEFTOVER MASHED POTATOES. I was shocked at how great the final product was. Harkening back to my high school days going to Bennigan’s, I loaded up the garnishes like a baked potato.
EK: That soup! That pot roast and silky potatoes…that HOMEMADE pasta! I am a little jealous of Josh—and maybe we all are!—you can tell him that I said that:)
Here’s my truth. I mostly took the holiday off. I cooked a little and ate out a little but nothing in comparison to what you did! You really cooked up a storm. And, I also hardly took any pictures—again, as AU said, You are welcome:)!
My biggest cook of the season was a 5.5 pound/3-bone prime rib. Now, I’ve cooked hundreds of pounds of prime rib on a smoker, a grill, and in the oven but they have all been between 5 and 7 bones—a full prime rib consists of 7 rib bones. If you have cooked a small beef roast before, you know that the challenge is how to make the meat the same doneness from edge-to-edge. Often, the exterior of the roast is well done when the middle is cooked rare to medium rare.
The only guarantee of cooking meat to the same temperature from end-to-end is to cook using sous vide or the reverse sear method—sous vide + grill is basically another way to reverse sear the meat.
AU: I also think the sous vide method is so much more forgiving. It’s a little easier on the timeline, and especially handy when cooking expensive cuts.
EK: Amen! that’s why I call it my favorite party/entertaining trick. Maybe we should put sous vide on our newsletter “to do” list as well. If you would like us to write more about sous vide here, let us know in the comments.
Now back to my meat. In a nutshell, reverse searing is cooking a piece of meat at a low temperature until it is cooked to your liking and then searing or browning the outside. It’s called “reverse sear” because classically you sear the meat first and then cook it. In this method, you cook the meat and then brown it—searing the outside surface.
IMO a smoker or a sous vide circulator are the best ways to do this. I sous vide + grill beef tenderloin and rack of lamb frequently as it is a foolproof way of keeping the meat rare from end-to-end, but I had never used this technique for a prime rib before.
This particular prime rib was a gift for a friend of mine and she asked me to help her cook it for Christmas. I didn’t want to screw it up, so I decided that the best thing to do was to sous vide the roast and then finish it on the grill.
At 5.5 pounds, the roast took 6 hours to sous vide at 136F and 20 minutes to turn a beautiful burnished color on the grill. I set up my big stock pot and my sous vide circulator the night before Christmas and I woke up at 5:30 a.m. to start the process. My friend came to pick me and the prime rib up at 11:00 a.m. and I dumped the water and took the whole set up with me to her house so I could finish the last hour of sous vide and finish the meat on the grill. It worked so perfectly that I’ll never cook a prime rib any other way.
The rest of the meal was classic English Christmas feast including roasted potatoes and carrots, Yorkshire pudding and Horseradish Cream.
Let us know if you are interested, and we will put those recipes on the schedule for this year. It would make a wonderful Valentine’s Day dinner!
EK: To round out the meal, I made my VGV* Roasted Garlic and Caramelized Onion Butter with red onions to make it more Christmas-y. This time, I roasted the green beans in the oven which was super easy and I liked them even better than the microwave! *Virtuous Green Vegetable
EK: For dessert, I leaned on one of my favorite sweet friends and served the most delicious Eli’s cheesecake. It was a special holiday dark chocolate and cinnamon flavor that reminded me of the best Mexican Hot Chocolate in cheesecake form. It’s still for sale and comes frozen if you have any special occasions, birthdays, or “just because…” dates to celebrate in the next few months!
AU: While I did a lot of home cooking, we also took advantage of a half-empty Los Angeles to score some hard-to-get reservations. I wrote an entry about Indian Sports Bar Pijja Palace’s famed Malai Rigatoni (which was delicious, as advertised!), but the standout for me were the Dosa Onion Rings pictured above.
The dosa batter—typically made from lentil and rice flour—was shatteringly crisp and the onions were tender and easy to bite through (the hallmark of a great onion ring, IMO). They were served with a brightly spiced mango chutney that I wanted to slather on everything.
AU: The last celebratory meal of 2023 we shared was with our pals at Queen St. in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles. It’s a Charleston, SC-themed raw bar and grill owned by the same folks as another popular oyster spot in LA, Found Oyster. We ordered SO MUCH FOOD, but you can never go wrong with a seafood tower, and the Crab Louie at the top of this one really is my ideal of that dish.
EK: I love a good Seafood Louie! In fact, we should add that to our 2024 “to do” list! And, Queen Street is an iconic street in downtown Charleston. One of my favorite restaurant courtyards in Charleston is 82 Queen and I bet that it was one of the inspirations for the LA restaurant. But it’s not the only one! It is a street full of great restaurants including Poogan’s Porch and Husk.
Whether you cooked a lot or just “took it easy” this holiday season, we hope it was just what you needed to end 2023 on a good note. We can’t wait to get in the kitchen with you this year! Sending only the very best vibes to each of you for 2024!!
xo A & E