A Very Rhode Island Hanukkah

It struck me that we don't own a menorah. That is sad. Would it be too late if I bought one tomorrow and we started lighting it a day late? Well, it's probably not a big deal since I had no intention to be very traditional with tonight's meal there's no real reason to be traditional with the accessories either.



To be safe we lit our makeshift menorah. There's space for four total candles so the way I figure it is we have four more days to get a real menorah. That's proper protocol, right?



For a salad I got this nice Boston lettuce from Tiverton, Rhode Island which was as close to Boston as I could find this lettuce growing. I guess that makes this Boston lettuce almost as authentic as they come. Next I'd like to try some Boston butt from Fall River, Massachusetts.

On the lettuce I put sliced radishes, fennel, and fresh dill from Migliorelli Farms in the Hudson valley. The last ingredient there kinda killed my Rhode Island vibe I had going.

Then I topped it with a sweet lemon vinaigrette that I made with Maille mustard, lemon juice, Lyle's golden syrup, cider vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper.



After salad it was time for latkes. To make them I shredded a russet potato and half a vidalia onion then chopped up some green onion and dill. I mixed that all with a couple of spoonfuls of Maille whole grain mustard, horseradish, an egg, and a generous amount of salt and pepper. I let it sit in the fridge for a few hours before adding some flour, squeezing out the excess moisture, and frying in a pan until golden brown.

I served with sour cream, fresh dill, and apple sauce.



To go with the latkes I felt beer was in order. What I grabbed was a beer from Innis & Gunn which I'd never had before. It tasted a little too sweet but once we started eating the latkes it wasn't as noticeable. It was a very tasty beer, very high in alcohol, but not at all what I expected. I had planned this meal to be less sweet than our traditional Jewish fare but it turned out my beer had been covertly sabotaged by my own inability to read the label.



For the main course I carmelized a ton of onions in a pan with butter, olive oil, and garlic. Then I seared a chunk of generously seasoned brisket, deglazed with some zinfandel, topped with the onions and some of the rich turkey stock I made from the Thanksgiving turkey, and braised in the oven.



In a separate pan I roasted some carrots, parsnips, and fennel with just olive oil, salt, and pepper. I guess traditionally I should have glazed them but my recent Jewish meals have been just too sweet for dinner so I tried to keep this one a little more savory.



Since I'd opened the zinfandel to cook the brisket I figured we might as well drink it as well. It was not a kosher wine but it was quite tasty. It was far better than the Great Manischewitz Debacle of Passover '09. I think I still have a lingering sugar headache from that one glass I had.



Jen's mom sends us a disposable advent calendar each year. This year she sent us a permanent advent calendar. It was perfect timing in that it arrived on December 1st. It was a little strange opening the first door on the first night of Hanukkah.



You can imagine my disappointment when instead of delicious chocolate we were greeted with, of all things, earrings for the first day! I told Jen that if we get chocolate tomorrow she has to give me all of her portion to make up for this.



For the final course I took two frozen confections, again from Rhode Island.

The first was orange sherbet (or what they call SherBetter) GaGa's in Warwick, Rhode Island. Rhode Island likes things with the word "better" clumsily crammed into the name. At one Rhode Island grocery store they top cakes with "Better Cream" which is basically a butter cream made with shortening so that it lasts forever and doesn't matter. Better than what I shudder to imagine. This "Better" on the other hand was quite good.

Along with the SherBetter I used vanilla gelato Cold Fusion Gelato in Newport, Rhode Island to keep my home state's theme going strong. A bunch of eggheads like
Brian Cox claim that we don't have the technology yet for cold fusion. Apparently he's never been to Newport, Rhode Island. See? This is why you can't trust science.

I topped both with chopped Medjool dates, and pistachios.

Since we don't really have any Hanukkah movie traditions (and I didn't feel like searching for a copy of 8 Crazy Nights) we opted to just listen to our awesome four-song Hanukkah playlist instead.

I did just learn that there is an Israeli version of Sesame Street called Shalom Sesame and there's a Hanukkah special featuring Jeremy Miller of Growing Pains fame!

Oh my. If I knew a few days ago what I know now that DVD would have been shipped to me two-day delivery from Amazon and we would have watched it this evening.

Well, at least we know what we're doing for Hanukkah 2011.

Noodling Around

There is a Noodle Battle Episode of Iron Chef but I haven't yet watched it. However, I had some noodles with an expiration date of yesterday so I needed to rush a quick meal through.

That's right, a day after the expiration date. Yeah, I'm a real risk taker.



I put together a quick miso broth and added to it some tamari, rice wine vinegar, curry paste, sesame oil, spinach, shrimp, and noodles. This cleared out a nice segment of the fridge and freezer. It also gave us a nice continuation of our break from the turkey-stuffing-mashed-vegetable theme of the holiday weekend.



For beer I enjoyed a Prelude Special Ale from Shipyard Brewing Company which we visited this summer on
our trip to Maine.

With the holiday upon us tomorrow we have now successfully cleansed our palate except instead of using sorbet we used soy sauce and sesame oil.

Our palates work in mysterious ways.

Currying Flavor

Tonight, I decided to make something a little different. I was inspired by a recipe by Mark Bittman (warning: the link takes you to the New York Times page which annoyingly forces you to log in to read it and it's super annoying).



I didn't follow the recipe too closely but here's what I did: I made a makeshift ghee (by heating equal parts safflower oil and whole butter) then browned some garlic and ginger. After that I put some roughly chopped onion in the pan, cooked it down, then put in a few teaspoons of curry powder. Then I tossed in some leftover raw potatoes. I let that cook down for a bit before adding a can of potatoes and cooked that down. Then I added most of a can of lite coconut milk. After cooking the whole pot until the potatoes were tender I added a good amount of diced light and dark turkey meat and some leftover boiled turnip chunks and a good handful of baby spinach.

I served it with some plain white rice with butter and chopped green onion. Overall I was pretty happy with how this turned out.



For beer I tried the new Winter Ale from Blue Point Brewing Company to keep with tradition and stay a solid month ahead of the season.

And so it is that we enter the next week with leftovers losing this round. Better luck during the next holiday, fools!

Hot Belgian Sandwiches . . . It's Complicated

I worked an abbreviated day yesterday, after ten hours of sleep, then came straight home and took a nap. I've turned into a tremendous wuss. I used to routinely get to work at 6:00 AM and leave around 11:00PM, six and sometimes seven days a week. Now I have a few 10-12 hour days in a row and I need recovery time.



I decided that I need the great monks of Belgium to satisfy my beer craving after a busy week. This task could not be left to the bearded hipsters of America microbreweries. I needed to call upon the bearded monk hipsters of Belgian breweries.

I started with a Duvel, saving the big guns for tonight.





Friday we, once again, had our two interpretations of hot turkey sandwiches. Jen was sad about the sherry gravy she made so she thawed out the rest of the gravy and made a thicker version with no sherry for our sandwiches. This particular leftover dinner is probably no longer worth mentioning as we make it twice a year for Canadian and American Thanksgiving but for completion's sake I show it here.



For lunch today we started out with something a little lighter by combining the leftover fruit salad ingredients with some spinach, pistachios, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper. This probably would have been more virtuous had we not still been hungry after the salad and heated up two full plates of Thanksgiving leftovers slathered with gravy.



Tonight I let the Belgians take care of me once again, this time with what has long been one of my favorite beers, Chimay.



The other day Jen through out the idea of making turkey Reubens. It sounded like a fantastic idea so I rendered some bacon in a pan, drained off the fat, toasted some thick slices of rye bread, and topped them with swiss cheese slices. On top of the cheese I put a little sauce that I made from mayonnaise, ketchup, relish, Old Bay seasoning, hot sauce, Worchestershire sauce, and my favorite whole grain mustard by
Maille. I then topped it with some hot sauerkraut, more Swiss cheese, more sauce, and another buttered slice of rye bread.

This may rank up in the top ten best sandwiches I've ever had. Unfortunately the sandwich experience was somewhat co-opted by the mustard. Well, not the mustard itself but the odd promotion on the mustard itself.



You see, the mustard seems to be promoting that romantic comedy with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin. Printed on it is: "Own it on Blu-ray and DVD 4/27!" So, apparently, this has been in my cupboard for some time. It also advertises "Summer Recipes Inside" and the self-deprecating "le yum."

Attached is a little booklet with a few different recipes including Croque Monsieur A La Maille as featured in the hit comedy It's Complicated. This just seems like the strangest cross-promotional marketing campaign I've ever witnessed.



A visit to the Maille website shows an extremely half-baked attempt to drive home this odd partnership. Clicking on the "News" section link (which apparently has not been updated since before April 27th) brings you to another page with a picture of the mustard and DVD and the following text:

Own it on Blu-ray™ and DVD April 27! Croque Monsieur A La Maille® As seen in the hit comedy It’s Complicated Go check http://www.itscomplicatedmovie.com/

You may note that the URL above has no link to the actual website. That is not only because I simply copied and pasted it from their website. If you go to their odd mustard/DVD partnership website you will note that this is true on their site as well. They pasted the text with the URL and did not make it a link. So, in order to visit the movie's website if you are interested you will have to copy and paste the URL text into your browser's address bar and go there that way.

For your convenience I will provide you with a link to this fairly old movie here, removing all unnecessary HTTPs and WWWs: itscomplicatedmovie.com

Going to that site you will see that they fulfilled their end of the cross-promotion with a bit more competence. They provide a graphical link to the Maille website. It seems like Maille got the better of this marketing deal.



To try to take my mind off the odd Maille/DVD issue I enjoyed a post-dinner Black Chocolate Stout from Brooklyn Brewery. I've been putting this one off for a while because I'm not a big fan of stouts and it is 10% alcohol. However, after turning this whole mustard/DVD thing over and over I needed something to take my mind off of it.

It didn't work.

Even in a James Bond movie I couldn't imagine product placement of mustard. I can't figure out how this mustard thing happened. Is there product placement in the movie? At first I thought that perhaps the people at Maille and Universal had joined forces to launch the world's worst marketing campaign. Now I'm convinced that they are geniuses. See, I've been a Maille customer for years now but the movie It's Complicated came and went without me paying any attention to it at all. Now I actually feel compelled to see the movie and see what's going on with this Croque Monsieur scene. Now I think I'm going to have to order the DVD and find out. And maybe I'll make some Croque Monsieurs for us to eat while we watch it, using Maille mustard of course.

Damn you, marketing geniuses!

Our Sort Of 50's Thanksgiving

With my busiest time of the work year upon me, Jen thankfully receives a slight reprieve from her normally busy schedule. This couldn't work out more perfectly. If this was not the case we would be forced to either have Chinese take out for Thanksgiving or have dinner at 1:00 AM.



Jen's menu this year was a tremendous success. There was a slight 1950's retro theme to the menu but not overly so. Jen, even more so than me, is a fan of tradition so we couldn't mess with the traditional meal too much. For the past seven years I've been trying to convince her that a whole turkey, even a small one, may be overkill for just two people. Each year that suggestion has been received as well as a lead, fart-filled balloon in church.



Our natural inclination is to simply roast sweet potatoes. This year I told Jen to make them Dvorak style(as in tech columnist John C. Dvorak). He roasts them just like us but adds a little butter, cream, and bourbon to the mix. Jen did this along with adding marshmallows and chopped pecans.

While I prefer not to add any peripheral sweeteners to already sweet butternut squash or sweet potatoes, this was a fun change to our normal meal.

Jen's mother did not see it this way. Instead this only made her sad.



Another thing we never make is green bean casserole. This year Jen made it with an assortment of various mushrooms and crispy onions and it came out wonderfully. Again, not something I'd normally include but it was pretty tasty.



Jen also made macaroni and cheese (not another Jen & Nate classic), mashed carrot and turnip, mashed potato, roast turkey, stuffing (frozen and saved from Canadian Thanksgiving), cranberry sauce (also saved from Canadian Thanksgiving), and gravy (also saved). Jen added a little butter and sherry to the gravy to try something new. This was the only part of the meal that made her sad. I thought it was pretty good.

Let that be a lesson to all of you out there: don't ever try anything new.



For wine we enjoyed this bottle of Tarima Monastrell. Well, some of the bottle. I'm quite happy with this picture which was taken by accidentally using the wrong settings but ended up turning out far better than I'd hoped. It looks almost like I'm some sort of photographer who knows what I'm doing and this was intentional. I need more mistakes like this.





The pumpkin pie was probably Jen's finest yet. Jen hates eggnog so I made her some hot apple cider with whisky and I enjoyed a nice glass of eggnog with brandy. At this point it was 7:30 PM and after four days of waking up at 5:00 AM I was ready for bed. Jen told me that it was too early so I forced myself to barely stay awake on the couch until 8:30 PM at which point I went to sleep and slept straight through until 6:30 AM and it was the finest night of sleep I'd had in years.

Happy Thanksgiving!