Tag Archives: holiday recipes
Jeanne’s Potatoes au Gratin
It seems like an easy dish: just potatoes and cheese, right? But this cold-weather staple can be boring if you just take the traditional French route. Luckily, my family was treated on Christmas Day to some of the best potatoes au gratin I’ve tasted. My future sister-in-law Jeanne Arnondin combined her mother’s recipe with a Food Network recipe for a dish that’s decadent and infinitely craveable. The key differences are fennel and Pecorino Romano, which brings a sharper umami flavor that a straight French preparation doesn’t have.
Make it with a simple beef tenderloin roast for an elegant but easy winter dinner party. (more…)
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Tagged beef, French recipes, holiday recipes, sides recipes, the copycat chef, vegetable recipes
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Old-Fashioned Christmas Cookies
Like the wartime song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” some holiday classics remind us of a time when the basics were harder to come by. So it was with my grandmother’s Christmas cookies, the recipe for which dates back to about 1900. By the time the Depression was over and people could actually afford to buy the butter and sugar to make cookies, she said, along came the war, and butter and sugar were rationed.
Which may be one reason these cookies are best left to shine as is, with just sprinkles or nothing at all on top. Before it became the fashion to ice Christmas cookies elaborately à la Martha, they were less cakey and ultra thin, so as to showcase the crisp, delicious cookie itself – and how fortunate it is to have access to plain old butter and sugar. (more…)
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Glogg
This recipe for Scandanavian mulled wine, glogg (pronounced GLOOG), is adapted from the Market Cafe, where proprietress Fanny Farkas used to serve a number of holiday specialties from her native Sweden.
Alas, the Market Cafe is not serving glogg this season, since Fanny seems to be traveling, but it’s simple to make yourself. (I like making it just so I can say the word “glogg” over and over again.) The only difficult part is finding the cardamom pods, which can be had at Dual Specialty Store on First Avenue between 5th and 6th Streets or at Adriana’s Caravan in Grand Central Market.
Don’t bother using expensive wine, since you’re just going to corrupt it with sugar and vodka. If you can’t get your hands on any cardamom pods, don’t let that deter you: chances are no one will notice after a couple of glasses of glogg anyway.
Glogg
20 cardamom pods
10 cloves
2 sticks cinnamon
1 orange peel
1 magnum-size bottle Shiraz or Rioja
2 cups vodka
1 pound sugar
1 1/2 cups whole raw almonds
1 1/2 cups raisins
10 dried figs
Make a bouquet garni of the cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, and orange peel. Combine all ingredients in a heavy saucepan and bring to a temperature just below a boil.
Makes about 10 mugs of glogg.
Gram’s Ginger Cookies
For the holidays, an old recipe – my grandmother’s. Not quite gingerbread, not quite ginger snaps, these cookies are ultra thin, crisp and addictive. She used to make them out of the bridge-party heart, club, diamond, and spade cookie cutters even at Christmas, but if this mystifies you as it does me, use a traditional gingerbread man cookie cutter.
The molasses give these an especially old-fashioned taste. I’ve seen no evidence of Brer Rabbit molasses around NYC, but other brands will do just as well.
Gram’s Ginger Cookies
1 cup Brer Rabbit Molasses
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup melted unsalted butter
1 egg, beaten
pinch of baking soda
pinch of salt
3 tablespoons ginger
4 – 4 1/2 cups flour, plus more for dusting
Beat molasses until light, then beat in sugar, butter, egg, and dry ingredients. Add just enough flour to roll. Refrigerate dough for at least 2 hours.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Dust a rolling pin and pastry cloth with plenty of flour and start to roll out a ball of dough. When it flattens into a good sized disc, pick it up and swish the underside in more flour from the pastry cloth, then move it back to center. Roll until extremely thin and cut with cookie cutters.
Bake each batch for just under 6 minutes, until the cookie edges just begin to brown. Makes about 4 dozen cookies.