I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year.
We spent our first (and probably only) Christmas in the UK exactly as we planned - eating delicious food, drinking champagne, and then going for a walk to burn it off.
Stu made gravlax (cured salmon) a few days before Christmas using gin, sugar, salt and mustard. The salmon was wild Alaskan salmon so was a beautiful deep pink colour. We had that for a starter on Christmas Day with homemade buckwheat blinis, sour cream, lemon and of course champagne. Yum!
As it was just the two of us, we couldn't really justify cooking a turkey, so we roasted a chicken instead. Not just any chicken, though. We've found an excellent organic butchers which sells amazingly good chickens. They're also sold with giblets, which were put to good use in the gravy. French people use goose fat to roast their potatoes as it makes the crispiest, tastiest potatoes you could hope for. There's a potato stall at our local farmer's market, and the guy keeps recommending different varieties to us. He knows his stuff, because the ones we used for Christmas dinner were perfect for the task.
Stu and I both hated brussel sprouts as children but have recently come around to them, largely thanks to discovering a way of cooking them with chestnuts and pancetta. They made a very festive accompaniment to the rest of our dinner. We also made a sausage stuffing with yet more chestnuts, and the giblet gravy (mmm, offal).
Dessert was Mont Blanc, a ridiculously easy dessert of creme de marrons (chestnut puree), grated dark chocolate and cream, topped off with some silver cachous just because it was Christmas.
