Sunday, December 02, 2012

Holiday Weekend!

No, I haven't fallen on my head.  This is our new holiday weekend.  At least for this year!  What has happened is that Number One Son and his Significant Other (SO) have trouble getting time off on the holidays so we decided to make our own holiday.  Number One Daughter can pretty much schedule her time her way so she has no problem.  We are retired so no problem.  What we are hoping is that having a mid-December holiday will enable us to all be together for a couple days.  So far it seems to be working.  The only problem is to not become too blimp-like from eating too much three times in a month! I'm sure we can figure out something. 

This year though my wife was determined to do a Prime Rib.  (Prime is the highest quality rating that is commonly available.)  I won't say how much that damn roast cost but will tell you it was $19.99 a pound.  If you care you can figure out the price per kilo; personally I don't want to know!  I must say it was very good and remarkably easy.  We made a garlic/salt/pepper/thyme paste to put on the outside and let it sit in the fridge for a day to soak up the flavors.  Then tossed it in the oven for half an hour at 450F (230C) then reduced the heat to 350F (175C) until the internal temp. was 115F (46C).  It took about three hours.  When we tried the crust, it was AWFUL - totally salty but it also just fell off the roast.  Without the crust the roast was great.  The two end pieces were fairly well done but the interior was just medium rare; just like everyone likes it.  I had one of the ends and even it was nice and juicy and even the exterior was tasty.

Everyone who watches the various cooking shows has seen someone using a mandolin.  It is used to cut  uniform slices off potatoes, onions, etc.  I just had to buy a cheap one a couple weeks ago and yesterday we decided to use it for the first time to slice some potatoes for a dish.  I managed to slice a piece off my little finger on the second slice!  Grrr!  What a chump.  My wife did use it to slice the rest of the potatoes and you can believe she was careful.  I must say it did a great job though; uniform slices and the job didn't take more than about a minute a potato.  This is about the cheapest mandolin on the market & I can recommend one if you are careful.  Maybe it's not so great if you are a chump like me. 

Now we have three whole weeks until the next holiday.  Why don't we move Christmas to April or sometime?  I'm going to break the scale if this over-eating and over-drinking keeps up. 

Have a good one!


1 comment:

JoeinVegas said...

Well, you can celebrate holidays whenever you want to. In SD we used to have our Christmas parties in February - there seemed to be a multi-month gap there with no holidays so we started hauling out the artificial tree, decorating the house and having people over. It worked well, as we never had to compete with someone else's holiday parties. And I can truthfully say we had the first Christmas party for the year 2000. (and many other years as well)