Christmas Dinner

Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year. Especially this year, as Hanukkah was at the same time (so it's very ecumenical). To celebrate, we had an traditional Christmas feast - or as traditional as one can do when one is vegetarian.

The main protein was a Tofurky - slathered in a generous amount of coconut oil and slow-roasted. Not being stingy with the coconut oil is key, as this was the tenderest Tofurky ever (in our experiences - your results may vary).

My partner made delicious puff pastry tarts stuffed with vegan brie and cranberry sauce (you can see the leftover cranberry sauce on the table).

I made a salad with a sriracha vinaigrette, but what I was most proud of was the vegan mashed potatoes.

Vegan Mashed Potatoes

Oil
3 pounds Potatoes (a starchy type like Idaho or Russet)
1.5 cups white wine
Dash of hot mustard
Salt and pepper

Dump the potatoes (unpeeled!) into a pot and fill with water. Bring to a boil and add some salt. Cook for 15-30 minutes. Periodically stab the potatoes and when there's no resistance they're done. Drain in a colander.

If you want you can let dry for a bit and then wrap in tinfoil and store in the fridge. Or, you can start on part 2 right away.

Put some oil in the pot over medium-low heat for about a minute. Then, add the potatoes and start mashing away with a suitable instrument (something that looks like this). Add the wine, salt, pepper and mustard and keep on mashing until you get the right consistency.


Serves 6

The potatoes were really nice and fluffy and I didn't miss the milk/butter at all. Because there were plenty of leftovers, we got to have mashed potatoes in the days to come. I even tried some unsuccessful food experiments with them which will not be blogged (because unsuccessful).

Christmas time is here, by golly

Eastern orthodox christmas that is. Still, I thought it would be a good time to blog about my family Christmas. Gentle readers, I have – I confess – let you down by not posting over the break as much as I thought. Hopefully this will help remedy matters.

My Jewish family had our traditional christmas day: open presents (I got tree fungus!) and watch a movie (we saw Up In The Air which was quite good). For dinner we invited over one of my mom's Buddhist co-workers and had another traditional meal of Raclette. Raclette is sort of a swiss fondu that we discovered during a trip to Montreal many years ago. Appropriately enough, it starts with the eponymous raclette cheese:

After acquiring a slice of raclette cheese you place it inside the raclette maker, which is a device that melts the cheese on the bottom and while on top it grills items that you will pour the said cheese over. The middle slots melt the cheese faster, so those are always prized. It uses a lot of electricity (actually dims the lights in our house) but we only pull it out once a year or so (usually on Christmas).

While you can pretty much pour the raclette over anything we generally have a staple of items: gerkins, cocktail onions, boiled potatoes and french bread. We made a few changes this year, we couldn't find any french bread so we used bagels instead. I also supplemented the gerkins with conventional dill pickles which, quite frankly, I prefer anyway.

The meal itself is delicious, mainly becaues of the massive amounts of cheese it involves. It's incredibly unhealthy and very bad for the environment, but you're allowed to have a few of those every year.

Coming up next, our Christmas Day desserts. Plus, a post on Hannukah if I get around to it.