New Year's Plans - What are you doing?

My Christmas's are always booked with my in-laws. Reading the thread on Prime Rib for Christmas was very enjoyable. Alas, I lurked because I knew I would not be Christmas cooking. My BIL cooked the meat for Christmas dinner and roasted a bone in prime rib in their Nesco cooker. While he was carving this dark gray piece of "meat" I peeked into the cooker and saw about a gallon of brown liquid which I assume was "braising liquid". I almost

I looked in the freezer yesterday and saw a 5lb boneless rib roast I purchased for $22.00, marked down from $60 in the clearance section of the meat cooler (My favorite place to shop for steaks"). The roast is almost thawed and will be ready for seasoning and cooking tomorrow. With the weather hitting 50

Tomorrow night: Shrimp Scampi, linguini and sauteed veggies
Saturday: Traditional New Years Day Artichoke and King Crab Dinner
Sunday: WSM smoked back ribs & multi-ethnic sausage

I will be driving home from my sister's place in Atlanta. Upon arriving in my Chicago home I will hit the "Run Program" button on my house thermostat to move the temp back from the 50 F I left it at for the last 2 weeks to a nice 68. I will then probably dump luggage inside the house and drive out to a local establishment to have a drink or 2 while the house heats up. Jury's is a good possibility for those drinks.

For one, some very evil person made me come into work this morning. It seems we are the only company here on our 35 floors today.

Anyhow - a good friend has a loft party in Greektown. Lots of bubbly, bourbon and good eats.

I'll be bringing some chicken liver pate that I whipped up last night - tasty might fine after it chilled. I almost wanted to eat some this morning. But went with a glass of OJ and a banana to ready my stomach lining for tonight's abuse.

For reasons unknown to me, my family has always had on New Year's Eve the dish that is now most widely known as spaghetti alla puttanesca (garlic, olives, capers, anchovy, tomato) and, though I don't make it every year, I think I will make a wee bit tonight. As a second course, we'll be having brandade de morue à la Bénédictine (purée of potatoes and salt cod with milk, olive oil, garlic and parsley, finished in the oven with a layer of bread crumbs on top) along with a salad of bitter greens.

We've always treated New Year's Eve as a fish-night but not as a fast-night, which is to say that animal poducts could be included as ingredients or marginal elements, something which traditionally was not the case on real fast-days.

Not sure yet about tomorrow but whatever the main course is, there's a good chance it will turn up with boiled "salt-potatoes" with raclette grated on top... The last couple of years we've made an Italian pork roast with juniper that's delicious...

By the way, anybody know of a place that sells cotechino? Lentils and cotechino would be nice and very traditional...

Antonius

We have always stayed at home with the kids and had an all night seafood buffet. Tonight my 20 year old will stay home, most likely because of the huge amount of food available to him all at once. But for the first time my 15 year old daughter is overnighting at her gal pal's house in schaumburg and wont be with us. I cant believe I will miss the company of a sarcastic, back talking, messy eating, pop spilling teenager but I will. And I know if she was here right now she would say "Whateverrr" I suppose it is just a matter of time when a boy will be calling for her to go out new years eve but I will cross that bridge with axe in hand when i come to it.

My parents always had seafood on NYE and stayed home. The folks didnt have a large budget but it didnt matter to the kids. All we knew was we only got stuff like this to eat once a year. We enjoyed smoked chubs, sardines, pickled herring, smelts and those awful sau see shrimp cocktails. Mom would always toss in a large frozen Johns Cheese Pizza as well.


Tonight we will be having, in no special order
raw cherrystone clams
baked clams casino (ISO better recipe)
Platter of Lox, Onions, Tomatoes
Whole Maine Lobster
Shrimp Cocktail
Steamed King Crab Legs
Blind Robins
Hot Crab & Cream Cheese Loaf
Pickled Herring
Shrimp Scampi

Asst breads, bagels, chips and crackers

We kind of make things in waves and just hang out together in the living room.
A Happy New Year to all

bob

bob kopczynski wrote:Blind Robins

Explain, please.

stevez wrote:

bob kopczynski wrote:Blind Robins

Explain, please.

Blind Robins are a salty smoked fish hunk. I think it is herring fillets. I was first introduced to them when accompaning my dad to the local polish tavern for concertina jam sessions. They always had a plate of them on the bar along with some other equally salty food. Way too strong for a kids taste. When I started getting served in taverns the free lunch custom had already stopped, but to my delight Blind Robins where for sale all pre packaged as a bar snack. And I found them to be a perfect snack with a beer, in fact that may have been the advertising slogan.


I get my supply from supreme but I have had them from hagens fish at montrose/central . I dont get to other fish markets so I am not sure if they are common. The link below has a picture of them, yummy!



http://www.supremelobster.com/40200.html

A little early,but I have no intention of being online at Midnight.Happy,yummy New Year!

LTH,

I'm taking a break from dinner to off-load the first batch of pictures to my laptop. There are 6 of us and we are having a Nothing says Excess like Excess dinner, which we are cooking. We just finished the main course, and it's already after 11pm, we are on Eastern time, looks to be a long and delicious evening.

I will post the menu later, but suffice to say Fergus Henderson's bone marrow and parsley salad is a real winner. Though that in conjunction with foie gras terrine may send us to the cardiac ward.

Happy New Year to all.

Enjoy,
Gary

After a lot of more or less time-consuming cooking in recent days, we had a really simple New Year's Day dinner. I never was able to find any cotechino and so just bought some fresh basic Italian sausage from Riviera (Harlem, just north of Belmont), which I simply cooked in a pan (with a little water, then browned in the same pan). The quality of their sausage is very high.

Along with the sausage we had some greens with garlic and chile flakes; the greens were rapini from Caputo's and they were especially fresh tasting (nicely bitter) and a beautiful deep green. We also had a pot of lentils, Neapolitan style. Just to break up the completely southern Italian character of the meal, we also had some boiled potatoes with raclette melted and scraped onto the hot potatoes. The raclette was from Whole Foods (ca. $9-10 per pound).

I'm not sure what the potatoes with raclette symbolised but the lentils symbolised coins, the greens symbolised paper money, and the sausage symbolised... well, sausage.

Buon' anno, y'all.*
Antonius

*This combination of dishes is very close to what folks in Amata's home territory traditionally eat for New Year's: black eyed peas, greens and hog jowl. The symbolic value of the beans and greens is the same but theories regarding the significance of the hog jowl abound.