Day 174: Merry Christmas to All!

If you grew up in a Jewish household in the US, you likely celebrated Christmas just as I always did.  Say it with me now - Chinese food and a movie!

Having married someone who is not Jewish, the Chinese food dinner has been replaced with a gourmet Christmas dinner, usually prepared at home.  But I'm not ready to abandon my idea of a traditional Jewish Christmas and so we switched things up this year and went out for a Chinese food lunch.  Or, I should say, we tried to.  I was saddened to find our local Chinese restaurant closed - especially since we phoned them up yesterday to make sure they'd be open.  And so, no Chinese food for me this year - instead, I had a tuna melt.

Fortunately I had an amazing meal in which to drown my sorrows tonight.  Late in the afternoon, we began with sparking wine, shrimp cocktail, and goat cheese with baked whole grain crackers.

After we had enjoyed that, my husband lit up the grill and began to cook a 4-rib rack of pork - low and slow.  We saw this cut of meat prepared by Guy Fieri on the Food Network a couple of weeks ago and decided to give a try as something special for our Christmas dinner.  The best part?  My husband was more than eager to be in charge of this meal - after all, it involved a huge piece of meat and the grill.  A man's dream!

My husband created a yummy homemade marinade last night and the pork bathed in it for about 20 hours prior to cooking.

Marinade:

3 T honey

4 cloves of garlic, chopped

1 tsp Chinese Five Spice Powder

1/4 cup whiskey

Prior to putting the meat on the grill, he strained the marinade to avoid burning the garlic, added 3 T olive oil, and used that mixture to baste the pork every 20-30 minutes.  In all, the pork spent nearly 3 hours on the grill until it reached an internal temperature of 160 degrees.

To accompany the pork, I made a simple side dish of sugar snap peas and shitake mushrooms.  The peas marinated for about an hour in the juice of 1/2 a lemon, 1 T white wine, 1 T olive oil, 1 tsp honey, 2 smashed cloves of garlic, and two shakes of cayenne pepper.  I added the mushrooms to the mix about 15 minutes before I was ready to cook them.

The whole mixture - marinade and all - was sauteed in a heavy saucepan, preheated with about 1 T of olive oil.  As they were cooking I added S&P and cooked everything for 6 or 7 minutes.

All of this was enjoyed tree-side.  Who needs Chinese food.  Merry Christmas to all - and to all a good night!