Alton Brown Rocks My Christmas

[akirlu]

On the upside, the Swedish meatballs for Christmas dinner were really fine. Ditto the ham. All thanks to more tips from Good Eats. The trick with the meatballs is the third type of mince. Typical Swedish meatball recipes call for equal parts ground beef and ground pork. Alton Brown's recipe uses equal parts beef, pork, and lamb, and oh my goodness does the lamb ever make a difference. The meatballs don't really wind up tasting lamb-y, but the flavor is rich and deep and complex in a way that normally isn't true at all. Also, the trick of using a melon-ball-sized ice cream scoop to get uniform meatballs is genius.

The main trick with the ham was tenting it with the giant-size sheet of aluminum foil for the 3-hour initial baking, which made the final result amazingly juicy, and adding the layer of brown sugar on top of the mustard, and the spritz of bourbon in the crust. Admittedly, I haven't baked a lot of hams over the years, but this was far and away the best one ever. What I can't get over is the consistently good results I get when following Brown's Good Eats recipes. Best turkey ever, best ham ever, best meatballs ever. I can hardly argue with results.

Now I just need to figure out where I can keep my Very Shiny new KitchenAid mixer -- Empire Red, natch -- which was my big prezzie for this year. So, having buried the lede, I have to say that libertango also rocks my Christmas.

Meanwhile last night's movie prodded me to finally figure out what to do with the leftover pumpkins, since I don't much care for pumpkin pie. Soup! Pumpkin garlic soup! With toasted pignolas! Alas, I don't have any Good Eats episodes on the subject, so I'll have to wing this one...

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I could have added apples to the pumpkin soup -- those I had on hand -- but I tend to think of yams as the antichrist, so I would have had to shop for them. Part of the exercise was definitely making food out of ingredients we already had in hand.