How fun is it to eat food from your garden on Christmas day? Preserved food is great, of course, and very do-able. The exciting thing was that we, who dwell in Zone 5, consumed FRESH produce as well.
Our first delight was horseradish sauce as an accompaniment to an impressive standing rib roast. As mentioned in an earlier post, we make two kinds of horseradish sauce to please the various palates around the table. One tangy horseradish sauce is made simply of ground horseradish root mixed with vinegar. This will keep for about 6 months in the refrigerator. We also make a creamy horseradish sauce, which is mixed with a bit of sour cream usually. We somehow managed to run out of sour cream so we substituted cream instead, and that worked just fine.
Our second delight was a kale dish, made with kale picked from our garden only minutes before preparation. I must admit that I had no idea that kale was actually that sturdy. The leaves I cut on December 25 had the same turgid structure of the kale I’d been cutting all fall.
To prepare about 2 pounds of kale, I washed the leaves and tore out the thick part of the ribs. Then I chopped the kale. In a large pot, I put one sliced onion, 2 cloves of garlic chopped, and about 3 cups of homemade chicken stock. The kale simmered for about an hour while we got the rest of our dinner together. It was really a superb dish. And we had a really lovely meal.
