Christmas Dinner

BP II and I will not be spending Christmas together and therefore we decided to celebrate Christmas this Sunday, just the two of us. I wanted to make a big dinner with all the trimmings to celebrate. I was so excited. We woke up super early (like 8:00 and anyone that knows me knows that I do not get up at 8:00) and opened our gifts under the tree. (I received a pretty blue Dutch oven… yay!) I completely understand if you are nauseated at this point because I know it is completely obnoxious how much we got into this but bear with me.


I started dinner around 3:30 for a 7:30 dinner and the menu was ambitious: Cherry glazed coca-cola ham, grown up mac and cheese, cheddar biscuits, pan roasted tomatoes and Pecan pie. I thought I had planned it out well and things would all be done around the same time, ending with me popping in the pie before we start dinner. OMG!

The ham needed to be scored and in the oven for 3 hours and basted every 15 minutes. I have never scored a ham before but saw Alton Brown do it once on the food network. It looked easy enough. In hindsight, I think I scored a little too deep because the ham was dry in those parts. Lesson Learned. I also had to call my aunt to find out what it meant when the recipe says “remove excess fat.” The whole ham looks a little fatty. Anyway, the advice given to me was - you would know what excess fat to remove. If it doesn’t look right, or you see something that you wouldn’t want your food to cook with, remove it. Ham is in.

The 2 hour timer mark goes off and now it is time for the heavy cooking. The next thing to start is the grown up mac and cheese. I brown the bacon and move on to the cheese mixture. I start heating the milk in one pan and melting the butter in another. I was so afraid that the milk would begin to boil, I added the flour to early and the butter mixture was a little lumpy. I added the warm milk anyway, because I am the kind of person that just goes for it. The milk mixture never fully thickened and there were lumps of butter and flour that would not go away. I decided to cut my losses and strain the milk into a bowl and try the roux again. This time success. I removed from heat and added the cheese and bacon. Popped this bad boy in the oven with the ham and on to the pie. I take the pie crust out of the fridge to let it soften a bit. (I made the pie dough the night before) All of a sudden I hear this sizzling sound and smoke coming from my oven. WTF! I open my oven and see the mac and cheese is boiling over! Quickly, I put a sheet pan under the mac and cheese pan and this stops the sizzling. My oven is still smoking.

It is right about now that I cut my finger. It is small but continues to bleed non-stop!

Back to the pie dough. I am rolling this dough and it is just not coming out right. It gets too sticky and I can’t get it up from the board or it keeps ripping into pieces. I am starting to freak out. Why can I not get this to work? BP II comes over and asks if he can help and in my Linda Blair Exorcist voice I scream that I am fine and leave me alone. He persists and simultaneously the pie crust falls apart yet again and for a single moment I just loose it. I throw pie crust everywhere. Two big heaping handfuls of pie dough go flying threw the air and hit a kitchen wall. Yes, I threw a temper tantrum at the age of 23. BP II tired to console me but I just needed a minute to wallow. I cleaned up my pie dough and threw it all away. After a minute of regrouping, I started again. Made a whole new pie dough and put it in the fridge to chill. Then went over to BP II to apologize, he just laughed and said, “I always knew you were a little crazy.”

I would just like to mention that during all of this, I am basting the ham every 10 minutes.

On to the cheese biscuits. I have 30 minutes until it is time for my ham and mac and cheese to come out. The plan is to rest the ham while the biscuits bake and just cover the mac and cheese and hope for the best. The recipe states to use a stand mixer with a paddle attachment, which I don’t have and therefore resort to using my hand mixer. Needless to say biscuit mixture flew all over my kitchen – On my front door, the bedroom, like everywhere. I had already had my mental breakdown, so I just continued on. At this point, I have also run out of bakeware. I have nothing to cook these damn biscuits on. I have to wait for the mac and cheese to come out of the oven before I can start these biscuits. Timer goes off, I rest the ham and wash the baking sheet for the biscuits. Pop in the oven. 30 minutes to dinner.

Pie crust, round two is next. I am not sure why the pie dough was not cooperating this day. It could have been how hot my apartment was at this point or how dry the air was. I am not really sure. BP II wanted me to note that because of these unforeseen circumstances; it might be good to keep a ready made pie shell in the freezer at all times. For everyone’s sanity. This pie dough was a little better this time but not much. I did manage to get it in the pie pan and piece together the breaking parts. After that it was pretty easy to combine and get ready to pop in the oven.

Finally, the pan roasted tomatoes. The only real issue was the basil went brown on me. I am not sure how or why but I bought bright green basil on Friday and by Sunday, it was brown. I tasted it and it was fine just not very pretty or as crisp. Luckily these were really easy and I could just coast. Dinner is finally ready.

I had planned to put on a dress and make-up for this dinner. You know make it special but by the time it was done, I just wanted to eat. You know what I mean?