With a little input from the folks who will be at the table, I put together my menus for Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner. I’ll be cooking Christmas Eve dinner at home this year, which is a change for us, and one I’m looking forward to. I’ll keep to the Italian tradition of having fish or seafood, although I’m certainly not making seven kinds. We’ll start with a shrimp cocktail (Jim will make his excellent cocktail sauce) and some puff pastry pinwheels filled with spinach and cheese. Our main course will be poached salmon served with a dill/creme fraiche sauce, accompanied by roasted white and green asparagus and a nice loaf of bread (served with truffle butter). Dessert will be Christmas cookies (and I will cheat and buy them at our local Italian pastry shop) and molten chocolate cakes.

Christmas breakfast at our house has, for the past several years, consisted of freshly made cream scones with clotted cream, lemon curd, and jam. There’s always a big pot of coffee and some tea for Jim. We see no reason to stray from this path.

Unlike the Cratchits, I’m not looking forward to putting a roast goose on my dinner table. At our house, dinner on the big day will be a small prime rib. This isn’t actually one of my favorite cuts of meat, but the menfolk adore it, and I certainly don’t mind roasting one once a year. We’ll have roasted brussels sprouts and garlic mashed potatoes with that, and dinner rolls (I’ve not yet gotten up the nerve to do Yorkshire pudding). I feel like we should have something a bit lighter to start, so I’m thinking we might actually begin with a salad of mixed greens dressed simply with olive oil and my good balsamic vinegar. Dessert will be those Christmas cookies again, and some pound cake.

We’re looking to make some homemade eggnog this year, too, although where it fits in to all this I’m not sure. One thing I can tell you is that it’ll be good.

Although I originally started making granola using a recipe from the Morning Glory Farm Cookbook, I’ve modified the basic formula enough that I think I’m evolving my own granola style. This past weekend I made a batch of almond-apricot granola that came out really good, and I’m posting it here (at least partly at the request of my friend Stephe). I used sunflower seeds alone because they’re always available at the supermarket, but if you  have other seeds (or nuts) that you like, you should feel free to mix and match and substitute to your heart’s content. I may experiment a bit once I locate a good online source of nuts and seeds in bulk.

Ingredients:

• 5 cups oatmeal (I use Quaker Old Fashioned rather than the quick-cooking stuff — it has a better texture)
• 2 - 2.5 cups unsalted sunflower seeds (or a mixture of sunflower seeds and your seeds of choice)
• 3/4 tsp. salt
• 1 cup pure maple syrup
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 1.5 tsp almond extract
• 1 cup slivered almonds
• 1 cup dried apricots, chopped

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Mix the first six ingredients together in a large bowl and then spread in a large baking pan (you should have enough room in the pan to comfortably stir the ingredients without spilling them over the sides. Bake at 325 for approximately 30 minutes, stirring once or twice. Lower heat to 250 degrees and continue baking for approximately an hour, or until the granola starts to turn a nice nutty brown. Stir it frequently to brown it evenly and keep the stuff on the bottom from over-browning. Add the almonds and bake for another 30 minutes. Remove granola from oven and then add apricots. Stir thoroughly and cool in pan. When granola is cool, pack it into an airtight container, where it will keep for quite some time.

You can serve this like cereal, or enjoy it with yogurt (and fruit if you’d like). It also makes a nice snack for eating out of hand. If it doesn’t taste as almondy as you’d like you can experiment with increasing the amount of almond extract a bit.

That’s my pronouncement for the week.

Last year, after reading a ringing endorsement of this pan on Cook’s Illustrated, I ventured to Wal-Mart and bought one of these 6.5 quart Tramontina enameled cast iron Dutch ovens. My winters are full of soups, stews, and other things that call for slow cooking, sometimes on top of the stove, sometimes in the oven, and I wanted a pot that would serve me well. The truly amazing thing is how well this Dutch oven performs, and how (relatively) inexpensive it was — this year, Wal-Mart’s website lists it at $45 (still a bargain), but I think I might have paid $40 for mine.

The enamel coating on this pan is great because it allows you to brown things very nicely — you end up with a nice fond on the pan bottom which will serve your dish well if you deglaze the pan with some wine or broth. I like to make giant batches of tomato sauce with meat in this, and it’s also great to make chicken in a pot. I brown the chicken on top of the stove, remove the chicken, add some aromatic vegetables to the pan to brown them up a bit, return the chicken to the pot, add a little wine or stock, and stick the whole thing in the oven for an hour and a half. I also trot this baby out when it’s time to make a pot of kielbasa and sauerkraut, or corned beef.

It’s easy to clean, too — the enameled interior cleans up almost like a nonstick coating, and on those few occasions when you’ve got something really stuck, you just need to put some water in the pot and soak for a couple of hours and it’s good to go.

The one drawback? It’s heavy. It’s really heavy. It’s so heavy that once you put a few pounds of ingredients into it, you don’t want to pick it up if you don’t have to. It’s heavy enough that when you wash it out you’re very careful not to drop it. Not in the sink (it’d probably chip the porcelain off your sink), not on your foot. Other than that, it’s a relatively inexpensive workhorse, and it looks pretty on the stove.

A couple of weeks ago, Jim and I took a ride to the Penzeys Spices store in Norwalk. I’d been ordering spices online from Penzeys for a while, but never bothered to make the trip to a brick-and-mortar store. I’m so glad we went. It’s not a very big place, but the aroma is huge — you walk in and your senses are immediately stimulated by a wide variety of spicy/herbal fragrances. One of the things I bought was a small bag of jerk pork spices. According to the bag, it’s hand-mixed from paprika, allspice, ginger, red pepper, sugar, ground Grenadian nutmeg, black pepper, garlic, thyme, lemon grass, cinnamon, star anise, cloves and mace. It smells — well, it smells warm and inviting, and familiar and exotic at the same time. In the Caribbean, jerk pork would traditionally be made from a whole roast pig. I, um, didn’t go that route.

So, last night’s dinner consisted of a jerk pork roast and Caribbean rice. I served the pork with a jerk dipping sauce that was made by a co-worker of Jim’s with hot peppers from her vegetable garden. I picked up a bag of plantain chips in the Latino section of the grocery store and called it a theme dinner.

Caribbean Jerk Pork Roast

• 2-lb. boneless pork loin roast
• Jerk spices (I highly recommend using Penzeys if you’re not inclined to mix your own)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Pat roast dry with paper towels, and then rub generously with spices (I spread a little of the spice mixture on a sheet of wax paper and rolled the pork around in it until it was well-coated). Bake for one hour and 15 minutes, or until the pork registers 160 degrees on a meat thermometer. Slice and serve with or without jerk dipping sauce.

Caribbean Rice

• 2 teaspoons vegetable oil
• 3/4 cup shredded coconut (I suspect the idea is to use unsweetened — they don’t carry that at my supermarket, so I went with sweetened)
• 1/2  onion, minced
• 2 cups rice
• 4 cups chicken stock
• 1 firm ripe mango, peeled and cubed

Heat oil in large saucepan over medium heat. Add coconut, and cook, stirring, until coconut is lightly browned. Add onion and cook until translucent. Add rice, and stir to coat. Add stock, bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 25 to 30 minutes, or until stock is absorbed and rice is tender. Remove from heat, add mango, and serve.

NOTES: The jerk season is fairly spicy, so be forewarned. The dipping sauce we had was very hot as well (I can’t remember if she used Scotch bonnets or jalapenos, but in either case, we used this sparingly). The rice is absolutely delicious, but it needs some green. Given the other flavors, I would be inclined to throw in a handful of chopped cilantro. The mango adds a wonderful touch to the dish, and cuts the coconut nicely. I will look for unsweetened coconut for next time.