Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Merry Christmas Part One - The Christmas Tomato




I'd love to make this a yearly tradition, but the timing might be tricky to duplicate next year. Tomatoe plants just go so nicely with Christmas ornaments!

Our potted tomatoes actually did quite poorly this summer - I think we might have gotten 2 or 3 tomatoes from them all year. We brought in the plants when it got cold this fall - there were still a few tiny little tomatoes on the plants that we thought might eventually grow and ripen if we brought the plants inside.
They started turning red the week before Christmas and are now perfectly ready to eat in our leftover turkey sandwiches. Brilliant!

Merry Christmas Part Two - Tourtière


Apparently, it is a French Canadian tradition to serve Tourtière on Christmas eve. I am not French Canadian, but I love tourtière, and I happened to have a lot of ground pork in my freezer. And anyway...what goes better with a turkey dinner than MEAT pie?

So...this is the method. You get your ground pork (Berkshire pork from Clearwater, MB in my case), you cook it up with some water, onions, garlic and lots of ground cloves, sage and savoury. Mix it up with mashed potatoes and stick it in some lardy pastry. Bake until lovely and enjoy with friends and family.