Saturday, December 24, 2011. Christmas Eve.
A Family Feasts On Prime Rib. A New Cheesecake.
Christmas's weekend occurrence this year made for a lot of funny scheduling. WWL had a hole in its morning lineup for Christmas Eve, and thought a show about cooking holiday dinner would be perfect. I agreed. It was a lot like the show I do on Thanksgiving morning, with the usual questions about turkey and ham. But most callers seemed to be thinking about the same thing our family was: prime rib.
Mary Ann is a big fan of prime rib, but we don't cook it very often. At least not in the classic soft, juicy style. Most of our past standing rib roasts were cooked on the grill with substantial heat, cooking even large roasts in just a bit over an hour. But that makes it come out with the texture of a steak.
This time, we'd do it the other way. Mary Ann saw standing rib roasts at the store for about four dollars a pound. That triggered a desire for a traditional Christmas Eve prime rib dinner with all the traditional sides, attended only by the four of us.
We headed to the Fresh Market in Mandeville early. While she shopped for everything else, I looked over the rib roasts and found a beautifully marbled, three-rib roast of about four pounds, bones removed, tied up. The price--$15 a pound--gave me pause. The explanation: this was USDA Prime prime rib. The two uses of "prime" in that last sentence mean different things independent of one another. It is possible for a prime rib to be cut from inferior grades of beef. In fact, that's typical. Prime rib graded USDA Prime is quite rare. The only place I ever saw it in a restaurant was at K-Paul's.
Gimme that one, I told the butcher. My mind reeled with the possibilities. In recent years I've spoken to a lot of people who were pleased with a technique I've never tried before. You fire up the oven to 500 degrees (or even 550, say some sources), put the roast in, cook it for five minutes per pound (there are variations in that, too), then turn off the oven and let the roast remain there for four or five or six hours.
A variation on this idea begins the same way, but instead of turning the oven off, you lower it to between 200 and 250 (again, it depends on who you ask).
The two-step technique gets a good crust going on the outside of the roast as rapidly as possible, then allows the interior to get up to temperature slowly. If I were doing this to my specs, and if this were not Christmas Eve, I might have tried that oven-off approach. But the rest of my family likes beef cooked to medium. And Mary Ann is loading this dinner with so much significance that it must be to everyone's liking. No putting it back into the oven for another hour if it isn't.
So it was 500 for a half-hour, then 250 for a little over two hours. That got the internal temperature up to 135--about ten degrees higher than for medium rare. After the roast rested about fifteen minutes, it was perfect for everybody. Mary Ann and Jude got the crusty, medium-well end cuts. I took the middle slice, the reddest part. Mary Leigh--who orders medium but really seems to like medium-rare--was very pleased with what I cut for her. Each of us got a generous slab of beef, with another left over for Mary Ann's future delight.
Only one disappointment. I didn't get much of a jus out of the roast. But nobody asked for it. Jude requested bearnaise, which also sounded good to me. He joined me at the range in a class on how to make that greatest of all sauces. Fortunately, it came out just right. I used all three of the egg yolks Mary Leigh had left over from her chocolate mousse cake. It's easier to make a lot of hollandaise (the base of bearnaise) than a little of it.
The prime rib plates were fleshed out with potatoes au gratin (the cheese was Nor-Joe's provolone, plus parmigiana), asparagus, and Mary Ann's inevitable roasted bell peppers. We lit the Advent wreath and resolved that next year we absolutely must get new candles. One of them was only a matchstick in a little pad of lavender wax.
Dinner was warm and loving and complete, harkening back to our earlier days. After we finished, we all returned to the kitchen to clean up (a large job we didn't quite finish) and to make food for the party tomorrow. I was asked to bring a cheesecake. Mary Ann was busy with spinach-artichoke casserole, mushroom casserole, and pimiento cheese dip. Mary Leigh finished her chocolate mousse petits fours, which she said didn't come out right but I thought were delicious. Jude made another batch of cream-cheese-frosted red velvet cupcakes. He uses a mix, but twenty-two-year-old straight men get a pass on shortcuts like that.
I tried a new cheesecake. I have lately kept a box of Kellogg's Special K Vanilla and Almond cereal around the house as an appetite killer. I eat it right out of the storage container, without milk. The flakes are mixed with a goodly amount of big almond pieces, and the flavor all adds up to something like that of a nectar sno-ball, but neither as sweet or rich.
I ground up about three cups of the cereal in the food processor with the half-stick of butter I would have used with the graham crackers in my standard cheesecake crust. I had to adding a lot more cereal. No exchange formula existed for graham crackers to Special K until this moment:
1 packet graham crackers = 2 cups cereal
My usual cheesecake is flavored with orange juice and orange zest. This one included what was left in a bottle of macadamia nut liqueur I've had hanging around for years (about a quarter cup), a half-teaspoon of almond extract, and a tablespoon of Ronald Reginald's Melipone vanilla (with its unique Mexican flavor). I sprinkled toasted almond slivers over the top of the filling, and baked it at 325 degrees in a water bath for an hour and fifteen minutes. Then the essential hours of slow cooling. Everything else was the same.
We were up until midnight doing all this, the Christmas tree glowing in the living room and the kids watching the Christmas sequel of Home Alone. For Mary Ann, the only way this evening could have been better would have been for the kids to be eight and five again. I love Christmas Eve any way I can get it.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
