Bottomness of Cooking: Christmas Dinner

Happy Holidays All!

I realized recently that I have not been keeping my blog up-to-date. (Again!) My New Year's resolution is to post about my experiments ASAP. I've gotten into a bad habit these past few months of choosing gaming over logging these fun-time cooking adventures.

Lots of firsts for me this Christmas. Number one: I made prime rib. Number two: I made a yule log. What the hell was I thinking?! Not all is lost! It all came out amazing... and you couldn't see the cracks in my yule log which is always a plus.

Things to do if I attempt these recipes again: 1) Get a new oven. 2) Get a new oven. Ok, I should explain... Our oven does not keep an even temperature in addition to not actually being the correct temperature. This made (at the very least) the yule log way too difficult.

The spread: prime rib with an herb paste, potatoes, glazed carrots, green beans with bacon, and french onion soup. If the holiday gathering is small, I am inclined to make the prime rib again (purely financial reasons). The potatoes were good, nothing fancy; just cooked in the drippings from the roast. Green beans were pretty standard (well, for Southern green beans). The carrots are now a required side dish at any holiday meal. Thankfully, they are super simple to make. The French onion soup recipe was different from my previous one, but I like the recipe I had previously posted better. This one was good... just not great.

As far as the desserts go for flavor, the gingerbread cake... is a must try! It was fantabulous! I made it with a vanilla bean cream cheese frosting. The yule log was very tiramisu-like in flavor. Although, I am inspired to try filling it with different creams. This will also give me opportunity to practice baking and rolling the actual cake (without cracking it). I want to try a hazelnut cream as well as a peppermint cream. If anyone has any tips on not cracking the cake when rolling it, let me know.