And other holiday, ahem, traditions

by DON GENOVA

I love holiday traditions. And I wouldn’t hesitate to say that between Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, I can be sickeningly traditional. I hang up the few non-electronic Christmas cards we still receive in the windows, like my mom used to do. I bring out the festive, crocheted doorknob covers she sent to me years ago and put them on the bedroom and bathroom doors, and switch my dish towels to ones with a Christmas motif.

At the same time, I’m always trying to start new traditions—especially in the kitchen. Unfortunately, they don’t always have the desired results. For instance, ever since I read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, I’d wanted to try roasting a goose for Christmas. With much excitement and considerable expense, one year I ordered a goose from a local farmer. But instead of the giant breast and succulent thighs I was used to getting with a turkey, the goose was dry and so puny it barely managed to feed my family of five. Next!

Then there was the New Year’s Day duck. It kind of got away from me in the oven, and the skin on the breast was burnt black while the legs roasted away to tough strands of chewy flesh.

Only the cat had sharp enough teeth to make short work of it.

One Thanksgiving I made a very ingredient-pricey, dried-fruit-and-nut-stuffing, which I baked in a large casserole in the oven instead of inside the turkey. Great idea. Too bad that amid the to-do of getting all the other dishes to the table I completely forgot the stuffing. Luckily, the oven had been turned off, but it was sometime past the dessert, after-dinner drinks, and the dishes being put into the dishwasher that I remembered the casserole. It was dried out and—since it also had sausage in it—past the number of hours I would have considered it to still be “foodsafe.” Into the garbage it went.

Then there was the Christmas Eve I was determined to explore my Sicilian heritage and serve a dinner featuring all seafood, no meat. The raw oysters and smoked salmon went over well. But the salt cod I had spent days fussing over by soaking it in water and changing it religiously fell flat on my palate, and the special, marinated spicy whole oranges were so “special” I chucked them into the compost after the first taste.

On another New Year’s, an exuberant mussel farmer from Cortes Island really wanted me to try his mussels. I enlisted a couple of friends who were coming over for our New Year’s Eve party to meet the farmer’s partner in a dark church parking lot in Nanaimo to make the pickup. They drove around for ages before finding the church, and then felt like they were making some sort of drug deal when the “baggie” of mussels was handed over, all under the watchful eye of God. I won’t be asking them to make that a tradition.

But some of my traditions persist. This past Thanksgiving I helped my brother-in-law deep-fry our turkey. It was one of the most delicious turkeys I’ve ever had. That’s a keeper. And my commitment to local foods remains steadfast, with products like Fanny Bay oysters, B.C. smoked salmon, Pemberton potatoes, and turkeys from my favourite farm—that is if the farmer can still find a place to have her birds slaughtered under B.C.’s new meat-inspection regulations.

And there is one Sicilian dish that everyone enjoys: thinly sliced fennel bulb along with peeled, sliced oranges, a little chopped celery, black olives, a drizzling of olive oil and sprinkle of sea salt, along with the juice of the oranges.

OK, oranges, black olives and olive oil wouldn’t get me points under the rules of the 100-Mile Diet, but I’ll claim the Marco Polo rule for this dish: you can use any ingredient a wanderer like Marco Polo would have packed in his bags during his trips. Hmm… I wonder what Marco Polo ate for his holiday meals? Maybe a Marco Polo dinner could become a yearly tradition….

Don Genova is a B.C.-based food journalist who recently acquired two kittens. He ís wondering what they’ll eat over the holidays that they shouldn’t—including the chocolate hedgehogs. His website is dongenova.com.

| | | | | | | |