Christmas adds it’s own challenge for cooking and eating. There are so many meals and which do you choose for your local challenge? How to be true to tradition and at the same time do it with local ingredients?
I teach small children to ski on Wednesdays at Buck Hill, a local ski and snowboard area. The Wednesday before Christmas we celebrated one of our instructors who is moving to Alabama. I volunteered to bring soup. We’re in Minnesota so it had to be Minnesota Wild Rice soup.
Ingredients: Naturally harvested Minnesota Wild Rice, locally raised turkey (I bought a breast and a couple of thighs), carrots and onions from our garden, chicken stock saved from cooking necks and backs from our own chickens, local milk, cream and butter. The exceptions would be salt and pepper and corn starch to thicken.
Served with a delicious loaf of local bread from an Italian bakery. It’s the perfect Minnesota lunch!
Christmas Eve I decided to bite the bullet and go for a local holiday dinner.
Rib Roast from the Village Meats Butcher shop, potatoes sliced thin, cooked with Minnesota Creamery heavy cream and butter layered with onions from our garden, corn frozen from a local farm, a loaf of rustic bread from the local bakery, strawberries and blueberries from the freezer and cookies made with local butter and North Dakota flour. There were exceptions: my sister brought the salad – how can you have Christmas eve without a salad? and of course the other cookie ingredients. But we did have Minnesota Creamery Mint Ice Cream with the cookies 🙂
My brother in law Mark teased us throughout the holidays about butter. How many pounds does it take to do a holiday? When you factor in cookies, potatoes, bread, veges, and other toppings it’s several pounds per dinner. The only thing we don’t use it in is the salad, but then there’s the oil…
Happy New Year to all!
