[Author's note: Christmas dinner]

Burnout hit me like a ton of bricks last Friday (Dec 18) and the following weekend. It's a feeling sort of like my head is full of cotton but there's also a kind of mental weight dragging me down, a lack of energy and a need for more sleep (I have been napping during the day a lot). Nasty emotions go along with it too, of course: feelings of desperation, inadequacy, demoralization, etc. I started feeling it on and off back in the summer, but never as bad as last week.

But the hiatus is helping.

And since it is Christmas (by my book, the season doesn't end until all the leftovers are gone) I am indulging in the traditional annual pig-out. On Shirley's urging, I post what we had for Christmas dinner at my place last night, since it was not at all the usual.

She had done turkey on Christmas Eve (being of German extraction, she celebrates it then, so we were all over at her place) so I opted for a duck and, on a whim, added two cornish hens. The only thing I planned before the day was to stuff the duck with roughly equal proportions of clementine sections, coarsely chopped onion and garlic cloves, with several glugs of soy sauce. Everything else we did was spontaneous and based on what I had on hand.

We glazed the duck with a mixture of 1 cup orange juice, 1 tsp chopped garlic, 1 tbsp honey, liquid smoke to taste, pepper to taste, chili sauce to taste and a goodly slug of red wine, all thickened with a heaping tablespoon of cornstarch. The duck was repeatedly basted with this while it baked.

The first cornish hen with stuffed with onion and garlic cloves, and glazed with about 1/4 cup of coconut milk, 1 tbsp tandoori powder and 1 tsp of chopped garlic.

For the second, we sweated one large onion, chopped, 2 tbsp basil pesto, 2 tbsp chopped garlic, in pure bacon grease, then deglazed it with a generous slosh of red wine, and marinated the bird in this for a few hours. We then removed the bird from the marinade and fried the marinade up again, adding 1 slice of German rye bread torn up, 1/2 1bsp butter and soy sauce to taste, and stuffed the bird with it.

Into the oven all the birds went, with potatoes. The duck took about two hours, the cornish hens one. We also did a vegetable dish that is usually done with Swiss chard; you fry three slices of bacon until they're crisp, remove, crumble, fry the chard in the bacon grease until it's wilted, put it in a baking pan, sprinkle generously with a combination of bacon bits, Parmesan cheese and chopped garlic, and bake until the surface is golden brown. We did this with nappa, aka Chinese lettuce, for a different but equally good effect.

We made a delicious gravy out of the duck drippings by adding flour, duck stock and white wine. We made a second delicious gravy out of the cornish hen drippings -- both hens were in one roasting pan -- just by adding flour and water.

Last thing on the menu: Yorkshire pudding, which was awesome with either gravy.

If you happen to get any ideas from this, bon appetit.






--