Thinking Outside the Christmas Dinner Box

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

It all started with a goose. Some years ago while I was living in New York, my parents called from California about five days before Christmas asking if it was possible to procure a goose for the holiday meal.

Apparently my younger brother had been reading too much Dickens. In a bout of nostalgia for something he had never experienced, he was insisting that to have a proper Christmas dinner at some point we needed to make a goose. Surprisingly, we all agreed.

Five days before Christmas was too late to find a goose that year, it turned out, so the next year it became our mission to make the Christmas goose happen. A search of the internet led me to the specialty meat purveyor, D’Artagnan (www.dartagnan.com). Ninety dollars and a UPS package later and we had ourselves the making of a good old fashioned English Christmas.

For never having made a goose before it was, amazingly, a huge success. We all loved the roast goose with its rich, gamey flavor. Except, of course, the one person who wanted it most, my younger brother. What we realized, more than it being about the goose, was how nice it was to have a dish to look forward to that was out-of-the-ordinary. The goose was special. And seeing how Christmas was one of our favorite holidays of the year, in part because it is usually the only holiday where our whole family is together, it deserved a dish impressive enough to be part of our gift to each other.

So started the beginning of what has been both a fun and sometimes daunting tradition. Once we broke free of the roast turkey or ham mold, it became a challenge to see how we could out-do the meal from the year before.

There was the year of the standing rib roast with five peppercorn crust served with potato and leek au gratin swimming in enough delicious cream that I could almost hear the potatoes squealing with delight. Then came the three week project of confit duck legs which packed in their fat made the 10 hour journey up the golden state from Southern California to Sonoma. Freed of their fat cure and roasted in the oven, the duck legs stood proudly on each plate alongside seared duck breast, flageolet beans, and wilted greens.

Since starting this new holiday tradition of decadent and celebratory meals, each year has been more memorable than the year before, and has raised the ante for the year to follow.

Apparently I am not the only one with this idea for an out-of-the-ordinary Christmas dinner. Upon trying to place an order for a suckling pig this year I was told I was too late, my butcher had already placed five pig orders for Christmas and that is all their supplier could handle this month. And as for the goose, in the five years since our first goose dinner, now geese can be had at Whole Foods, pre-cooked from Bristol Farms (a California specialty market), or even ordered from most local grocers such as Ralph’s.

To step outside the ribbon-clad Christmas box does not necessarily require the detective work of Sherlock Holmes or the direct line to a pig farm. If you normally cook a ham, maybe this year you do a rack of pork (the loin still on the bone) or a crown roast of pork. If you normally do beef, maybe this year you try lamb. A roast leg of lamb is simple. Or for a smaller crowd, seared medallions of the tenderloin are even faster than beef tenderloin and are a good baby step for making your way into more exotic meats.

So if you are like me, and are too late for a whole pig, and have been there done that with most of the usual meats, call your butcher or check out D’Artagnan’s website and see if you can upgrade from beef and lamb to something more exotic, say venison, or maybe even elk chops. The preparation doesn’t vary much from working with lamb but the long, elegant bones of a rack of venison says nothing if not “special.”

If Christmas comes but once a year, it demands the sort of meal that one is likely to see but once a year. Like the Cratchit family gathered around their Christmas goose, a “special” meat of your own might be enough to bring out the Tiny Tim in all of us. But maybe nothing says “God bless us, everyone” quite like a goose.

Serves/Makes: 8

• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 2 (8 rib size) racks of lamb
• salt and pepper
• 4 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
• 20 juniper berries
• 1 tablespoon fennel seeds
• 2 teaspoons whole peppercorns
• 1 bag fresh cranberries
• 2/3 cup sherry
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 orange, juice and zest of
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 sprig fresh thyme