cassoulet for New Year’s Day

I was only recently introduced to the idea of eating beans on New Year’s Day for good luck and prosperity. I’ve always figured I’ve gotten my good luck from our noodles the night before - but on the other hand, you can’t have too much good luck. So this year I decided to try my hand at a cassoulet.

I know that there’s a lot of argument over what makes the “true” cassoulet. I read the recipes in The Art of French Cooking and The Cooking of Southwest France, and I read David Lebovitz’s post on Camp Cassoulet in Gascony.  Doing it the “official” way, with confit and pork fat and God knows what, certainly sounds exciting. But you know, the only people I was trying to impress were J and myself, and I just wanted it to taste good. So I did it all in one day, skipped the confit, and came up with something I was really pleased with. My one concession to working ahead was to have a pork roast for dinner a few days previous, so we could use the leftover meat.

noodles for good luck

My family has a few traditions that we keep up pretty well. Some are new and just between J and myself, like having macaroni and cheese on my birthday, or pumpkin soup and Yorkshire pudding on Halloween. But the oldest and most sacrosanct tradition is the Good Luck noodle bowl on New Year’s Eve. There may have been a year when I have not eaten these noodles, but I’m not sure…even when I’ve spent the holiday with friends I’ve insisted that this dish get eaten. I just feel funny without it.

According to my father, our family has been eating noodles on New Year’s Eve since about 1950, when my grandparents became good friends with a Japanese family. The Fujitas introduced them to the idea that eating noodles with chicken, eggs, broth and scallions at the beginning of a new year brought good luck and health. When I was a kid, we always ate the noodles directly after midnight, after setting off fireworks in the snow and attempting to play each others’ instruments, loudly. These days, we tend to eat earlier in the evening and save some champagne for the midnight toast. It hasn’t seemed to hurt anything (knock on wood). J and I have also started buying a package of Chinese barbecued pork from the local deli counter and slivering it into the noodles, as being a little more festive than shredded chicken. And we sometimes use Japanese udon instead of the traditional Rose brand Chinese egg noodles (gasp!). But fortunately, it’s good no matter what.

Happy New Year!

For some reason, J likes to save the corks from bottles of sparkling wine - champagne, prosecco, whatever. If he shoots the cork up the stairs then it gets put over my dressing room door; if he pops it out quietly it stays at the bottom of the stairs. We’ve been in this house for more than a few years now - it’s a pretty good collection.

We’ll be adding a cava cork to the lineup tonight. Happy New Year’s Eve to everyone out there!

Christmas vignettes

We’re back from our Christmas trip! We spent it mostly holed up at my parents’ house, with a short expedition to Leavenworth when it stopped snowing for a few minutes. We cooked a lot. Here’s an abbreviated photo essay of the holiday:

First, for my mother’s birthday, there was chicken biryani (with a tofu option) and chocolate cake.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas ornament handmade by my mother-in-law in Paris, 1968.

Hallowe’en dinner

Don’t ask me how this got started, but every year on Hallowe’en we have to eat the same thing for dinner. Pumpkin soup, hot Italian sausages, and Yorkshire pudding. It’s a requirement. It’s warming, autumnal and not a little bit indulgent, so I guess it’s perfect for an autumn holiday. In any case, we’ve been doing it for years. Usually I get a small sugar pie pumpkin for the soup, which I actually did this year, but it will have to get used for something else this time, because we got hold of one of these:

It’s a padana squash, as far as I know, a sort of heirloom Italian pumpkin with awesome ribbing down the sides. J saw it at the Dunbar farmstand and immediately wanted to carve it, and Steve pointed out that it makes good eating, too. So on Saturday J carved it, and we saved the flesh for our soup.