The Yum Yum Factor

I get it, I don't always feel like cooking some huge holiday meal either. I find, as my son gets older, we do less and less Christmasy stuff and spend the time off hanging out together. We go to movies, we play inappropriate games like Cards Against Humanity and visit friends because nobody has time to get together apart from Christmas. It has been a couple of years since our last, big, Xmas eve open house and I can't remember the last time I hosted a giant dinner. Our new ritual is to get up, go for dim sum and drive our Christmas Dog (we babysit her while her family flies out west to visit family) back to her family at their chalet and spend a few days drinking too much wine, eating too much food and relaxing. Now, does this mean I still don't want to eat turkey and enjoy the flavours of Christmas? Of course not. I LOVE turkey, I love stuffing, I love mashed potatoes and gravy and eggnog. Sometimes, when I can't even imagine cooking a turkey, I make something ...

Kwaf  is offering two great Xmas wine packages for the holidays and it was my job to pair each package with a recipe. The  Quintessential Christmas Dinner  package was a no brainer since I had just posted my recipe for Portuguese Corn Bread stuffing and those wines are all about turkey dinner but the  Three Brilliant Reds  pack was more of a challenge. At the breakfast tasting last week, I decided that although beef is the obvious meat to serve with bold reds, it would be nicer to do some lamb. Now, The Kid and I love lamb but Shack doesn't so I rarely cook it and I didn't have anything in the archives at all. That meant that I was going to have to come up with something on the fly. I bought some really nice lamb stew meat and sat and stared at it for a while, trying to think of something tasty, simple but nice enough to serve to guests over the holidays but not so involved that it would make entertaining a pain. I couldn't get a shepherd's pie out o...