Christmas Dinner Burritos

One thing my girlfriend and I have tried to do each year is make Christmas Dinner a little different. I've yet to complete a post about Christmas 2016's festive Salmon En Croute with Mixed Veg, which we prepared for my folks when we stayed with them for a couple of nights over the festive season, and last year's turkey burgers were a bit of a disaster because I'd foolishly assumed that a burger should be 100% meat, regardless of the type of meat.

This year, we didn't need much discussion to decide on our alternative Christmas meal style. I'd been considering burritos for some time before Courtney even brought up the subject of making Christmas dinner plans, so that was my first suggestion... and she agreed straight away. I then started researching options for Christmas-appropriate rice as part of the filling, while Courtney looked into seasonal 'slaw recipes. She opted to use What The Cluck? from The Vegetarian Butcher, while I picked up a couple of packs of Bernard Matthews turkey chunks. In place of a salsa, we both agreed that a dollop of cranberry sauce would be reasonably appropriate, and so the plans were in place.

For the rice, I came up with a shortlist of three existing recipes from around the internet:

• Puerto Rican Rice with Pigeon Peas, from Saveur.com
• Festive Rice, from Taste of Home.com
• Christmas Pilaff, from DeliciousMagazine.co.uk

After due consideration, the Festive Rice option was selected, but was prepared in a pan, on the hob, rather than by baking, the 1/4 cup of butter and the mint were both entirely omitted, while the Feta was added to the burrito rather than incorporated into the rice mix. Courtney's 'slaw was a mix of red cabbage and red onion (both sliced quite thinly) with pomegranate seeds, as well as lime and orange juice, seasoned with a little salt and pepper. She'd intended to also add some chopped Brussels sprouts - which she'd bought especially - but it slipped her mind at the time.

Now, since we all know that turkey tends to be a bit on the bland side, and mixing up some gravy for the purposes of a burrito seemed rather pointless and wasteful, I figured I'd heat it up in a pan after coating it with Peri-Peri Salt. This involved just dumping a bit of sunflower oil into a small frying pan and then chucking the coated turkey chunks in once it was heated up and stirring them about till they started to brown in places. I somewhat underestimated how much oil I'd need, which led to small pieces of turkey adhering to the pan, but it worked well enough aside from that.

Assembling the burrito was a simple case of serving out a portion of rice onto a tortilla (warmed for 10 seconds in the microwave to ensure they were flexible enough for filling and rolling), crumbling over some Feta, scooping over some cranberry sauce, then adding some of the slaw. Courtney further embellished her burrito with some jalapeños and coriander, but neither are particularly agreeable to me, so I just had to make do with the basic ingredients. As a finishing touch, the burritos were returned to the pan for a bit of browning, and to help seal the seam.

The end result turned out really well - we're both fans of burritos, but have previously tended to rely on supermarket-bought sets for making them, and we tend to omit staples like the rice, focusing instead on the seasoned meat (or meat substitute), packed-in salsa, some sour cream and, at most, a home-made guacamole. Having a somewhat seasonal rice recipe, further spiced up by the Peri-Peri Salt, then sweetened by the fresh pomegranate, it was a comparatively light and sweet burrito, but filling nevertheless. This was also probably the first time we - or I, at least - have tried to properly roll our burritos rather than turn them into makeshift tubular pockets. I had to look up a couple of YouTube videos for the technique, and still got a bit confused, to be honest.

All in all, this is one of the most successful 'alternative Christmas' ideas we've had so far, yet it's still ripe for exploration into alternatives. I'm particularly keen to try the Puerto Rican Rice option - I felt that was probably the best fit for a burrito, albeit at the risk of overpowering everything else, but that was a risk I was willing to take with Bernard Matthews turkey chunks - and, having thought about it a little more, I'm wondering if mixing up a little gravy for the turkey wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.

We have sufficient leftovers of the rice and slaw for a decent dinner tonight, as well... I'm considering some Boxing Day 'sushi' using some sliced salmon I picked up a few days back, along with some Christmas spiced streaky bacon acquired in Iceland... Hopefully will be adding a few photos of that in the next few days.

I'll leave you with a Binging With Babish-inspired cross-section, with apologies for the quality of the photo, as it was taken quite hurriedly, on my phone:

Christmas Dinner... Burger-style!

I have to confess that, despite largely eschewing this blog this year, in favour of quick-and-easy, hashtag-enhanced Instagram posts, I'd thought my Christmas Dinner pizza was a more recent event than it actually was... Perhaps my recollection had become 'slightly' skewed by the emergence this year of Pizza Hut's take on my idea (which is heartily recommended, BTW - the Red Wine Gravy base alone is delicious, though the use of rotisserie chicken rather than turkey makes it a little less authetic), but it was way back in 2014... and I didn't even get round to writing up my 2016 magnum opus, the salmon en croûte with cream cheese, cranberry sauce and orange zest that Courtney and I made for my parents as Christmas Dinner that year.

Nevertheless, it had occurred to me a month or so back that it'd be nice to follow that up with another form of junk-food-ised Christmas Dinner, and the most obvious option seemed to be burgers... While Courtney and I have eaten fewer burgers at home this year than previously, I did end up visiting the McDonald's round the corner from my last Temping placement, in Islington, a little too frequently while I was there.

She was very much on board with the suggestion, so I went ahead and started looking into how best to make turkey burgers from scratch. In the end, largely through lack of care and attention, I made the most basic option in the world - just turkey mince (500g of 2% fat turkey mince from Tesco), seasoned only with salt and pepper, and formed into two patties. These were pan-fried, one at a time, in a little vegetable oil, with the use of a meat thermometer to ensure they were properly cooked all the way through, since I couldn't easily eyeball it.

Turkey is only part of a good Christmas Dinner, though. I also wanted to add a patty of stuffing and a Christmassy hash brown at the very least, while thoughts of cranberry sauce and lightly toasted slices of Brussels sprouts seemed to round off the concept nicely. Courtney mixed up a red cabbage coleslaw, because we had some red cabbage, and it went well with her planned vegetarian option.

For the stuffing patties, I had the option of going for something simple, like sage and onion, but ended up choosing a pork, chestnut and onion stuffing from the Tesco Finest range - a 400g pack divided up into four patties. The hash browns were home made, using a mixture of parsnips, rainbow carrots, onion and potato with egg and potato flour added to aid binding. These were pan-fried and still didn't hold together especially well, but the rainbow carrots added some seasonal colour to what could otherwise have been quite anaemic hash browns (hash beiges?). The sprout slices were simply chucked in the oven, unadorned, alongside my stuffing patties and Courtney's vegetarian sundries, while the hash browns and burgers were being cooked on the hob.

Of course, it wouldn't be Christmas without pigs in blankets and, rather than buy them oven-ready, I decided to piece together my own using a combination of Pork and Caramelised Onion cocktail sausages and Chestnut Smoked Streaky Bacon, both from the Tesco Finest range. Weirdly, the packs were of different sizes - 18 cocktail sausages versus 16 slices of bacon - so I ended up with a couple of unwrapped sausages. However, about 30-35 minutes in the oven created a tray full of pigs in blankets, with enough leftovers to cover my lunches for the following couple of days.

Bun-wise, I'd originally ordered a pack of Warburtons' Brioche Burger Buns but, with the only delivery slot available to us being the 18th December, these would have been out of date and probably growing stale before Christmas Day, so we ended up using them for other things and buying a pack of standard sliced buns locally, a couple of days ahead of time.

The buns were assembled with a helping of Courtney's red cabbage 'slaw on the bottom, the stuffing patty, the turkey burger, some cranberry sauce, and the toasted sprout slices substituting for that old burger staple, the pickled gherkin slices. I only got one of the hash browns, because Courtney miscounted, and they hadn't held together very well anyway, so much of the mixture ended up in a pile on her plate. I served my pigs in blankets on the side, and nicked one of her Brie Bites (Tesco's own brand) for a bit of variety, since my plate was largely made up of meat.

The results were a little mixed... and, unfortunately, my hastily taken, blurry, poorly-lit photos don't help...

The pigs in blankets were excellent and, for once, I was able to taste the difference between fancily-smoked bacon and the normal kind, these rashers having a pleasantly sweet, spicy edge to them rather than just being super-salty.

The stuffing patties tasted great, but I misjudged their size before baking them: their circumference shrank, while their height increased - I'll know to take that into account if I try this again in future, and make them shallower and wider before putting them in the oven... though the chunks of chestnut might make that a bit tricky. Courtney's red cabbage 'slaw was nice on its own, but ended up becoming rather overwhelmed by the rest of the burger, including the bun itself. The hash browns turned out really well other than their tendency to fall apart - we'll really need to research how to make them stay together... Personally, I suspect a mold may be used for the shop-bought kind or, at least, some sort of press to compact them together rather more before they're cooked.

Less impressive were the turkey burgers, since they ended up very dense and very dry. I'd definitely like to try making them again, but actually following one of the myriad recipes out there, in the hope of a more succulent result. At the very least, there should have been some additional seasoning - I had been reluctant before starting, since the other contents of my burger were, theoretically, going to be seasoning of a sort. Some of the recipes available online also feature things like egg white and breadcrumb, and these may have helped considerably. Part of the problem, though, was that I split a 500g pack of minced turkey into two 250g patties, which ended up being far too large in and of themselves. Considering a Quarter Pounder burger would only be a little over 100g, I really overdid it. Another part of the problem is that minced beef - the main constituent of a normal burger - would tend to comprise more than 2% fat... and the leanness of this minced turkey contributed to the dryness of the end result. Topping the burgers with cranberry sauce added surprisingly little to the flavour but, again, a smaller burger may have made all the difference.

Possibly the most disappointing part was the toasted sprout, which ended up getting utterly lost in the burgers. In retrospect, I suspect they should have been seasoned and oiled... So I'll know better for next time.

We're already considering options for next year's non-traditional spin on the traditional Christmas Dinner, and a curry is the front runner. We just need to look into how things like nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger into a curry sauce that can accommodate both turkey and whatever vegetarian substitute Courtney ends up using...

Christmas Dinner... Pizza-style

In a recent post, I explored the possibility of turning the humble pizza - whose leftovers can so often form a 'breakfast of champions' the morning after - into an actual all-day breakfast, with surprisingly good results. Coincidentally I had a similar sort of thing on my recent trip to LA, eating a 'Sunny Side Up Bacon and Potato' pizza - a seasonally inspired special at California Pizza Kitchen. Pizza is, after all, one of the most universally adaptable forms of food.

So, when my girlfriend and I started discussing how we would deal with Christmas dinner - since one of us would certainly not be partaking of the traditional turkey - one of the earliest suggestions, directly inspired by the All Day Breakfast idea, was 'Christmas Dinner Pizza'.

The most obvious necessity for my pizza was Gilbert's Turkey Roll Pastrami (bought at Morrisons) which, with its black pepper-coating, has made for some rather tasty sandwiches for my lunches during the working week. After that, it was a case of determining what other Christmas Dinner staples should be included. Potato would have involved rather too much wastage, sprouts and most other veg were easy passes. What I really wanted to include, somehow, was stuffing and cranberry sauce. We'd picked up some dried cranberries for some cookies that we've baked to take over to my folks tomorrow, but just adding dried fruit to the pizza seemed weird. Thankfully, I noticed, nestled in our fridge, a pack of Yorkshire Wensleydale with cranberries (also from Morrisons), and so chopped off a few small pieces to scatter around.

I'm a huge fan of 'pigs in blankets' - small pork sausages wrapped in streaky bacon - which tend to be served as part of Christmas dinner at my folks', so I also bought a pack of them - eight were arranged on the pizza, the last two in the pack were left separate. Upon reflection, I think I probably should have picked up the 12-pack rather than the 10-pack, since that would have given me four overs, which could have been kept aside for our evening meal.

The final ingredient was an idea borrowed from my girlfriend - she'd added pickled red cabbage to her vegetarian version of a Christmas pizza (featuring pieces of a Quorn 'Turkey' Burger), which made it all nice and colourful, so I figured I'd add some to mine as well.

Before. Note that the pigs in blankets had already had about 10 minutes in
the oven prior to being added to the pizza for this shot. The stuffing had
been cooked separately, according to its own instructions

So, after about 10-12 minutes in my oven, the pigs in blankets were done to perfection, the Wensleydale and cranberry had melted into the mozzarella, the stuffing was nicely crisped, and the end result looked like this:

After... But before I scoffed it all down. Obviously.

I must confess to some surprise that this turned out as well as it did - particularly with the addition of the Wensleydale with cranberry (that, being such an unusual and late addition to the range of flavours, was the wild card, but the overall effect worked very well). I mean, OK, it's unlikely that I'd ever complain about something involving pigs in blankets, I already knew the turkey pastrami was nice (rather more moist than the average roast turkey!), and stuffing is little more than additional herbs... but there was plenty of room for it to be terrible simply because it's a bit of a jumble.

The only thing that did go slightly wrong was the pickled cabbage, which could have done with a bit more draining before it was chucked onto the pizza, as it ended up soaking right through and causing a damp patch in the middle of the base.

I had been a little concerned about the stuffing, as my girlfriend started preparing the whole packet, where I'd intended only to make a small amount, rolling into balls to distribute around the pizza. However, even once cooked in an oven-proof dish, the stuffing below the crisp surface remains moist and malleable, and easily stands up to further time in the oven. I ended up not shaping it as it was still rather hot when we started making the pizzas, but I think that just adds to the 'hand-made charm' of my pizza.

A decidedly tasty and tidy Christmas dinner, with very little washing up required afterward... and so another success for pizza as a method of preparation.