My Week 3 meal for the Dark Days Challenge was a bit of a surprise: we ate one of the Christmas tourtières for my birthday! Never fear, there is a whole pie in the freezer for Christmas Eve, which will be more than enough for three people. I always planned to make the pies this week and use the Christmas Eve dinner as my local dinner next week, but we just couldn’t resist the smell of the pie and went ahead and had one for dinner.
Day 1: Potatoes and meat filling cooking on the stove.
Day 2: Pies ready to go into the oven.
As with the beef stew, this was also a two-day meal. On Friday I made the filling with local pork from Smith Meadows, local venison from our friend in Frederick (which arrived over the course of two days in the form of giant sacks of ground meat, which probably deserves a post of its own), organic spices from Frontier, and onions, garlic, and potatoes from our CSA (the last of those; we’re back to buying from the store). On Saturday, I took the dough that I had made the weekend before out of the freezer and assembled and baked the pies. The recipe makes two, and since we are only having a small gathering this year, I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with the second one. Eat it for my birthday, apparently! We had it with last year’s home-canned pickled beets (made with beets from Larriland Farm), cranberry sauce, and Farmer Brett’s Garlic Fire Sauce, and it was delicious.
Dinner: tourtière, pickled beets, and cranberry sauce.
Dessert was another imperfect gingerbread. What can I say: babies are hard on cakes! Last time, the pan didn’t get properly floured because I was foggy-headed and used the wrong flour. (It didn’t help that I was rushing through it to get the cake in the oven before I needed to feed the baby again.) This time, I just need five more minutes to butter and flour the pan and mix everything together and…the baby needed me for an hour. Sitting on the counter for an hour is not good for the rising properties in cake ingredients (just a note for the future, in case there were any doubts). This cake fell down in a ring through the middle. Now I know why people think making cakes is difficult: they have children! It was still a perfectly good gingery gooey delight, and we loved it. I’m hoping that our friends who are having some tonight will agree.