Delectable December: Don’t Cancel Christmas, Have Cameron Lawton’s Holiday Feast!
Today’s guest is Cameron Lawton who shares a wonderful French holiday tradition. Make sure to have this before your New Year’s resolutions. In fact, it’s meals like this that probably inspired people to decide to start dieting on January 1. I think next Christmas, I’d love to visit Cameron’s house for dinner!
We don’t celebrate Christmas. Mixing up a card-carrying pagan with a die-hard atheist means that we came to an agreement long ago. Celebrations start at the Winter Solstice and go right on through to New Year.
Before you start booking me into your local de-tox clinic, no, we don’t get off our faces every day but my partner goes out weeks before and stocks the house with masses of treats that we don’t normally get during the year and hides them. So every day during our holidays, he brings out another surprise. It might be a special drink or different fancy nibbles to go with our aperitif.
The main feast meal which would probably equate with Thanksgiving or Christmas, is the Solstice when we celebrate the days becoming longer again, the return of the sun, the shorter nights and the hope that the harvest, both agricultural and personal, will be rich this year.
We live in France where the tradition is to get all the family around the table on Christmas Eve and eat… and eat… and eat, starting about 10.30 pm and going right through to the early hours. We don’t have family over here so we play a game – each year we try to have something new for our feast. We go out together and choose. Obviously with only two people a turkey is out of the question, even if the two dogs would help out enthusiastically with any leftovers!
This year we found something fabulous – roti de porc Orloff. Our local butcher, Sebastian, is a wizard. He knocked up this creation which is boned, rolled pork joint, stuffed with ham, cheese and tomato. We’ll have it like all traditional feasts with roast potatoes and all the fresh veg, followed by Yule Log, which is the French version of Christmas cake – heavy, tooth-destroyingly sweet and very, very rich. I never knew a sponge cake could kick me so hard. It’s always decorated with darling little gift parcels, champagne bottles etc and I save those to put on our home made British Christmas Cake …here is this year’s offering. I believe in recycling … my Scottish upbringing rejoices at not wasting things.
MY GIVEAWAY is CANCEL CHRISTMAS – Leave a comment by January 10, 2013 for a chance to win! (contest extended due to technical difficulties.)
The Military Police boys are back and this time it’s murder.
A fast-paced murder mystery featuring the two Military Police investigators from “Yours To Command.” Plans for the holidays are scrapped when a body is found on an Army base in Germany. Still firmly in the closet at work, they stay in a hotel and indulge in some midnight room-hopping but will Rory be able to cope with his assistant’s newly discovered dominant streak? Who killed the translator and why in such a grisly way? Is there a connection to a recent suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan? Killing doesn’t stop just because it’s Christmas, especially in the British Army.
Buy at MLR Press or Amazon.com –
My blog is http://www.cameron-lawton.com/
3 Responses to “Delectable December: Don’t Cancel Christmas, Have Cameron Lawton’s Holiday Feast!”
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Thanks for hosting me here, EM – I’ve saved you a huge slice of Christmas cake xxx
OMG! Roti de porc Orloff looks sinfully delicious…I will be searching out a recipe for that. Yum!
Oh, that looks divine…we had a pork crown roast for a dinner party a few days ago, but the stuffing sounds just lovely! I bake a lot, but for some reason I’ve never done a full-on buche de Noel…roulades always frighten me, I guess I’ll figure they’ll break when I roll or lift them.