Feastmas

I'm stuffed. There was barely enough room in my belly for ham and cornbread stuffing omelette this morning.

Barely...heehee. I know, it sounds strange but it was soooo good. Especially with a good zapping of srirachi.  This is now known in our house as my "Birthday Omelette" because TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY!!!!!
I am 38 freaking years old!!!!
Yippee!!!

I'm recovering from 48 hours of gluttony.  My 38 year old belly is stuffed beyond capacity. There's a lot packed in there....

filled beyond capacity

We started off with a Feastmas Eve feed at our friend Moe's. We had a casual get-together to share the loche/burbot that our friend Juan caught earlier this week.  It's the camo fish below.

loche and coney

Loche is a easy fish to clean and process. The skin peels right off and the meat pulls right off the spine. The skin is smooth with tiny scales. It almost feels like an eel. There aren't any finicky bones to deal with, making it a ease to fillet. You can cook it up whole if you feel like it but most folks around here cut the meat into chunks and boil it up.  I prefer to pan-fry it with a bit of butter and oil and serve with a squeeze of lemon.

There are three rules to a proper pan fry.

Firstly, don't crowd the pan. Or else you'd end up sweating the fish and sweaty fish is about as appetizing as Santa's sweaty jockstrap.

Secondly, don't mess with the fish once you put it in the pan. Give it a good minutes. You'll see the flesh start turning opaque around the edge. You only want to turn the pieces over once.

Thirdly, don't overcook the fish.

I basically spent much of the evening frying up pan after pan of loche for everybody. As soon as I filled up the plate, it was gone.

Thank goodness my dear, dashingly handsome, darling husband took pity on me and fed me as I cooked round after round.



 It's really mild, firm flesh. Many compare it to lobster. It's so good that even my freshwater fish hating darling husband liked it.

The fish also has one of the best livers I have every had. It's sweet and rich and everything good that a liver ought to be. I keep planning to save some to make a pate with local cranberries but it's so much easier to just roast it up.  I threw in the liver with the egg sac (another bit of yummy heaven) into the over for 30 minutes at 350F.

This the egg sacs (top) and loche liver (bottom) in the raw form:

All roasted up (liver on the left, eggs on the right):

Yum nom nom nom. Life is good. I know the idea of eating fish liver and egg sacs is kinda weird to most people. That's ok. That just means more for me!

The following evening we hosted a huge Christmas refugee dinner. Pretty much it was all our friends that stuck around Inuvik for the holidays and didn't have family to share dinner with. I woke up at 8am and started cooking (and nibbling) by 8:20am and kept going all day. I managed to squeeze in a much needed walk with the girls to work through my day-long nibblefest.

I made roast turkey, mashed potatoes, cornbread & apple stuffing, buckets of gravy and cranberry sauce made with local cranberries. Friends brought over bumble berry pie and sugar pie (otherwise known as my Kryptonite), homemade maple syrup fudge, baked sweet potatoes and ham. I also made traditional Danish dishes including rice pudding to start off the evening, braised red cabbage and Kevin even whipped up a dish of candied potatoes. I told if he wanted them, he'd have to make them. Not that I don't like them. I just hate peeling those tiny potatoes. I'm so lazy :P

Just looking at all that food is making my belly ache. And it doesn't even include the all the chocolates and desserts that I ate. Ahhh! Sugar pie is my nemesis! But it's so yummy.

Here are some happy Feastmas puppy photos:

Happy Yummy Holidays everybody!