In The Kitchen: Christmas Dinner (A Few Days Late)

I am not a cook. I’m not sure why, as I love to eat, but I just don’t like to prepare meals. I think it has something to do with my lack of patience. I never understood the idea of standing over a stove for hours on end just to cook a single meal.

I will, however, spend hours knitting socks which I put on my my feet and shove into shoes. The irony is not lost on me.

This year, though, I decided that I wanted to cook an entire meal for Christmas for Mr. Martini and I to enjoy. It had to be easy, it had to be (fairly) inexpensive, and it had to be food we’d like.

I happened to find a few recipes on The Pioneer Woman Cooks that looked good, so I printed them out, and yesterday I cooked. Like, real food. Not just grilled cheese sandwiches, is what I’m saying. For those wondering, the reason we didn’t have our Christmas dinner until the Sunday after Christmas is because we ate out on Christmas Eve. A huge meal. And we still weren’t hungry Christmas day. But we were hungry on Sunday, so that’s when I dove into the cooking!

I cooked pork tenderloin, browning it in a cast iron skillet before baking it in the oven (also – surprise! there were two pieces of meat in the package, which I didn’t realize until I had started seasoning them. So we have extra.):

I boiled potatoes, then crushed them and sprinkled them with salt and pepper and olive oil, and browned them in the oven (this is a before shot):

I roasted asparagus (again, just olive oil, salt and pepper):

I made a sauce out of onions and wine and cranberry sauce, and at the end of my prep, this is what it all looked like:

Then it went onto plates:

I also made buttered rosemary rolls, but I miscalculated the timing, so they were in the oven baking while we ate dinner. But they were really good, too:

All together, this was a FANTASTIC meal. Mr. Martini can’t stop raving about it. He even went so far to say that it was one of the best meals he has ever eaten, and was way better than the fancy meal we ate Christmas Eve.

I admit, the cynic in me thinks that he’s just saying that to get me to cook more often. But he’s adamant that he means it, and I have to say, it was a darned good meal. Good thing we have leftovers!

If you missed them, here are the recipes I used:

Pork Loin with Cranberry Sauce

Oven Roasted Asparagus

Crash Hot Potatoes

Buttered Rosemary Rolls