Making Christmas Dinner

Today I did most of the cooking for our Christmas Dinner. I love to cook and I don't think I have ever blogged about cooking before.

Of course, whenever you cook, you need to wash your hands often. Wash your hands especially after you handle raw meat.

We started preparing the duck yesterday.
I mixed vinegar and brown sugar to make a syrup to use on the duck.

I put a little red wine vinegar in boiling water.

And then poured the boiling water over the duck to help the skin absorb the syrup.

Then I put on the syrup on the duck and left it in the fridge overnight to dry out the skin.

I put the salt and Chinese five spice on the skin.

Then I put char siu sauce on the duck.

And put it in the oven for 2 1/2 hours at 375F.

I think it came out good.

What do you think?

Next I worked on the corn bread.

I mixed all of the dry ingredients first.

And then I mixed the eggs and buttermilk together.

Then we mixed the wet and dry ingredients and added in some melted butter.

I melted even more butter in the cast iron skillet in the oven.

Then I poured the batter into the hot skillet.

Smoothed it out

And then put it in the oven.

 It was ready after about 15 minutes and I moved on to the candied sweet potatoes.

Dad cut up the potatoes for me and I layered them in the baking dish with brown sugar and cinnamon.

And then I poured melted butter over the potatoes.

I baked them for an hour and then put marshmallows on them and baked it for another 5 minutes.

We also had venison.
I seared the venison to get a crust on it and I finished it in the oven.

Then I deglazed the pan with some red wine and added some butter and (gluten-free) flour to thicken it up to make a sauce.

Dad cooked the asparagus and did some chopping and of course he took a lot of pictures.
& Mom took this picture of me and Dad.

Here is a link to the recipe that we used for the Cornbread.
http://www.chow.com/recipes/28597-basic-skillet-cornbread

Merry Christmas!