Christmas was different this year. We could not gather with my parents, siblings, aunties, uncles and cousins to celebrate the holiday this year. It was a quiet and less complicated celebration. But we all try to bring in some normalcy into our pandemic celebrations.
Food is a way to bring comfort and normalcy into our Christmas celebration. Annually, we enjoy prime rib for our Christmas celebration. We try to be healthy and do not eat lots of beef though we love it. So we could not leave this out of our Christmas food fest.
We raved to our family and friends about our prime rib recipe which our good friend introduced to us about 10 years ago. There is a fear in overcooking an expensive prime rib and ruining this investment. But this recipe truly is foolproof. You do not need to figure out how long to cook your prime rib depending on the size and weight. It works for us whether our roast is a Costco king size prime rib or the 4 rib prime rib we bought for this Christmas.
Foolproof Prime Rib from Paula Deen
We seasoned with Costco 21 salt less seasoning, garlic salt, fresh garlic, garlic powder and fresh rosemary the night before. We roasted for the designated 375 degrees for one hour and turned off and waited 3 hours before turning on for 30 minutes not waiting for the 375 degrees to come back. The meat came out rare. We prefer rare. Especially for leftovers, we will not have overcooked meat. We saved the drippings to make gravy the next day. We savored the flavor without the gravy. We were in prime rib heaven.
Cooking took time to prepare! But what else are we going to do during this pandemic life?
We also enjoyed the Safeway deal of utilizing the coupon to buy our roast for $5.99/lb. So we enjoyed a big 10 pound roast for the cost of one serving of beef from our local popular prime rib restaurant. We look forward to prime rib sandwiches using Costco Artisan rolls, Trader Joe’s Whole Grain Dijon Mustard, and avocado.
Our accompanied side dishes were scalloped potatoes and ginger butternut squash, carrot and broccoli medley. For dessert, we enjoyed Meyer lemon bars utilizing about 4 lemons from our garden.
Our cooking skills have improved during this pandemic. We refined our tastes and hope to continue to improve.
Even though, we could not spend our Christmas with our family and relatives. Instead we were able to notice the flavors of our food better. Normally, we are blessed with a lot of dishes prepared by relatives. So we over indulged and the flavors are a little intermingled. We do not get to truly appreciated each dish’s unique flavor.
Lesson learned is to slow down and savor the flavors. I am a fast eater. I did participate in a couple of food eating competitions with success. But fast eating does not allow for noticing the nuances of flavors.
Hope we can learn to continue to slow down to savor life in 2021.
Photos Remind and Teach!
