Culinary Adventures with Camilla

At the very end of the beloved Charles Dickens holiday classic A Christmas Carol , a reformed Ebenezer Scrooge and his long-suffering employee Bob Cratchit share an oddly named libation: a smoking bishop. "A Merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. "A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon over a bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob! " The drink, as NPR's Neda Ulaby discovered  when she interviewed Cedric Dickens, Charles's great-grandson and author of Drinking with Dickens , is hot, spiced wine similar to wassail — something like a mulled wine, scented with citrus and infused with port. Ingredients 1 bottle of red wine same amount of water 1/2 C organic dark brown sugar juice from 4 roasted oranges + 1 roast...

I know, I know...it's still November. Barely. But because December is such a quagmire of events - all fun! - this serial planner has to plan things even earlier. Between Nutcrackers and three birthdays, I began thinking about our Christmas Eve menu this week. While I'm decidedly non-traditional for Thanksgiving, I decided to go ultra -traditional for Christmas with a Dickens-inspired feast, replete with a Christmas goose and plum pudding! I need to do some reading and figure out what the heck a Smoking Bishop is. Here's my Christmas Eve dinner plan... Recipes and photos to come.

On the heels of a book following the noodle road, I am continuing my  Foodie Reads Challenge  with one that follows an author's musings about fortune cookies, American-Chinese food, and lots more:  The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee. * The '8' in her name is not a typo - it's not supposed to be a 'B'; she was named '8' because that is a lucky number. On the Page Despite the intriguing topic of Chinese food, I did not find this book particularly engaging. I struggled to read more than ten pages at a time. Really, I felt as if it were about 100 pages too long. Lee's book spans nearly 300 pages and it read more like a high school research paper than a book penned by a professional journalist. Still, her premise was interesting. Lee begins by telling a story about the Powerball lottery on March 30, 2005 when 110 people played the same numbers - from their fortune cookies - and ending up sp...

After finding this 16th century recipe for mincemeat pie, I decided to nix mincemeat pies from our Christmas Eve Dickensian feast. Yuck. And yuck again. I'm sorry. I try to be open-minded about food, but this sounds so unappetizing to me - mutton, saffron, suet, vinegar, prunes, raisins, and dates...oh, and powdered beef broth. I don't want to waste all that good fruit! Pyes of mutton or beif must be fyne mynced & seasoned with pepper and salte and a lytel saffron to colour it suet or marrow a good quantitie a lytell vynegre pruynes great reasons and dates take the fattest of the broath of powdred beefe.  And if you will have paest royall take butter and yolkes of egges & so to temper the floure to make the paest. Other changes: Nonna requested figgy pudding - like the song! - instead of plum pudding, so I changed from the brandy hard sauce to vanilla ice cream.