Christmas 2013: Peach mustard pork shoulder, new sides, and a Tardis cake!

If you've been following our blog this year, you'll know that 2013 has been the year of trying new dishes in place of our standard holiday meals.

When Megan and I first started cooking together, Christmas ended up being a repeat of Thanksgiving with turkey and traditional sides. That gets old fast though, with the two holidays so close together, so eventually we switched to a salt roast, where a large cut of beef is encased in kosher salt to roast in its own juices.

Last year we changed that up, trying out a pork version of the classic wellington dish. This year we totally changed the formula, not only switching out our meat, but completely revamping our traditional sides.

Our Christmas dinner this year started with a 7 pound pork butt ("butt" actually being a cut of meat from the shoulder, not coming from the backside as you'd expect) we got on sale for $11 - not a bad price for something that will be feeding a large group.

There was a good deal of fat on the edges, so the first thing to do is clean and trim the pork, then set it down on a layer of plastic wrap.

We're going to rub down the pork with a herb and mustard mixture and let it sit overnight to soak in the flavor. For the marinade, we mixed together rosemary, sage, salt, minced garlic, oil, and dijon mustard.

The marinade is thoroughly rubbed over all sides of the pork. It's messy and doesn't look particularly pretty to start, but trust us - this will make it taste fabulous!

The plastic wrap is then tightly rolled up and the pork butt rests overnight in the fridge.

Here's the pork the next day after soaking up all those flavors. To ensure this remains juicy and tender, we're going to cook it "low and slow" for about 5 hours. We've poured a cup of water into the bottom of an oven safe pan, then set the pork on top of another dish actually meant for grilling that is filled with small holes. This lets the juices drip into the pan and keeps the pork moist, without it actually sitting in liquid, which will prevent the edges from getting crispy.

Here it is out of the oven hours later, smelling fabulous and with an amazing bark on the edges.

Here we're finally cutting in, revealing the succulent meat inside!

The edges have a crispy bark ring, while the inside is moist and tender without a hint of dryness.

The marinade isn't the only flavor going on though! We're also going to spoon on a delicious sauce. To start that, we chop up frozen peaches.

The peaches get cooked with white wine, rice wine vinegar, and both dijon and spicy brown mustard. You can really play with the amounts here to get the flavor you want.

But what about our sides? Instead of mashed potatoes and green bean casserole, we're doing something completely different! We'll have two sides - one using red potatoes, and one using asparagus.

Here we're going to bake the asparagus (after snapping off the woody stems of course) in a light coating of oil and pepper.

The red potatoes are cut in half, then set face down on a mixture of parmesan cheese and oil.

Here are the potatoes when they get done baking, with the cheese mixture baking directly onto the top of the potatoes with no effort at all.

And here it is, our finished Christmas meal: a few slices of pork butt covered in peach mustard sauce, a handful of cheese crusted potatoes, and baked asparagus covered in hollondaise sauce. This was a real winner, and everyone left satisfied. These are definitely recipes we'll be using again in the future!

But what about desert? Cristal went all "Cake Boss" on us and made a three dimensional, multi-layer Tardis cake, complete with colored fondant on the exterior!

Chicken and Steak Tacos with Sour Cream Salsa

The tried and true traditional beef tacos are always a great weeknight meal and an old standby we like to fall back on every few weeks for dinner.

Of course it goes without saying, we've found plenty of ways to jazz up that old fashioned classic, from making double-deckers (a softshell taco placed inside a hardshell taco and held together with a layer of beans or sour cream) to our fantastic pulled pork tacos for Cinco De Mayo.

This week we had some ground chicken in the freezer that needed to be used, and I didn't feel like burgers or a loaf, so we decided to try out a new twist on tacos. Besides 1 pound of thawed ground chicken, here are our primary ingredients:

That's about half each of a red onion, green bell pepper, and both poblano and anaheim peppers. If you want it spicier you could do jalapeno or serrano instead, but we didn't need to, because we'll also be making a delicious sauce to go on top.

First the onions and peppers are sauteed in a few teaspoons of oil, and then we add in the chicken to brown (or in this case more accurately "whiten").

Here the chicken is getting its proper coloration and cooking through on the sides, so it's almost time to throw in our seasonings.

Here we're using a combination of store-bought chicken taco seasoning, fresh lime, and about a cup of homemade stock. We put the cover on and let it simmer for 15 minutes or so until it reduces down.

Remember that sauce I mentioned? Well that's actually the real star of this show. This consists of two chopped roma tomatoes, half a diced red onion, a whole diced serrano pepper, two or three handfuls of roughly chopped fresh cilantro, the juice of one freshly squeezed lime, and about half a tub of sour cream.

The end result was good, but I wasn't satisfied with the texture and wanted something more along the lines of salsa, so I threw it in the blender! It came out perfect - not too spicy or too calm, and every bite gets you all the flavors of the veggies and lime.

Our tacos are nearly ready, but of course we need a few more additions first. To match our unique tacos we decided to ditch the traditional iceberg lettuce and go with freshly shredded cabbage instead. We're using colby jack cheese, but pepper jack or any others would be great as well.

Now that the filling is cooked through, we plop some down on a few warmed up tortillas.

Next up we add on some shredded cheese and cabbage.

Now it's time for the sour cream salsa!

Here are two delicious finished chicken tacos. These turned out great, and are less like a Wednesday night dinner and more like a Mexican restaurant meal.

We had lots of sour cream sauce and cabbage left, so we needed to have a second meal to use them with. We decided to go for a double helping of tacos, but this time using steak instead of ground chicken! We marinated thin steak medallions in a mixture of lime, oil, water, and mexican seasonings for a few hours, then sliced the meat into small strips.

Like the night before, we're first cooking peppers and onions, then throwing in the meat to sear on each side.

Instead of using stock and taco seasonings, this time we used our marinade to flavor the filling. Remember to cover and turn up the heat when adding more marinade at the end to make sure you kill any bacteria, since it's been in contact with raw meat for hours.

Here are our finished steak tacos with sour cream sauce, ready to be eaten!

Thanksgiving 2013

Starting with the pork wellington for last year's Christmas, the Six-Seven-Eight family has been changing up all our holiday meals, trying out different recipes outside the standard classics.

That theme continued throughout much of 2013, when we tried out pork apple sirloin with gouda bread for St. Patrick's Day, the bacon wrapped pork with French onion soup for Easter, and pulled pork tacos for Cinco De Mayo.

While this year will again see experimenting on Christmas, we weren't quite ready to give up the traditional Thanksgiving dinner yet, so we went with all our classic favorites again.

It's our tradition for Megan to start with deviled eggs, which I get to eat while we make the rest of the meal!

One of our perennial Thanksgiving day sides is a broccoli cheese casserole, which actually gets put together the night before and then baked the day-of when the turkey comes out of the oven. To get started, we cook broccoli with seasonings and butter on the stove top.

To make the casserole extra thick and creamy, we use Velveeta instead of cheddar.

In a large casserole pan, set down a layer of broccoli, then a layer of cheese, followed by another layer of broccoli and a final layer of cheese cubes.

When it comes out of the oven the cheese melts deliciously into every nook and cranny - but it's not done yet!

These are wheat butter crackers that have been crushed up in a ziploc bag using a rolling pin.

The crumbs are spread across the top of the casserole forming a crunchy topping.

Here's the golden brown awesome when it comes out of the oven just in time for plating:

Of course, any Thanksgiving meal needs a green been casserole! We start ours by cooking several cans of green beans with sliced bacon on the stove top, then mixing it all together with cream of mushroom soup.

After being in the oven for most of the baking time, everything is covered in French fried onions and returned to the heat.

This is actually one side we're specifically looking forward to swapping out for Christmas this year, because although its a contemporary classic, frankly we've had just too much of it :)

Another side we do is creamed corn casserole, made with corn, cream, and seasonings.

It wouldn't be Thanksgiving without stuffing, and we start ours by shredding fresh carrots, onions, and celery.

Toss in some stuffing mix, milk, and seasonings and you've got a fluffy, delicious side ready to go!

Here our turkey has come out of the oven. Our traditional method of turkey cooking is to rub a butter and herb mixture underneath the skin all around the bird, and then bake it inside a baking bag so all the juices are retained and we can use them for the gravy. We're keen to try something a bit different next year however, like wrapping it in bacon or perhaps even frying it!

That's a 10 pound bag of peeled, chopped, boiled, and mashed potatoes right there! To make them extra fluffy and tasty, we add sour cream, milk, salt, and pepper.

Remember how I said we use the turkey's juices for the gravy? There's no need to go store-bought here. Cut a slice in the bag and pour as much of the juice into a stove top pan as you can get. Mix in flour, milk, and any seasonings you'd like (although you may not need any if you seasoned your turkey properly!) and whisk it together over a medium heat.

It will start thin and soupy,  but after simmering for about 15 minutes...

...you've got thick, amazing gravy to cover all those side dishes!

Here's the first official plate of Thanksgiving 2013, complete with a mashed potato well ready for some gravy.

With the last ingredient ladled in, we're ready to dig in for the first of many plates of Thanksgiving dinner!