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!