Weekends always revolve around food in our family. Traditionally, being brought up in a Jewish family we always had our roast dinner on a Friday night, usually started off with a bowl of my mum’s chicken and lokshen soup followed by roast chicken. My favourites were always the Polish classics such as ‘olishkas’ – minced beef and rice seasoned and wrapped in blanched savoy cabbage leaves and then stewed in a sweet and sour tomato sauce. Delicious! And mopping up the sauce with crispy roast potatoes, oh my!
But more latterly, we’ve been enjoying our roasts over the weekend, having fallen in to the more English tradition of a roast dinner. We will always carefully select our meat and often discuss the garnish we’ll have to go along with it. The boss man usually takes charge of the roast cooking and so every week it’s always a nice surprise to see what will end up on the table. Will it be red cabbage this week? Cauliflower cheese? Stuffing? Are Yorkshire puddings acceptable with all meats or do they just go with roast beef? We always have them, roast beef or not, or the kids would protest. When Spring arrives and the weather starts warming up, we always say goodbye to roasts for a while, in the place of grilling on the egg in the garden. This year as we’ve arrived into Autumn and now Winter, we’ve continued to grill, using it as our outdoor oven for roasting chicken or slow cooking a shoulder of pork. Delicious.
We’ve experimented with all sorts of different potatoes, King Edwards, reds, whites, or sometimes just whatever we’ve got in the cupboard, usually baking potatoes, which as we agreed yesterday, strangely produce the best roasties.
We find that nothing brings us together like a good old roast. We love getting as many veggies in to our kids as possible. A family favourite is mashed swede with some butter melted through it. Personally I think it’s all about the stuffing and the gravy.
What do you include in yours? What are your traditions? And with Christmas day coming up, do you do turkey? Or will you have another meat? We know someone that ditches the whole tradition and has a BBQ. Nice!
Bring on the festivities and wishing you all a happy season of delicious roast dinners.