Fourth of Advent

As it is on the same day as Christmas Eve, we decided to cheat a bit and light the fourth candle on the Saturday during our traditional Christmas dinner. This is the first of three that we are having, the next one is on the actual Christmas Day with Lundulph's family and then the third one is on New Year's Eve with mine.

Since we moved together, we've been going through various birds for our special Christmas dinner and last year we had guinea fowl. But since we didn't have an oven to roast it in, we did guinea fowl au vin (from Delia Smith), which was nice, but not really Christmassy. This year, we repeated the guinea fowl, but according to another one of Delia's recipes, guinea fowl with 30 cloves of garlic. This sounds drastic to any one but a garlic lover, but to be honest, it was absolutely divine! The garlic cloves are cooked in their skins and that gives a very delicate flavour.



With this, I did roast potatoes and carrots. Boiled the potatoes (Maris Piper) with the carrots for 10 minutes, removed the carrots, poured out the water and fluffed up the potatoes by shaking them in the saucepan. Then placing them on a deep baking sheet, where I'd heated up about 2 dl goose fat. I added the carrots as well, browned all a bit on all sides and put in the oven together with the guinea fowl. Took out and turned the potatoes after 20 minutes and also poured hot oil over everything again. At this point wafts of delicious smells of rosemary and garlic came out from the oven. Mmmmm!

Also, I steamed some sprouts and broccoli. When they were done, I added them to the tin of potatoes and carrots, to get a bit of goose fat on them and back in the oven for another 5 minutes.

Needless to say, this is a recipe I'll repeat, it was ever so tasty.



With the bird, we had a Rioja from 2001, Baron de Ley. This is a wine we discovered when we went to Spain in 2003. It is a relatively new brewery, but the wines are very good.