Chef Pharaoh

Self,

I come from a "small" family. (I'll explain the quotations in a bit.) Small is so much that I'm one of only two children. Although both my of my parents are one of four children I don't have a bunch of cousins. Most of the "family togetherness" comes from my mother's side. Her parents moved out here from Tennessee (via Detroit) leaving behind their relatives to create a life of their own. Due to this fact my framework of family has extended by "leaps and bounds" by simply connecting with good folks and welcoming them into the fold.

Anyway, like I said my family is small. When we come together for holidays, like Mother's Day, Memorial Day, Father's Day and particularly major ones like Thanksgiving and Christmas, we instantly have a family reunion (yes we are that small - I told ya.) Well like this past Thanksgiving, work schedules and the such has prevented us from coming together on Christmas day. We instead came together in the spirit of the holiday in Arizona on Dec 27th.

The cool part about this ordel is that I was given the opportunity to prepare Christmas dinner for my parents, my brother and myself. Since the rest of the family were going to be in other places, we didn't need a huge feast.....to satisfy everyone's individual tastes, desires and wants. So to give my mom a break I offered to cook, with my brother as my assistant.

I made chicken-fried babyback ribs, broccolini with pecan brown butter sauce, yorkshire puddings and garlic mashed potatoes.

I have to say the ribs and the broccolini were the bomb. The mashed potatoes were great but since that was the "standard" item on the menu we already expected them to be good. The yorkshire puddings were....well I baked them too long so it made them a little hard on the edges, but had a good taste in the middle. At some point I will have to try them again.

Despite the fact that we were leaving town the day after Christmas, I still slightly over cooked. Luckily Schehimazade and his mother dropped by the house JUST as I was finishing cooking and they each had a small sample plate. (No it wasn't planned Schehimazade was trying to return a laptop after we had dinner but I was a little slow and communication lines got crossed.) LOL there was actually enough that we were able to share with the family members who made it early to Phoenix festivities.

Sadly I didn't take any pictures to share here. So I'm going to have to try everything again for you all. Also Prince Esquire has asked that I contribute to his second blog, Esquire-Eats, which "is a cookblog, for the use of all those who aspire to be better gentleman and ladies through cuisine, because true gents know how to cook, not only for sustenance or to impress a [date] but for pleasure and expression as well," I'm sure I'll post atleast the ribs there.

Sincerely,
Pharaoh