Christmas dinner

Not the best dinner I've ever made, but as my late Swiss Papa might have said, "C'est mangeable." ("It's edible.") Behold—seared salmon on some seriously faux-Fredo:

As Murphy's Law would have it, my downstairs grocery didn't have any heavy cream. So I bought some cream cheese, Grana Padano, and extra milk and decided to make do with that. What I should have done, in retrospect, was to make a Mornay (Béchamel + cheese = Mornay). I was thinking, at the time, that the traditional Alfredo sauce doesn't have any flour in it, which is why I dismissed the Mornay idea. But when you cook with cream cheese—and I remembered this too late—you have to use really low heat, otherwise the cheese will seize up and create lumps. So that's what you see above: I used the Grana Padano to try to emulsify the sauce, but some of that curdy lumpiness still came through. Well, damn. A Mornay would have been a lot smoother. The result still tasted pretty good; the faux-Fredo sauce had a bit of a sour tang from the cooked cream cheese, but I had added dried onions, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and basil, and that made it okay. Live and learn.

Here's the bread, liberated from its pan:

The salmon is seared on the outside and somewhat rare on the inside.

For the bread inspectors among us: a look at the crumb.

The bread was definitely a fail as a focaccia, but it worked just fine as my regular no-knead bread, and it's got a bit of a fried-bread exterior plus some extra butteriness on the top thanks to an alliterative brushing of bovine byproduct.

The galette/pie is yet to be made, but that's coming up! The dough is done; it just needs to be rolled out. Add the filling, and we're golden.