Scott's Kitchen

Scott's Favorite Prime Rib

Earlier this week as part of our holiday get togethers, we had a family group over for dinner and cooked - for the first time in a long time - a prime rib roast. Prime rib is one of those special meals - just right for the holidays with friends and family! It was delicious - accompanied by roasted potatoes, and some spinach.

Elise has a great prime rib recipe over on her Simply Recipes site. We used the 450 degree for 15 minute and 350 for the rest - although we cranked it back up to 450 again for about 5 minutes before taking it out of the oven (a technique mentioned in one of Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa cookbooks).

Everyone reminds you about needing to let the roast rest for 15-20 minutes after you take it out of the oven -- so I will remind you here too! ;-)

Scott's 'Lazy-S' Easy Oven-Roasted Tri-Tips

For our Christmas Eve family get together, we like to serve main course meat entrees that are really easy to eat in a buffet style setting - without formal sit down dinner place settings for every guest. Most of our guests will be eating with their plate in their lap, so something lovely like a slow-roasted prime rib just won't do.

We've settled on serving a combination of honey baked ham, just heated to room temperature in a 450 degree oven for little more than 5 minutes, and beef tri-tip roasts. The ham is super easy to prepare, comes basically pre-sliced (spiral cut) and preparation literally requires unwrapping it, putting it briefly in the oven to warm and then choosing which serving platter to use to present it! A couple of choices in gourmet mustards to accompany the ham and that half of the main course is ready to go!

Scott's High Heat Upside-Down Roast Turkey Recipe

For our Christmas family dinner this year, we roasted a 12-lb turkey that turned out delicious. For the first time, we tried a new technique consisting of roasting the bird upside down (breasts down) and high-heat kickoff followed by a two step heat reduction while roasting (a total of 3 different temperatures are used). All you do is manage time and temperature - nothing could be simpler.

In the past, we've done brining and that works well to yield a moist bird. But the high-heat upside-down approach used here delivered just about the best, most moist turkey we've tasted - without the hassles of brining. Note: I kind of had to give up brining - my wife just can't stand the thought of open bowls of water and poultry in our refrigerator - she sees salmonella dancing everywhere around! Besides, as she says, there's never enough room in the 'frig anyway at this time of year!

Scott's Perfect Roasted Potatoes

This Christmas Eve, instead of our usual favorite Lemon Garlic Orzo side dish, we cooked a side dish of roasted small potatoes. We found a useful recipe here and modified it just a bit -- and the results were wonderful!

There's certainly nothing particularly healthy or low-fat about this recipe - but it's so simple and results in some great small potatoes!