Good King Wenceslaus

looked down, on the feast of Stephen...which is December 26th. Saint Stephen the Deacon, the first Christian martyr, stoned to death. St Paul, still Saul of Tarsus, helped out by holding the coats of the guys who did the actual killing. Muslim Iran keeps up this fine tradition.

Christmas dinner was, as it turned out, kinda Southern, with the exception of the amuse-gueles. For that I sauteed chicken livers in bacon fat with chopped onions, added sage and cognac and then blended it into a pate, served on crostini, olive oiled toast. Hard not to make a whole meal of them.

Glazed and cloved baked ham with red gravy...a Southern concoction of ham drippings, raisins, brown sugar and black coffee: amazingly good...We had russet potatoes in the Dutch oven with bacon and onions, and white rice with black beans cooked with spicy Italian sausage bits. Cookies and ice cream for dessert. We even gave the wolfdog some of the ham. Nice.

This week I am going to be finding ways to use the remaining 9 pounds of the ham that's left! Ham and split pea soup for sure.

Speaking of cooking and martyrdom, here's a very Catholic image, combining sanctity, history, grotesquerie, realism, humor, incongruity and domestic usefulness: St Lawrence...another Deacon, this time from Rome and mid 3rd century.

He escaped stoning and went, er, out of the fire and into the frying pan. He was roasted to death on a gridiron. Part of his legend is that he called out to his tormentors at one point, "I'm done on this side, turn me over now and have a bite." He is, not surprisingly, the patron saint of cooks. I have this image in my kitchen.

Another side of the Christmas season!