Merry Christmas! For dinner tonight we stuck with tradition and made roast beef, yorkshire pudding, roasted brussel sprouts and a sponge cake yule log.  Everyone helped (even Dad…he carved the roast beef).

Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding

Roast beef is actually really easy to make, assuming you have a good piece of beef.  You cover it with salt and pepper and then roast in the oven at 325 degrees.  Depending on how big your roast is it takes 1- 1/2 to 3 hours for medium rare Our roast was 5 pounds so we figured it would be 2 -1/2 hours to 3 hours.  We started testing with a meat thermometer at 2- 1/2 hours. It was only 122 degrees internally so we let it cook another 30 minutes.  By 3 hours it was 142 (we like it 140-145).  We removed it from the roasting pan, covered it with foil, and poured off all but 1/4 cup of the drippings in the roasting pan.

Yorkshire Pudding

Yorkshire pudding is a simple, eggy mix (4 eggs, 2 cups flour, 2 cups milk) that you cook in either the roast’s drippings or in butter. Either way you want to pour it into a hot pan and cook at high heat.  As soon as we took the roast out of the oven, we increased the heat to 450 degrees. Then we poured our mix into the hot roasting pan with the drippings and let it cook.  It puffs up and is delicious!

Yule Log

The key to making a yule log is making a flexible sponge cake and then as soon as it is out of the oven, rolling it up in a clean towel dusted with powdered sugar.  Then when its cooled you unroll it, spread the inside with chocolate frosting, roll up again and cover with more chocolate frosting.  We used a fork to draw bark lines on it, sprinkled powder sugar on it (to look like snow) and also decorated it with plastic animals we had saved from a yule log someone gave us last year.  (Ours was better.)

Brussel Sprouts

Not much to say here (we really made these for mom).  Hardest part is coring and cleaning them.  We got a new brussel sprout cleaner for Christmas (see photo below) but honestly it was easier to use the knife because our sprouts were pretty small.  Once they were FINALLY cleaned we just tossed them in olive oil and salt and pepper and roasted them.