Every Christmas is Different

Every Christmas is different, but in many ways, things are the same. As our kids have gotten older and have families of their own, getting everyone together isn’t as easy. From a culinary perspective, there are a few things you can count on.

The house will smell like garlic
There will be seafood on Christmas Eve
A roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding on Christmas day
Plenty of red wine will be consumed

Note: A traditional Paul Kenny Christmas Plan

GARLIC

Our daughter Jennifer nailed it: “The kitchen smells like Christmas Eve at home.” She’s right—I use a lot of garlic in my cooking. When Christmas comes around, I always start by peeling a few heads of garlic for mise en place. Look back at the menu above and you’ll spot garlic throughout.

SEAFOOD

I grew up in Silver Lake, an Italian neighborhood in New York. Thirty-one of the thirty-five kids in my grammar school class were Italian—Tommy Palumbo, Danny Monteforte, Georgy Deleo, Patsy Frachetti, and my best friend Tony Ciafone, to name a few. A fixture of holidays in Silver Lake was the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. As an homage to my Silver Lake upbringing, there will be seafood on my Christmas Eve menu. My dad would say: “You can take the kid out of Silver Lake, but you can’t take the onion and garlic out of his cooking.”

I must confess I still have a little scar tissue from one particular Christmas. When the whole Kenny Clan came to Memphis, I published a menu featuring “The Feast of the Seven Fishes” for Christmas Eve. After dinner—which included clams, shrimp, scallops, and cod—my brother-in-law Brian asked why I called it seven fishes when there were only four. Now, Brian is a nuclear scientist and one of the smartest guys I know. So I told him I was careful to count and made sure he had at least three shrimp and four clams. Sales and marketing guys just look at the world differently than scientists do.

ROAST BEEF AND YORKSHIRE PUDDING

Note: The perfect medium rare

My family has a tradition of overcooking the holiday roast. We all like our beef medium rare, but we always used to end up with medium well. It wouldn’t be the holidays if the beef isn’t overcooked. The fact is, your roast continues to cook after you take it out of the oven—Mom’s roast beef pulled at 140 degrees would wind up at 150 degrees. That nasty gray color is never good, unless you’re one of the outliers who like their beef well done.

My mom can’t be blamed for this. We can blame the cookbook industry. Check out my notes in the Joy of Cooking. Instead of cooking to 140 degrees as the book says, I pull the roast out when my internal-read thermometer reads 120 degrees. Then I let it rest for 20 to 30 minutes, and the roast will temper out to a little over 130 degrees—a perfect medium rare.

Note: See my notes in my copy of the Joy of Cooking

I once worked with two great chefs who ran Memphis’s top white tablecloth restaurant. When I asked what percentage of their customers preferred their beef medium rare, they said 85% at higher-end restaurants do. Of course, some people grew up in households where mom overcooked everything and medium well was the standard. I believe people like what they grew up with, but I still have a problem killing a good piece of meat.

Note: Checkout the blog

https://impromptufridaynights.com/cookbooks-lie-experience-doesnt/

PLENTY OF RED WINE

We have a tradition of buying double magnums (3-liter bottles) of Joseph Phelps wine for each of our grandchildren in the vintage of their birth year. The plan is to open them at a party celebrating their 16th birthday.

Note: SEE THE FEATURE PHOTO WITH EACH OF THEIR DOUBLE MAGNUMS

My buddy Tom Julian started this tradition. Our daughter Jennifer was born in California in 1984. Tom came out to visit, and we toured Napa Valley together. The Phelps vineyard has always been one of our favorites—it sits in a small sub-valley and produces excellent wines. Tom bought Jennifer a 3-liter bottle, and we enjoyed it at a wonderful party in 2000.

We originally planned to celebrate her 18th birthday with it, but we got nervous about how well the wine would age. We stored it in the basement of Tom’s old house on Onondaga Street in Rye, New York—the perfect place for wine storage. Fortunately, the wine held up beautifully. When we first opened it, we were nervous. Older wines change color slightly, and this one had a reddish tint instead of the deep purple of newer wines. The taste was good at the start, and as the evening progressed, it got better and better. Funny how that works…

Note: Tom Julian, Jennifer, Paul and Susan Kenny getting ready to open a 16 year old bottle of Phelps

While we won’t be drinking those double magnums this Christmas, a fair share of red wine will be consumed. Every Christmas is different, but the wine consumption remains constant.

If you enjoyed this blog and similar stories about wine, supper clubs, and food, follow me on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). Subscribe to future posts at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and check out my book Impromptu Friday Nights—a Guide to Supper Clubs, published by Morgan James Publishing and available wherever books are sold.

Special People 3

This is a repost of a blog originally written in 2017

In life you meet special people. Ronnie Wenzler was certainly one of them. I moved to Memphis in 1990, and the first night I was there, the president of Kraft Food Ingredients and Ronnie, the VP of Sales, took me to dinner. Making conversation, the president asked me if I played golf and mentioned that Ronnie played “a little” golf. So I asked Ronnie what his handicap was, to which he responded, “It’s a 3 or better if it has to be.”

I spent the next 20 years figuring out just what that meant. The figuring usually meant losing a bet or two. It turned out that Ronnie was a gifted golfer and one of the most entertaining people I ever met. Amongst his many golf accomplishments was having beat the great Jack Nicklaus in the 1956 US Amateur. As Ronnie would say with his Memphis drawl, “Jack was just 18 years old, but I was only 21.”

In the 1990s, Kraft had a business meeting at Butler National in Chicago. Someone mentioned to Ronnie that Jack Nicklaus just happened to be there that day. Ronnie went to the locker room and found Jack putting on his golf shoes. Ronnie walked up to golf’s greatest champion saying, “Jack, you probably don’t remember me.” Jack cut him off with, “Ronnie Wenzler, you old SOB, how are you doing?” Jack then asked him if he wanted to join him that afternoon for a round of golf. Ronnie politely declined, telling Jack he was happy to leave their competitive record where it was.

Ronnie and I had another special connection. We were the sons of very influential fathers. Ronnie’s dad, Jack Wenzler, was a legendary golf pro in Memphis. He taught golf for over 60 years in Memphis and Florida. It turned out that Jack and my dad (a college dean from New York) both spent winters in Winter Haven, Florida. For Christmas one year, I bought my dad a package of golf lessons with Jack Wenzler. Turned out they didn’t work much on dad’s golf game; rather, they got together regularly and talked about their sons.

After Ronnie retired from Kraft, he became a golf coach. In that role, he gave me a great gift. He taught my son Brian to play, and love, golf. Brian was a latecomer to golf and didn’t show an interest in the game until he was well into his high school years. Ronnie taught Brian the swing fundamentals and broke the “Kenny curse.” My father taught me to play golf, and my swing looks like my father’s swing. A curse of a swing that Jack Wenzler couldn’t fix with my dad and Ronnie couldn’t fix with me. Brian, on the other hand, has a beautiful swing crafted by Ronnie.

More important than the swing is the love of the game. A golf lesson with Ronnie was 50% golf and 50% life lessons and laughs. Ronnie made golf fun for Brian. Brian loves the game, and we had a great time in Scotland a few years ago. (check out the blog). Many times during that trip I told Ronnie stories and thanked him for the gift.

Ronnie passed away in 2010 after battling cancer. His old golf opponent Jack Nicklaus called him towards the end to wish him well. My guess is that Ronnie reminded Jack of where their record stood during the call. I also called Ronnie towards the end and thanked him for the gift. Ronnie made me laugh and asked me to pray for him. Something I do regularly.

If you enjoy this blog and similar other stories/supper club lessons, subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and be on the lookout for my book Impromptu Friday Nights: a Guide to Supper Clubs. Morgan James Publishing published the Kindle version on September 5, 2017, and the hard copy came out January 30, 2018.

Note: The feature picture is of a young Ronnie Wenzler and the legendary Ben Hogan. Ben is congratulating Ronnie for winning the 1953 Memphis Junior Golf Championship.

Variation On A Theme 3

Crème Brûlée is very popular. It is on the dessert menu of a large percentage of the better restaurants. I have been making it for years and actually have 2 blow torches and an extra canister of fuel, just in case. To be honest, the Brûlée part (charred sugar) is not my favorite. I talked about this with my friend Lucien last spring while we were in France together and he agreed. He told me that he makes custard for his wife’s mother and instead of Brûlée he tops the custard with fresh fruit. This variation on a theme is simply brilliant.

Fast forward to the summer peach season and what I call:

Crème Custard with Fresh Peaches and Berries

This has become the go-to dessert of the summer. It is the kind of dish that you can be pretty sure that if your guests don’t like the dinner, they are going to love the dessert. There is one variation to Lucien’s theme that I love and that comes from tossing the fresh fruit in maple syrup. Somehow the smokiness of the syrup adds a caramel note to the custard. I even thought of calling the dish Crème Caramel with Fresh Fruit but I didn’t in homage to my grandfather.

My grandfather loved Custard Pie. My mother would always make it when he visited. My father complained that mom wouldn’t make it for him, but she always made it for her father. Unfortunately for Gramps, it is pretty rare to find Custard Pie. Gramps would take us to Stanley’s, his favorite diner, where he would order Coconut Custard Pie and scrape off the coconut. How could he have known back then that his chubby grandson would go on to be the President of a coconut company, Franklin Baker Company of the Philippines? I can still remember Gramps saying: “This meal was so good, I just wish I was still hungry so I could eat more.”

Gramps with a smile that says his custard pie was so good that..

My grandfather was the family icon of his generation. (Check out the blog). He had 10 grandchildren. A few years ago I was playing golf with my cousin Buddy and the question came up of: Who would be the family icon of our generation? Almost in harmony we both answered, “It’s not me, it’s not me.” My vote is for my cousin Virginia who is the queen of her idilic valley on Maui. I am not sure if her connection with Maui Wowie helps or hurts her chances. Maybe that is just another variation on a theme.

My cousin Virginia in Maui with our grandkids

If you enjoyed this blog and similar other stories/wine group/supper club lessons follow me on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and check out my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs. Published by Morgan James Publishing and available through most channels where books are sold.