Just the two of us for Christmas this year, so we decided to have our standard pepper-crusted filet. We had some of the leftover mac ‘n’ cheese, but the beet salad was something new. It’s good, but the recipe might need some tweaking. The sauteed onions are good in it, but I think it might be too heavy on the spices – adding them to the onions made a bit of a gummy mess. In the end, the blue cheese was a good foil for the bacon and sherry vinegar.

• Pepper-Crusted Filet Mignon (America’s Test Kitchen)
• Beets with Bacon & Crumbled Blue Cheese (Food 2.0: Secrets from the Chef Who Fed Google, p. 138)
• 21st-Century Mac ‘N’ Cheese (The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper, p. 182)

Wine: Rosenblum 2001 Rockpile Petite Sirah (Dry Creek Valley, CA). We hardly ever drink Petite Sirah, but this one was good.