The traditional New Year’s Eve dinner at our house is Beef tenderloin with mashed potatoes. We threw in some peas this year, too. The potatoes came out extra good, thanks to the new food mill I received for Christmas (thank you, Santa!). They were fluffy from the get-go and needed less milk and butter.
I cooked the tenderloin in clarified butter. Sounds fancy, but it’s not. Cooking down a stick of butter separates it into it’s three component parts: water, milk solids and butterfat. Normal butter burns at a relatively low heat, and the milk solids are the culprit (white stuff in the bottom of the pan). If you remove those and just use the butterfat (clear, yellow oil), you can get that good butter taste and not have all your smoke detectors go off.