Trattoria Gargani's Recipes for Osso Buco & Saffron Risotto for Christmas

The winter holidays are prime eating cooking and eating season. For the Christmas entrée, my father and I prepared osso buco and saffron risotto. We followed recipes from the cookbook, Once Upon a Tuscan Table. The cookbook is about and from the beautiful Trattoria Gargani (formerly called “Garga”) in Florence, Italy. I have tasty memories of many meals surrounded by the murals on the walls there. 

I chose to make the dish because my husband brought home saffron this fall from a trip to Madrid and we wanted to share it with our family visiting for the holidays. I also wanted to serve something that would be primarily prepared and finished before our guests arrived to avoid last minute kitchen fuss.

Most of the ingredients, from the Arborio rice to the vegetable base for the osso buco were easy to find at any supermarket. I also saw fairly inexpensive saffron at a local Trader Joe's. I ordered the bone-in veal shanks from Whole Foods (there’s a general dearth of butchers in our neighborhood and the District in general, as Kojo Nnamdi discusses in a fall episode.)

I’m afraid that I failed to take any food pictures over the holidays. Too busy cooking and eating, as, perhaps, it should be. What were some of your favorite holiday dishes this year?