What are you cooking for Xmas/Xmas Eve?

What's everyone making for Xmas? Or maybe you are going out. Please share. I am not going with turkey this year. I am making lasagna and then seafood stuffed shells -- having kind of an italian theme. But I decided to make key lime pie for dessert. We will have a big salad and also green beans make ahead with bacon and tomatoes.

Funny you should ask. I'm Jewish and the Lovely Dining Companion is of Japanese descent...so we're not exactly the typical couple cooking for Christmas. Still, I celebrate Chanukah and she celebrates Christmas and we're doing a big dinner for Christmas and just settled on the menu today.

The appetizer is a flatbread-like dough with blue cheese and caramelized onion. For our entree, what else but a classic Russian dish: coulibiac. In fact, it's a somewhat unusual one with the recipe taken--of all places--from Paula Wolfert's Mostly Mediterranean. In any event, it's a brioche dough wrapped around a filling of salmon and whitefish, rice, mushrooms, onions, and dill, that filling then topped with smoked salmon. (See, I even get my lox!)

We'll have a ragout of wild mushrooms for our veg and a chocolate-almond cake out of Nancy Silverton's Pastries from the La Brea Bakery.

Boy...I'm getting hungry just thinking about this!

sounds excellent. well time to start cooking!!

With the Jews outnumbering the Italian Catholics and atheists this year, Christmas Eve will be a quasi-kosher almost meatless feast.

Meat Antipasto Tray (for those who don't keep kosher), including a selection of salumi and proscuitto di Parma

Vegetable Antipasto Tray, with marinated artichokes, marinated olives of all sorts, cherry peppers, roasted red peppers

Cheese Tray of fontinella, fresh mozzarella, gorgonzola, Italian fontina and smoked provolone

Bread selections including foccaccio, crostini, filone

Tossed green salad with balsamic vinaigrette

Fish salad, including cod, squid, shrimp, lobster, octopus

Spinach Lasagna

Ziti with Marinara

Pasta Fagioli

My mother's home-baked Italian cookies, chocolate cake, fruit salad

We are starting with matzo ball soup. My whole life my mom made something from out of parish cookbook called "sophie soup" which was a tomato soup with clams and other strange things that 31 years later I still will not try! My hubby's maternal side is Jewish and his dad is Sicilian, but he managed to inherit super matzo ball making skills. So my mom said "hey Jesus was a Jew so bring on the matzo balls!

Then we are having breaded Tilapia, fancy green beans, some kind of fluffy fruit thing, dried fruit....and the pierogi...mm!
Kinds: meat, potato, cheese, kraut, plum, strawberry and cherry.
We get them from the pierogi store at Central and School st. Mom fries them in butter and serves them with sour cream...mmm.

I am making grasshopper pies and we also make hot fudge sundaes.

But the coolest thing I eat that night is the oplatki. A thin wafer that in Poland you break a small piece off and make a wish or say something that you are thankful for out loud and then eat. My ignorant ex-uncle used to say "pass the apartheid" It is pronounced o-pwat-ki.

Yum.

I am having anti pasto tray with salami, cheeses, prociutto wrapped around cantaloupe.

A few cheese spreads my mother is making and crackers

Artichoke/parmesan dip

shrimp and cocktail dip

Green tossed salad with tomato, onion and cucumber

Garlic Bread

Lasagna with Besciamelle

Seafood stuffed (crab, shrimp and scallop) baked pasta shells with white wine sauce and parmesan cheese

Green beans sauteed with bacon and tomato

Watergate salad for a blast from the past

Egg nog Cake

Key Lime Pie

I'm smoking a pork shoulder over lump and cherry wood, and serving it with a carolina vinegar sauce, with cole slaw and champagne to cut the pork fat.
-parker

On Christmas Eve, Sweet Baboo and I will be the only two for dinner. I am going to roast a duck and mash sweet potatoes and put out a cool green salad. (I'll be saving the duck fat for fries later.)

On Christmas Day, we'll be joining about twenty other family members at my sister's house for dinner. She is cooking a goose and a ham. I am going to take homemade spinach dip, which I just learned how to make. I've never yet cooked a goose, but would like to someday. Not that just two of us, Sweet Baboo and I, usually need a bird that big. So I am curious to see how it goes for my sister, so that when the occasion arises for me I am ready. (Plentiful leftovers? Goose pot pie?)

On New Year's Day, we'll be eating deep dish Malnati's pizza and watching the Illini probably go down in glorious defeat to USC. Rose Bowl, Rose Bowl, ooh, ah. I get to chant that about once every 25 years.

It used to be Chinese before church, but here in the Great White North of McHenry County, we can never find a decent place open..so now Christmas Eve is all about the buffet at home. I'm inordinately fond of retro-y stuff at the holidays, and we're pretty basic in our house. If it's fattening, we usually give it a whirl.

This year:

-Mostaccioli
-Artichoke bruschetta and pizza bread
-Cocktail weenies and meatballs in sauce
-Antipasto plate
-Chips/Dip
-Veggie tray
-Something I'm trying out, which I'm sure will be popular with my pig lovin' family, Holiday bacon appetizers from The Pioneer Woman Cooks
-Chex Mix
-Cookies, peanut brittle, spiced nuts
-Bacardi rum cake

The Day will be more pig in the form of ham and Polish sausage, assorted side dishes and pumpkin and mincemeat pies.

Sushi Tray--various maki rolls and tuna, salmon, mackerel, unagi, etc.

Mussels Marinara in a puttanesca (Kalamata olive, onion, caper) sauce

Cherrystones on the half shell

Baked Clams (first time, trying to copy Bruna's)

Thin linguine & white clam sauce

Stuffed squid

Salmon smoked in a smoker

Pan-seared scallops wrapped in Prosciutto di Parma

Asian-style Broiled Salmon

Arugula Salad w/Beet, Pear, White Asparagus, Gorgonzola, Pine Nuts

Spinach Salad w/Warm Bacon Dressing

Cannoli Cake (Ferrara Bakery on Taylor St.)

Biscotti

Fresh Fruit

...then we explode...

Sweet Tamales

Coq a Vin, Spaetzle, Zuchini Gratin, and a Yule Log. Cooking for two with plenty of leftovers to get us through the next few days.

Dec 24, dinner for 7: tossed salad, prime rib (thank you Zier's), twice-baked potatos, banana cake with chocolate frosting, vanilla tapioca pudding, chocolate tapioca pudding.

Dec 25, dinner for 4: tossed salad, matzo ball soup, brisket, noodle kugel, banana cake with chocolate frosting, vanilla tapioca pudding, chocolate tapioca pudding.

It's just the two of us this year (unless you count the dog.) Tonight we are dining at Mon Ami Gabi courtesy of a couple of Lettuce gift cards we received. I've never done a Lettuce restaurant for a holiday so I'm keeping my expectations low and hope to be pleasantly surprised. I figured it would at least be cozy and decorated festively. Then we'll take a drive up Lakeshore and look at the lights.
Tomorrow I'm making homemade guacamole in my molcajete, wild mushroom enchiladas, and gunsmoke slaw (basically just coleslaw with the addition of some orange segments and chipotles.)
Happy Holidays to all! Lynn

I find Christmas dinner much harder to plan a menu for than Thanksgiving. Partly I've simply been doing one myself for a lot longer than the other, but partly it's because T-day is so set, you do variations on a pretty tight set of themes, while Christmas... I can do anything, except it's anything within a style of cooking mostly alien to me (Ye Olde English Large Expensive Beef). So I dithered on a menu until quite late in the day, and still have some ingredients I never used because I kept changing my mind, but here's what I served:

As noted here, I had 12 Nantucket Bay scallops, what I didn't have was an oven free at that point for the recipe Santander linked to, so I heated a skillet way way up with some butter and wine, sauteed shallots and some little slivers of jamon serrano, then pan-fried the scallops for a few short minutes and served them with a frisee salad. They were pretty terrific and made a very impressive starter for my wife and my sister, both scallop fans.

Main course was standing rib roast, pretty much per the standard Wiviott 5-Step method on the WSM-- I actually wanted to try oven-roasting this year, but I finally decided that it would take too much juggling of other stuff in terms of oven occupancy and timing. Anyway, that turned out beautifully, and alongside it we had two dishes from the Balthazar cookbook which both came out beautifully, a classic potato gratin and a really good pan-roasted root vegetable dish, simple as all heck but everything caramelizes a bit and it's terrific. Plus Parker House rolls (not as good as Josephine's) and, the kids pretty much have to have it at holiday meals, canned cranberry jelly.

Dessert was a bit of a headache. It's an Austrian apple wine-cream (Weinkrehm) tart from The Pie and Pastry Bible. Supposed to be basically a lemon-wine-vanilla chiffon, poached apples on top, a walnut-cookie-crust below. Too many things I hadn't done before done too quickly and without reading the full instructions-- I didn't put parchment down so the pie weights sank deep into the crust and had to be plucked out with tongs, I let the apples go a moment too long and they made mush, I did something wrong and the chiffon never really set, it basically became a runny cream filling... and yet for all that, it tastes really great, the delicate interplay of wine (a Michele Chiarlo moscati d'asti, picked up inexpensively at Costco), vanilla bean, apple and lemon was pretty wonderful. I can't wait to make it again (probably with a traditional crust) and do it right this time.


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Mike,

The choice of apple variety could have affected your pie more than the cooking method. Some apples like MacIntosh just go to mush really easily. Others like Granny Smith or Jonathons tenaciously hold their structure together. Whenever you see a pie where there is a tall empty ceiling of crust way above the apples, this again was a variety apples that collapse when cooked.

It sounds like you enjoyed a lovely Christmas.

Regards,

These were Granny Smiths, I just neglected them for too long at too high a heat. (I poached the last remaining one just to have something fairly solid to put on top, as you see.) And the chiffon/custard/whatever had its own problems, not setting for whatever reason. It tastes plenty good though!

Family party in Chesterton Indiana at a niece and nephews and they had asked in advance if I would cook the meat. Of course, I happily accepted, nothing I like better than outdoor cooking.

Nephew has a Big Green Egg, a heck of a nice cooker, a Weber kettle and some type of gas grill.




15-lb rib eye roast went on the Egg.


Took it to 123 dead center, which yielded medium beef toward the outside and nicely rare in the middle.




Did a couple of tenderloins on the Weber Kettle.


Just north of 30-lbs of meat disappeared plus assorted points of deliciousness, including the best German Chocolate Cake I have ever had the pleasure of eating.

A very nice Christmas day.

Enjoy,
Gary

Well, I ate too much, but happily our non-traditional "Mexican" Christmas dinner turned out pretty good (if I do say so myself.)

Prepping the guacamole:
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Finished:
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Gunsmoke Slaw before Chipotle Dressing is added:
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And after... (needs to be refrigerated for at least 2 hours for flavors to blend.)
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Ready to assemble Wild Mushroom Enchiladas with Ancho Cream Sauce:
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Finished Enchiladas:
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Dinner is Served:
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Trust me, it looked and tasted better than it photographed. Hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas! Lynn

Pancetta "crisps" w/ goat cheese and pear

Scallops 2 ways - 1) cauliflower puree w/ black tobiko 2) brussel sprout leaves and Nobu's Maui onion salsa

Roasted Chestnut soup w/ white truffle oil drizzle

Apple and fennel salad w/ Cider dressing, almonds, and rasins

Dukkah crusted lamb chops, Goat cheese scalloped potatos, wild mushroom bread pudding, haricort verts

Molten chocolate cakes w/ espresso cream

Went over very well, however took longer than expect as I was out of town and unable to do any prep work. Five hours in all.