Christmas Eve/Day Dinner
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3 years ago
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marilyn_c
3 years agoAnnie Deighnaugh
3 years agoRelated Discussions
Christmas eve dinner
Comments (28)The best holiday tradition here. I'm of Polish decent. Our Christmas Eve meal is a big deal. The whole family gets together and has traditional Polish Fare, three kinds of Pierogi, potato pieces boiled then sauteed in oil and onions, fish, mushrooms, peas, rice, prunes, olives, candy, wine and soft drinks followed by cookies, nut and poppyseed roll for dessert. Before the meal there is a large rectangular shaped wafer (consistency of communion wafer) everyone has a piece and those at the table break off a piece or yours and you of theirs and eats it, it's called Oplatki. I've always loved our traditional Christmas Eve better than any other Holiday tradition....See MoreWhat's for dinner Christmas Eve?
Comments (25)Our 'out-laws' (DIL's parents) have a traditional Polish Christmas Vigil meal on Christmas Eve. Last night there were twenty of us at table. Champagne is served before dinner. Then there is a sharing of wafers where each person greets every other person attending, eating bits of one another's wafers. The purpose is to mend any old year's discords and wish good things for the coming year. The table is set with the best china, silver and crystal. There is straw under the white tablecloth to evoke the manger in the stable. DIL's father reads from the Bible -- and this year recounted his first nativity play, where he played the ass! Then the meal begins with homemade soup made from imported Polish mushrooms. (Evidently becoming scarce.) Salmon has been a welcome addition to dinner in recent years. The rest of the meal is varieties of pirogi and cooked cabbage. After dinner there is an enormous sweets table with homemade cakes, cookies and candy. (DGS pointed out the six kinds of cookies and the caramels he had helped his mom make. Doubly delicious!) When the children can't stand it another second, the mound presents under the tree is attacked! Towards the end of that, carols are sung in English and in Polish. DH and I drive home while some of the family goes on to mass. (DH and I are not Catholic -- which becomes more 'OK' with passing years. It's nice to visit with DIL's big, extended family.) Today is bright and sunny near Lake Michigan's shores. I see walkers, joggers, and dog walkers passing along our street already. DH and I have had our breakfast -- with the stollen I *finally* found! Happy Christmas Day, good KT friends!...See MoreWhat's for Dinner, Christmas Eve?
Comments (20)Sirley, it's very simple. We always had it Christmas eve so I could spend Christmas Eve day preparing Christmas breakfast and dinner. Come Christmas day, we just had a long drawn out day of opening presents. First the stocking stuffers, then a break for breakfast which was a strata and fresh fruit salad. Then we would open Santa's presents and our presents for the kids. Then we would take another break. After dinner, we went into the living room and lit lots of candles, sat and relaxed and then we would open all the gifts the kids bought for everyone. So, a nice relaxing Christmas chowder and some biscuits and cookies was most welcomed Christmas Eve. At first, I would make a potato soup base several weeks ahead of time and freeze it but after awhile I began to cheat. I take a package of Bear Creek potato soup and a package of Knorr's Leek soup mix and mix them both together according to directions on the package. I sauté some celery and onions and throw them in along with some dry sherry to taste. Then I add whatever I feel like. Those lobster claws Raven was showing would be great along with some scallops, some crab meat and some shrimp. It's really quite goodâ¦..the more sherry the better. LOL When it's not Christmas, I will sometimes take the Bear Creek potato soup, sauté some onions and celery and throw in some butter and clams for a New England type clam chowder. Easy and good....See MoreSeven Fishes Dinner for Christmas Eve
Comments (39)Post dinner report. We had about 20 people over for this buffet meal. The idea was to bring out seafood dishes one at a time. Sides and salads were available throughout the meal, and people took plates and sat wherever they wanted at two dining tables, on the living room couch and chairs, or just standing around. As DD and I planned the meal, it started making sense to deviate from the traditional Seven Fishes dinner of full -on entree dishes. Instead, we decided to have every seafood dish more like an appetizer, that you could eat off a small plate with just a fork, so that the evening was more like a cocktail party with endless food. We also decided to keep each dish simple so that preparing seven dishes and serving one every 20 minutes wouldn't be crazy. To the extent possible, we'd prep ahead. When guests started arriving, we had salmon mousse on crostini ready. Two kinds of salmon mousse, because DD objected to my version. I make it by baking salmon, then putting it in the food processor and adding a couple garlic cloves, some shallot, salt and white pepper, heavy cream, a little bit of brie cheese with rind, a pinch of wasabi, lemon zest, processing to the desired consistency and taste, then placing into a squeeze bottle with pastry tip. DD was outraged at the brie cheese, and insisted on making her own version. Which, in the end, included cream cheese :-) Next was a shrimp louie salad. SWMBO made this, so I don't know what was in it. We made a clam fettucine, following a recipe that was so minimalist, it was intriguing. Heat a few garlic cloves in wrote a lot of olive oil, discard the garlic cloves, add clams in shells, cook until shells open, remove shells, extract clam flesh, return clam flesh to oil with parsley, cook a couple minutes more. Yes, that was it. This was a good cookbook, so we thought maybe the stripped-down recipe would bring out the essence of the dish. Turns out it basically yielded clams... in oil - ick. So we used the result as a base for a more full featured clam sauce, which salvaged the dish. DD made oysters in a leek sauce. You shuck oysters, clean the shells, lightly cook oysters to release liquid, combine the liquid, white wine (not too dry - or champagne or Prosecco), and cream into a sauce - there was more to the sauce but I wasn't watching closely - assemble oysters on beds of wilted julienned leek in the shells, broil, then sauce and serve. Meanwhile there was manicotti as well as other side dishes and salads that people brought, on the buffet. I made crab cakes. This was crab meat, minced onion and garlic, parsley, salt and pepper, a little red pepper flake, mixed with boiled and riced potato, molded into patties, dredge in egg and coat in Panko crumbs, then deep fry. A messy thing to do but they came out nicely. Normally I use egg and bread, not potato, as the binding agent, but we were trying a recipe from the Peterson book. It is a cross of crab cake and latke. Personally I prefer the way I usually do it. Then we broiled some halved lobster tails, with plenty of melted butter. We should probably have extracted the meat and cut it to bite size pieces, in keeping with the cocktail party appetizer theme, but by now we'd been cooking for hours and were getting bogged down by guests wandering into the kitchen, helpfully and insistently busing piles of dirty plates and glasses into the midst of our prep and cooking space. So I was having to do dishes while DD cooked, and our smooth process was getting chaotic. That's the drawback of a small kitchen. My new dishwasher requires a particular workflow. One side of the sink is full of soapy water. Dishes are scraped into the other side of the sink (that has a garbage disposal) then placed in the soapy water. When enough dishes have accumulated, they are removed from the water and placed into the rack which is loaded in the dishwasher. After the dishwasher cycle, which takes three minutes, the rack is removed and set on the counter. The dishes and glasses come out very hot so they are dry in a minute. Quickly remove and stack the clean ware. This is an effective way to wash a lot of dishes very quickly, but definitely interrupts cooking. The seventh dish was to have been scallops in lobster butter. We collected the lobster shells and were starting to make the butter, but then SWMBO reported that everyone was full and it was time for tea, coffee, dessert and the White Elephant present game. So we shelved the seventh seafood dish with some relief. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do!...See MoreJudy Good
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