• Sweet Potatoes with Prosciutto (NY Times)
• Carrots, Green Beans & Daikon (NYT)
• Polenta Cakes with Cranberries (NYT)
• Succotash of Fresh Corn, Lima Beans, Tomatoes and Onions (Epicurious)
• Rustic French Meat Loaf (Epicurious)
• Four-Cheese Stuffed Shells with Smoky Marinara (MyRecipes.com) (for the person who doesn’t eat red meat)
• Prune Kumquat Sticky Pudding with Armagnac Toffee Sauce (Epicurious)
Lobster tails, roasted red potatoes, and cole slaw.
You might take a look at recipes for Bananas Foster and modify it to fit your tastes.
Christmas Eve: takeout sushi
Christmas Day: Pierogie made according to moi’s family recipe. Also fresh polish sausage from the Warsaw deli and kraut for me.
Some years we have turkey, others pork roast. This year we’ll have turkey with the usual trimmings. I have no idea what we’ll have for Christmas eve yet.
Pork-stuffed turkey?
Antipasto patter with smoked barramundi, sushi, smoked salmon, jalapenos stuffed with cheese, etc. And whatever is looking good and fresh in the seafood section at the market on Christmas Eve.
Main course is a maple syrup glazed ham, cold roast turkey, potato salad (sour cream, fresh herbs and pepper!), caesar salad (with homemade garlic croutons), bocconcini and tomato salad, french bread. Husband is from Yorkshire so I’m fairly sure a stand pie wll sneak onto the table.
Dessert is Christmas cake (made in November and fed with brandy since), mince pies, shortbread, brandy butter and summer pudding.
And there will be an amazing cheese plate with all the best gear from Udder Delights and the market; brie, creamy blue, walnut cheese, dutch smoked, Port Salut.
[ul]
[li]Dad’s French onion soup[/li][li]a turkey[/li][li]a haggis (possibly stuffed inside the turkey!)[/li][li]vegetarian option: crowd-pleasing leek & gruyère tart[/li][li]some stuffing[/li][li]potatoes: roast & dauphinoise[/li][li]carrot & turnip mash (very traditional in our house; this was cutting edge in the seventies)[/li][li]sprouts (roasted enticingly)[/li][li]honey parsnips (requested by dad)[/li][li]cranberry sauce[/li][li]gravy x 2[/li][li]Husband’s festive wine crate and all the whiskey cocktails I can invent.[/li][/ul]
I am also going to set fire to a pudding from Harrods.
Point of Hilarity: I watched a Fanny Craddock marathon last week which has inspired me to dye my brandy butter pale green and pipe it into a heap. It’s our first Christmas at our house, so we can make our own traditions - could do a lot worse than inventive culinary piping.
He shoulda checked to see if I like pasta five nights a week, though. As it happens, I don’t eat pasta unless there is significant cheese involved, like lasagna, manicotti, and stuffed shells. Even mac’n’cheese has cheese.
Usually, I fix meat (sort of Bolognese but with only one kind of meat) sauce and some sort of pasta once or twice a week, and I take out the meat and veggies before I add the tomato sauce. I eat the meat and veggies (I’m not terribly fond of tomato sauce, either), with another veggie or fruit, and he gets his precious spaghetti. He really, really loves pasta, so I do fix it for him on a regular basis.
Now, if he’d wanted PIZZA five nights a week, I would have been fine with this. There is significant cheese, and not too much tomato sauce. Plus, you know, it’s pizza.
Christmas Eve my sister’s hosting. I’m supplying my famous dill rolls, and I’m making a rosemary salmon dish that’s beautiful and aromatic: you put a giant layer of rosemary sprigs in a baking dish, cover with a layer of sliced onions, lay the salmon on that, cover with another layer of sliced onions, cover with a layer of sliced lemons, salt and pepper and oil over the whole thing, and roast. It’s mighty fine. I’m not sure what everyone else is bringing, but I suspect it’ll be delicious.
Christmas day is at our house with my in-laws. More of the famous dill rolls, plus sweet potatoes, green beans, ham, and my mother-in-law’s incredible cookies (seriously, she makes the best cookies I’ve ever had–they’re a thing of beauty).
My husband’s parents are hosting Christmas Eve dinner for 26, bless them. They’re having it catered, and I think her sister and brother-in-law are buying, bless them. Chicken cutlets, pasta (I think I heard manicotti), some kind of potatoes I guess, some kind of vegetable. One sister-in-law is bringing salad, one is bringing vegetables & dip, their mother/mother-in-law is bringing cheese & crackers I think. My husband’s other aunt is bringing cannoli. I am Dessert Woman: Tomorrow night I make the chocolate cake layers, Wednesday night I make the cheesecake, Thursday I make the frosting (a whole pound of milk chocolate in the frosting!) and put together the 4-layer cake, and the cranberry-orange topping for the cheesecake. I get out of being Bread Woman this year because there are so many people; I usually get tapped to make focaccia too. But I guess they’re just buying rolls.
A fruit & cheese platter for an appetizer
Beef roast, a duck, and the attendant apple-jalapeno stuffing
Glazed carrots
Mashed potatoes
Peas
Biscuits
Cranberry sauce
Olives & pickles
Turtle pie
I think next year we should just ask people to bring stuff!
Mmmm, the Rosemary Salmon dish sounds divine! I adore all things from the sea.
Our Christmas menu:
Prime Rib (frenched by the butcher for ease of carving)
Halibut (for those that don’t consume red meat)
Roasted butternut squash (grown in our garden)
Broccoli with gorgonzola cheese sauce
Garlic mashed potatoes (using Bobby Flay’s recipe)
Green Bean casserole (mr. bot must have it!)
Some sort of bread item. Undecided yet what I will make.
There will be cheese fondue for an appetizer, with Granzella’s sourdough bread for dunking, a cured meat platter and some savoury puff pastries from Costco.
Dessert will be my famous 10lb cheesecake, and various baked goodies that I always make. Sugar cookies, brownies, snowballs, home-made Ferrero Rocher candies; ect.
Wish me luck, I’m cooking for 22-23 people this year. Thank goodness for Mimosas and Eggnog, it mellows out the stress.
Heh, don’t I know it! For some number of years after my MIL decided she’d gotten too old to cook Thanksgiving dinner (and she really had!), I volunteered to do it at my house, with her buying the supplies. Unfortunately for me, mr. new has a hella big family: four siblings, all married with kids, some even with grandkids! There was a houseful! And it was a big house!
So I’d carefully plan a traditional Thanksgiving menu, carefully plan what wines to serve with dinner and dessert, then just as carefully plan what wines to drink while I was doing the cooking! 
Due to custody schedules, we had ours this last Saturday, presents and all. I cooked for about 30 people.
This time it was:
Roast turkey
Baked ham (my mother-in-law’s)
Pulled pork that came off the smoker way late, but in fine time for the poker game
Artichoke dressing
Baked cauliflower
Roast Brussels Sprouts
Mashed potatoes
Potato casserole from someone else
Baked beans (MIL again)
Chili (another friend)
Homemade dinner rolls
And a whole lot of appetizers, since I made a bunch and set people to bringing those if they wanted to bring something. The hot artichoke dip and the shrimp dips were really good. Well, mostly everything was really good.
Mmmm, Christmas dinner. Turkey, stuffing, my mother’s splendiferous gravy. Corn, peas, some sort of starchy vegetable (it rotates between mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and squash - one year I won the argument and we had all three. I love my starchy vegetables). Cranberry jelly. Pumpkin pie for dessert.
Christmas eve is usually baked salmon for my mother’s birthday dinner. Breakfast the day after generally involves a giant buffet of sausages, cheese, croissants, and fruits.
Man, I’m hungry.
IME, Christmas breakfast doesn’t seem to fit into the day very well; I’ve got kids waking me at 7AM, and they want to open presents, not wait around while I cook! Then, by the time they are done opening presents and wrapping paper is cleaned up, it’s practically late enough for me to need to start cooking dinner.
So typically, Christmas breakfast is something that can be prepared in advance, like a casserole with eggs, sausage, cheese and bread cubes, or oatmeal in the Crock Pot that can cook overnight and just sit on ‘warm’ til everyone is ready to eat. Occasionally, I’ll just make a big batch of cinnamon rolls (the kind from a wrapper, by Pillsbury. . .), add some fresh fruit and juice and milk, and voila! Christmas breakfast in a snap!