By tradition, Christmas dinner is prime rib. This year I got a 5.63 pound, USDA Prime, standing rib roast with three bones. Right around the same size as last year. Mrs. L.A. says it’s pretty.
My mother is doing an all seafood spread this year. I know lobster and bacon wrapped scallops are involved.
I think we got a giant…uh…I guess its a ham? in the fridge. Its seems big. Its about the size of two or three milk jugs. I’m not involved with the cooking of it, just the eating.
Our Christmas dinner will just be immediate family. I am making spaghetti.
I screwed my plans up a bit(keeping my longest running holiday tradition alive for one more year). I decided this year to do a ham. I also decided I wanted to do a full ham cooking deal rather than a pre-cooked ham reheat. But they were all in a huge jumble of a pile. After a while trying to sort through try to look for the attributes I wanted, size,brand,price, never frozen,non-cooked I guess I got frustrated enough I overlooked one key attribute in selecting my ham… actually being a ham. :smack:
So now I must adjust my plans around a picnic shoulder, pulled pork perhaps, I don’t know.
Well I just found out Christmas is going to be at our house this year and now I have to make dinner. Guess what? It’s gonna be fried chicken and chicken fried steak because I don’t know if I can get a decent rib roast in the time left.
I want to eat at Johnny’s place!
I know I won’t be disappointed.
Here, in the Yucatan, the big event is the 24th. Plenty of family, great food and drink all day. Then we have dinner at midnight. Lots of regional food, and of course, turkey and ham. It is not unusual for the party to continue until sunrise. Looking forward to it.
They make non-cooked hams?
There’s plenty. It’s going to take us a week to get through the roast. (And then it will be time for the beans’n’greens.) But I have dibs on the BBQ ribs from the roast leftovers.
(Incidentally, harmonicamoon, I think I’m going to try to find lessons so I can learn how to bend notes. Online vids aren’t helping – and I’ve seen many. But that’s a subject for the thread I started a while back.)
Be prepared Johnny, my daughter lives in Twisp, WA. I may show up on your door step one day. I would like that. Your cookin threads make my mouth water. But, don’t worry, I don’t make it to the states often.
About the harp, I did some workshops. They helped. Good to have a teacher. Also did the online stuff. The harp is fun. Easy to pack, sounds great by itself, but better with a guitar.
What do you think it is before it’s cooked?
The ones I see in the store are pre-cooked. You just glaze them and heat them. Spiral cut, bone-in… already cooked.
Ham is pork that has been preserved through salting, smoking, or wet curing. Before it’s cured, it’s just a pork leg/roast. It has to go through the preserving process to taste like ham. Is some modicum of cooking required after preserving/curing? I think sometimes, but not in most of the hams you find at the store.
Mine will be what the kids insist on… a whole beef tenderloin. I’ve made one for about the last 20 years. Au Jus, Horseradish sauce, some sort of potatoes, marinated mushrooms, steamed green beans, fresh rolls.
We’re having roast beast.
Yeah, there are cured uncooked hams. They aren’t common in basic grocery stores but sometimes they are there. My grandma always used them, and her hams were incredible. So I decided to try one this year to see if I can get closer to how hers were. Unfortunately I have no idea what she actually used(although I know I would remember if she used country hams, and she didn’t), and by the time it occurred to me to ask she was fairly senile and now dead.
And I can’t ask my mom how grandma did it because it’s kind of impossible to get on the subject without making it clear grandma made a much better better ham then mom does.
So I am going to experiment around till I figure it out. But I screwed up and got a Smithfield smoked uncooked picnic pork shoulder instead of a ham because I am a moron.
We were going to attempt to smoke a goose, but we chickened out, so we’ll be serving duck. 
Doing a seafood paella again this year. Shrimp, scallops, clams, mussels, bomba rice, Spanish saffron and fish stock. It’s not a true seafood paella, as I also add Spanish style chorizo. It’s a killer dish that gets raves.
Dessert is a chocoflan cake, with a scoop of dulce de leche ice cream on the side.
Mmmmm, I’d love to have a carnivorous offering on our Xmas dinner table this year. But since number 1 son married into a family of vegetarians, and they are hosting the dinner, I am having Xmas vegetarian lasagna. :S Nothing wrong with lasagna, but somehow it doesn’t scream Xmas to me.
We have a turkey with all the customary fixings on Christmas Day and rouladen* on Christmas Eve. It is traditional.
*Thin-sliced beef, bacon and onion rolled up and browned then stewed, served with egg noodles and some form of vegetable.
I’m going to a restaurant for Christmas dinner. Prime rib or shrimp. Can’t make up my mind.