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Winter holiday foods

What foods does your family have during the winter holidays?


For Christmas we always have polish foods: pierogies, halupki (rice & meat wrapped with cabbage), sauerkraut, and kielbasa.  In other words, everything is beige.  For the past five years, my mom and I have been slipping in some type of vegetable dish.  This year we're making a vegetable soup and my uncle is bringing a ham.  

For New Year's we do pork and saurerkraut. 
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Re: Winter holiday foods

  • Our Danish tradition is to have an ox-tail broth base soup with bread balls, meat balls and carrots.  I haven't been able to have it for several years due to my Celiac diagnosis and the fact that both the bread balls and meat balls need flour (we tried to make gluten free bread balls one year but failed...they just dissolved in the broth).  We also have Risalamande (a Danish rice almond pudding desert we top with hot strawberries)...I heart it so much and end up eating several servings.  :)
  • @speakeasy14 - I love every food you mentioned. NOM!

    We're pretty white bread for Christmas. My family's background is all English/Scottish, so it's pretty much traditional turkey, stuffing, potatoes, a couple of vegetable dishes. We also make tomato aspic, which is essentially spicy tomato jello. It's like a jellied Bloody Mary. It sounds gross but it is fricken delicious and is my favorite part of Christmas dinner. FI refuse to try it...he's missing out, but it means more for me!

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  • @lmcooper86 Oh I love all of it too, but would love it more if there was a little bit more color to the meal.  Hahaha I really like my veggies. And jellied bloody mary?  Is it like a tomato preserve? 
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  • @minskat30 have you tried making it with the gluten free flour?  My best friend's sister has celiac's so we're always trying to recreate recipes with gluten free options. 

    @twodimes I made a breakfast casserole like that last year, everyone loved it,but my sister wants to do breakfast for dinner on Tuesday.  I like the cinnamon bun idea, you should bring the tradition back!
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  • We're Scandinavian, so Christmas means lutefisk and lefse. Strangely enough, it's my German FI's family who is serving the lutefisk. After my grandma got to the point where she couldn't host, no one volunteered to make it (I understand their feelings).

    One bite of lutefisk every year with mashed potatoes out of gratitude that I don't just have to eat lye-soaked fish.

    Then my family's Christmas is more like ham, turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and salads. I don't know how fancy my mom is going this year because she has to work up through the 23rd and host the 24th, but FI and I are bringing cherry fluff. Once I get better established in my kitchen, I'll be able to bring more things to help her out. In the meantime, I can at least do cleanup (she broke her shoulder 7 years ago and she's still in therapy and at the pain clinic - it's been a mess).

    FI's family usually serves the white bread turkey, stuffing, potatoes, vegetables, and aforementioned lutefisk. My only question this year is whether they will have pumpkin pie or not - they skipped Thanksgiving because not enough of them could make it, so it's a little unclear.
  • @minskat30 have you tried making it with the gluten free flour?  My best friend's sister has celiac's so we're always trying to recreate recipes with gluten free options. 

    @twodimes I made a breakfast casserole like that last year, everyone loved it,but my sister wants to do breakfast for dinner on Tuesday.  I like the cinnamon bun idea, you should bring the tradition back!
    Unfortunately, yes.  Didn't work and we tried a few variations...think it is because the balls need to rest in the broth to absorb some flavor and the gluten free ones just end up turning to mush.  Oh well, more room for desert.  :)
  • @speakeasy14 - Not so much a preserve as a jellied salad. You know those jello molds, they look like a half-sphere and are usually jello with canned fruit? It looks like that...it's like jello made out of tomato juice with spices in it.

    Looks something like this:

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    It looks weird...I know. A lot of recipes add vegetables to it, but that's just wrong (in my totally unbiased opinion).

    I forgot to add, we always have birthday cake for desert at Christmas. My sister's birthday is December 25, so it's always cake or whatever birthday desert she wants.

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  • edited December 2014
    I usually have Christmas with my mom's side of the family. It's usually ham or something like that for dinner with veggies, potatoes, etc. I don't eat any of it. I'm really picky. I always eat pasta- baked ziti, lasagna, etc. We're part Italian so there's always pasta too, it's not just for me. But that's all I eat besides dessert and any apps I like.
    I'm bringing buffalo chicken dip for an app this year :)

    ETA: we may be having dinner with FI's family for Christmas Eve and his mom is making ham and lasagna. He thinks I'm a total biatch because I won't eat her lasagna because she uses jarred sauce. I just can't with that.
     




  • Well we usually devote one who day to Cookie baking and we bake all the cookies. Christmas Eve we have a traditional German Christmas meal with Schnitzel and some other side dishes. On Christmas we usually will have ham or a roast.
  • @southernpeach89 - FI was trying to convince his mom to make schnitzel on Christmas Eve this year, but no luck. Sad.

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  • We throw a big Christmas party every year and so make a ton of food for that.  Gingerbread cookies, stillene d'oro (a sort of sugar cookie), a sort of cake with cranberries and a cream cheese filling, fudge, tannenbaum coffee cakes (shaped like Christmas trees with a nut and cinnamon filling), and Scotch eggs (hardboiled eggs wrapped in breakfast sausage and baked), and a ton of other stuff that I can't remember right now.

    For Christmas dinner, we usually do ham [or sometimes lamb], and on Christmas morning we always do pancakes and bacon.  Our family background is Scottish/Irish/English, so nothing super exciting.  Mr. H's family background is Czech, so I'm hoping I can start including some of those foods one of these days.
  • This thread is making me hungry.

    @lmcooper86 It kind of looks like the canned cranberry sauce.  

    KeptInStitches Lutefisk sounds similar to the fish soup my mom's bf makes for Christmas eve.  And I think your mom would appreciate the help more than you bringing another dish; assisting with clean up is a good idea.

    minskat30 Good point, more desserts! 

    lavenderfields13 you sound like my best friend.  She is also from an Italian family and they do the feast of seven fishes.  She hates fish, so they always have to make pasta dishes just for her.

    southernpeach89 I have always wanted to include the German side of my family, but my dad was an only child and the only remaining family he has is in Germany.  So we've always just done the holidays with my mom's side of the family.  I think I'm going to go through recipes now and see what I have from that side of the family.

    @futuremrshistorian Those Scotch eggs sound delicious!  
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  • @lmcooper86 You will just have to make it for dinner one night to show him how yummy it is and that you should make it for the holidays!
  • I have an Italian background so we have fish on Christmas Eve, in honor of the "feast of the seven fish," but we usually only make three kinds of fish because nobody really eats it :-P.

    FI's mom makes mushroom "sour soup," and bobalki with sauerkraut.  It is a new tradition that I have started to look forward to, for the holidays we have spent together.
  • Perogies - my grandmother handmade them every year for Chirstmas Eve... I at least buy them from people that home make them as I never learned how to make them.

    H's family is Italian - so they always have lasagna and Italian cookies.. and ham, and green beans, and mashed potatoes, and meatballs (the kind made with the grape jelly), and LOTS of other foods... nobody goes away hungry.


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  • We're doing things a little different this year because I wanted to be able to make everything ahead since we're renting a cabin in the mountains...and my MIL wanted to have ham on Christmas day instead of Christmas eve. H and I are doing both Christmas eve and day dinners, so here's what we've planned:

    For Christmas Eve we made porcupine meatballs (they're meatballs with rice instead of breadcrumbs). We're serving them with salad, mashed potatoes and stuffed mushrooms. We also have some Enstrom's toffee for dessert.

    For Christmas dinner, we have a Honey Baked Ham, cheesy hashbrown casserole, green beans, homemade Czech dinner rolls...and a lemon cake for dessert.  

  • Perogies - my grandmother handmade them every year for Chirstmas Eve... I at least buy them from people that home make them as I never learned how to make them.

    H's family is Italian - so they always have lasagna and Italian cookies.. and ham, and green beans, and mashed potatoes, and meatballs (the kind made with the grape jelly), and LOTS of other foods... nobody goes away hungry.
    This is how EVERY gathering with my mom's family is! There is always way too much food. My grandmother loves to cook. I grew up always having too much food at family functions so it's still weird for me when I go to someone else's gathering and there's like just enough food for everyone or not many options. 
     




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