What's On Tonight & Pop Culture: Christmas Dinner Food Thread

Almost my favourite part of Christmas is planning our Christmas meal, so I hoped others might want to talk about their meals as well.

What are your traditional meals? Is it a big multi-family affair, or something more closely knit?

Will you get to do that this year, and if not, will you still have at least some special food to mark the day?

Is Christmas Dinner at lunch time or in the evening?

My Australian family is very small - my parents migrated here, so it was usually just the five of us. Sometimes, we shared a meal with some family friends in the same boat.

Christmas Day always included a couple of awkward phone calls to my grandparents in England, but international phone calls were so expensive that the calls were carefully timed - everyone got thirty seconds or so. And as we only spoke to them a couple of times a year, I was always too shy to say much at all.

Australian Christmas has come a long way. When I was a kid, half the time it was a traditional English-style meal. A roast chicken or ham (turkey was and still is uncommon), the usual trimmings - my parents actually didn’t much care for these meals, especially the heat in the kitchen. Mum used to make several fruitcakes and puddings in advance though. I miss the puddings - hot Christmas pudding, with far too much brandy butter... heaven.

Or the alternative was a barbeque, but in the 80s, this meant sausages and kebabs on the grill, potato salad, etc. It never felt that different to a typical summer weekend lunch, and I need my Christmas dinner to feel out of the ordinary.

Now that we are all foodies, things have gotten far more interesting. Christmas is celebrated in so many different ways here, and the internet provides so much inspiration - every year we do something different. The consistent theme is abundance - the meal should last for several hours, and involves naps on the sofa in-between courses.

My family is still small, and for years was getting smaller. My older brother moved to Germany, my father passed away, so for a while it was just Mum, me and younger brother. Now we’ve added in one sister-in-law, and, this year a new baby, which makes things far more fun.

Usually, we divide the meal between us, although this year, with a new baby, brother and SIL are getting it easy - they are assigned the cheese course, and brother will grill the meat.

Melbourne in December is a coin toss between scorching or grey and wet, so the planned meal needs to be something that won’t heat up the kitchen too much, but also not entirely cool.

Seafood is a very popular Christmas food now. I hate seafood, so this was always a problem. But my SIL is deathly allergic! A pain for her, a boon for me; the seafood is eliminated.

Here is our menu for the day, with recipe links.

Drinks

Stone fruit and citrus punch (alcoholic and non-alcoholic)

Starters

Gruyere cheese gougeres - this will be a challenge, have never made choux before