I started with lasagna, vegetables, and homemade cookies for Christmas Eve. Then that was simplified to homemade pizza, veggies, and cookies. And now we're leaning toward take-out Chinese for Christmas Eve.
For Christmas Day breakfast, we began with a sausage and pepper egg casserole, bacon, almond bread, muffins, fruit salad, juice, and coffee/tea/cocoa. This meal too needed to be simplified. We're now planning on ham slices, deviled breakfast eggs made the day before (bacon bits mixed in with mayo and egg yolk to stuff the whites), a fruit bowl from the produce department (probably watermelon chunks), almond bread (already baked and in the freezer), muffins, juice, coffee/tea/cocoa. My husband will be in charge of the hot drinks, I'll bake and freeze a batch of muffins in the next couple of days, my daughters will do the deviled eggs, and I'll heat the ham slices.
We had planned on doing a Christmas lunch a few hours after the breakfast, but really, who are we kidding? None of us will be eating our Christmas breakfast at a usual breakfast hour. My son keeps late hours as a software engineer, and they often don't arrive for a breakfast at breakfast hours. So, we'll skip the lunch idea, do brunch using the breakfast menu, and somewhere around 1 or 2 in the afternoon I'll add a bowl of chicken salad (made the day before) and some rolls (already baked and in the freezer) to the remains of the breakfast spread. If we happen to have tangerines on hand, I'll add those, too.
Christmas Day dinner -- this is the big meal of our celebrations, so I didn't want to cut back too much on my efforts for this meal. But this is also the most complex of our Christmas meals. Much of it needs to be done just before serving. So far, I have steaks in the freezer from our latest beef delivery. My plan is to make Steak Diane, which is done on the stove. My daughters have volunteered to make a dessert for us. I still need a starchy dish (perhaps popovers or potatoes au gratin) and 2 vegetable dishes. I have a coupon for a free bag of salad mix at Fred Meyer. I'll get that and perhaps some vegetables to roast in the oven. I would also like to make my mother's creamy jello salad in tiny wreath molds. I may be able to un-mold those onto individual plates the day before, allowing me to take my time with this part of preparation. Can you see any other aspects of my meal prep that can be done ahead of time?
How are your holiday meal plans coming? What's on your menus for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day?
