Christmas Catch-Up

Breakfast was gorgeous! No luck finding creamed chipped beef for our usual Christmas breakfast casserole. So, we started a new tradition on this one: scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, which is a common breakfast over here. Accompanied by my delicious brown bread.

The rest of the day was a lovely Christmas spent at home. There was much relaxing by the fire, walking, looking over of pressies (and pressies and pressies and pressies and pressies), cooking, eating, etc. Our German friends came over for Christmas dinner in the late afternoon.

We had agreed that Slim and I would cook dinner while our friends would make the appetizers and desserts. We’ve had a few “food” conversations with these friends over the past year, but just a few, because they have always claimed not to be foodies. They like good food, but neither is very interested in cooking themselves and any conversations about going out for food are pretty short: they like what they like, but there isn’t much reason to continue (typical Germans in some ways!).

The Foodie Hubby and I did go all out for the dinner, but it was very traditional and homey – US and Irish homey. Goose has gone out of fashion and most people have turkey and/or ham for Christmas dinner here.

Side note, part of my Christmas bonus for my 3-month contract at the Cider factory was a turkey and ham – huge turkey (16 pounds if I recall) and leg of ham. I cooked the ham over the weekend, and it was gorgeous – seriously yummy, even for a first time try.

Our non-foodie friends show up with their appies and desserts and show us up like you wouldn’t believe! First was a lovely poached pear with two kinds of blue cheese and greens. The pears had been poached whole then cut in a fan with the tops in tact. They were brought plated (Grosser Mann had to drive the 300 yards to our house with all this!) on beautiful china that apparently had never been used before (no pressure for Miss Accident Prone here).

Anyway, for dinner we had turkey, two kinds of ‘tatoes, stuffing, gravy, cold ham and cranberry sauce (from a jar but not the RIGHT stuff for me). For the veg, we went native with buttered cabbage. All delicious and homey and filling.

After trying to stay awake long enough to digest enough to make room for dessert, the second set of gorgeous dishes from die Deutsche come out. For dessert, Grosser Mann had made champagne gelatin with berries and whipped cream. The champagne stayed fizzy, so it was bright and light and just perfect. We didn’t even miss pumpkin pie this time.

Afterwards, we brought out a puzzle, which was actually just finished by Slim and I last week (mid-February) – very hard. We enjoyed our company until quite late, talking, puzzling and making a toast or two to Christmas with friends.