Christmas Eve dinner was at our house.
My parents brought crab and Brian cooked up an amazing encrusted salmon (cooked to PERFECTION!), sesame green beans (one of my all time favorites, an old Martha Stewart recipe), caesar salad with home made dressing (holy goodness!), roasted fingerling potatoes in red, yellow, and purple, and the dessert? Individual cheesecakes with salted caramel sauce on top. OH MY!
And all of that followed the cheese fondue Brian made, along with the usual suspects on the appetizer tray - fresh veggies, olives, dried fruits and nuts, and a new family favorite brought by Anne and Ray of sausages and pinapple with a South Pacific tasting dipping sauce!
And then Christmas Day was at Casey and Liesl's house!
We started with brunch of fresh fruit and sweet strata made with cinnamon bread, cream cheese, mascarpone, raisins, and walnuts! YUM! We had a light lunch of cheeses, crackers, more olives, more fruit! And it isn't a cheese plate without some really stinky soft cheese! Casey emptied his whole fridge, thinking a piece of meat had gone bad. Nope, it was just the cheese. Soooo tasty! The stinkier the better for us cheese nerds!
And then dinner! Casey prepared an amazing local ham, made cranberry sauce from scratch, sauteed the most delicious fresh green beans, roasted three kinds of heirloom squash, and (it wouldn't be Christmas without it) green jello salad! We also had a wonderful spinach salad made by my aunt Sue, and a cheesecake with peaches and blueberries for dessert that Anne and Ray brought!
We each had a Christmas Cracker on our dinner plates - click the photo to enlarge it and you can see we each have on a paper crown. There were two kinds of crackers, so half of us have the gold crowns and the other half have striped ones. We each got a little trinket and a joke or two wrapped up in the cracker.
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