The holidays bring with it many things, one of the best is the array of foods only eaten over the holidays. Now, my friends south of the border have been indulging in goodies since late November, I'm glad our temptation is only just starting!
Each year, I do my best to combine both Louis' French Canadian family food traditions with my plain old Canadian food traditions and we come up with a pretty nice mish-mash that works for us.
We enjoy:
- Tourtière is a traditional French-Canadian meat pie eaten as part of Rèveillon, adinner usually eaten after midnight mass on Christmas Eve. We eat it with various chutney, pickled goodies and relishes.
- Yule Log is a rolled cake with chocolate icing shaped to resemble a traditional yule log. It is eaten as part of the Christmas Eve meal, following the tourtière.
- Mincemeat Pie is no longer mincemeat (as there is no ground meat to be found) but the holidays must include this favourite. Correction: my favourite. I find the Yule Log far too sugary sweet for my liking, I prefer the more savoury flavour of the mincemeat.
- Quiche, both ham/asparagus and spinach/cheese, is put in the oven for heating while the kids open their stockings and Louis and I, bleary-eyed and tired, sip our hot steaming mugs of coffee on Christmas morning. The quiches are served with bacon, sausage, homefries and toast.
- Sugar Cookies and gingerbread cookies sustain us through Christmas Day while the "big meal" is being made. I have the best, best, sugar cookie recipe. Louis and I often spend the night of December 23rd making the dough and sometime on the 24th (it has to be refrigerated for a day) the dough is rolled out and the kids help decorate.
- Mulled Cider is the beverage of choice. It is always on the stove. You can smell (since I can't) the aroma of cloves and cinnamon mixed in with the apple throughout the house. Egg Nog comes in a close second choice and Caden is partial to the new chocolate flavoured egg nog available (yuck!).
- Grandmaman's Dressing is made whether we have turkey or roast. It is a very savoury ground pork based dish which has virtually no resemblance to the original recipe, but isn't that the thing about family recipes? They all change in the making.
- Hard Sauce is so decadent, so bad for you, it can only be enjoyed one day a year. And we do! It is made with butter, icing sugar and rum, formed into a roll, put in the fridge to harden. Once the plum pudding is steamed (or microwaved) a disc is cut and the hard sauce melts and oozes into every crevice, every nook, ahhh.
Of course, all of these things are available throughout the year, but they are all special and eaten by our family over Christmas. Over the years some things are added and some are taken away, all depending upon the tastes of the children and the activities of the day, but always we come back to these items as part of our tradition.
Rachelle, aka Magpie Girl, started *8 Things to quiet her "monkey mind" and I embrace it for much the same reason: therapy! If you're looking for a place to keep your lists, you might want to consider *8 Things.
