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Eloquent Conversationalist
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 Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2008 6:25 am
I love holidays. Any excuse for a party, any excuse to serve people food and rake in the compliments, right? So here's my gift to the guild: a thread about holiday cooking, food, and feasting! Check here for upcoming holidays, listed by the country or countries in which they are celebrated. For any and every holiday that you may be celebrating, let's talk about it! What foods are traditional What foods do you enjoy eating and/or preparing, for yourself or for others? If you've got food pictures or recipes, please share them here! Are you planning a party or solemn gathering for an upcoming civil or religious holiday? Got a town event, or a birthday or name day to celebrate? Are you worried about providing food for (God forbid) a funeral, or a wedding, or a celebration of birth, circumcision, graduation, or any other life cycle event? Let's talk about what will be appropriate to serve, how to present it, and afterwards we'll talk about how it went over.
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Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2008 6:52 am
Last night, I hosted a Chanukah party for some relatives and friends. It's traditional to serve fried foods for Chanukah to commemorate the miracle of the oil, and so that was the focus of my meal. Here was my menu: Warm Spinach Salad With red onions, candied nuts, cranberries, and goat cheese.Israeli SaladTomatoes and cucumbers, scallions, and fresh chopped herbs, with a dressing of olive oil and lime juice. Five Gold RingsThe title is a salute to my Christian friends who were attending the party, but the cuisine is very Jewish. I made five different flavors of mini-latkes, or rather, fried patties, some of which were of the potato variety, thus qualifying them as latkes:
SPACE Traditional German Latkes made with grated white potatoes, white onion, egg, salt, pepper, and a little rice flour to bind it together. Served with a tiny dollop of homemade apple sauce.
SPACE Kremlach, traditional Czech latkes made with mashed potatoes instead of grated, and a hint of lemon zest and sugar to sweeten them. Served with a tiny dollop of lemon curd.
SPACE Chickpea fritters, an Indian style of patty made with chickpeas, yellow split peas, onion, fresh ginger, garlic, cilantro (coriander leaf), and cumin. Served with homemade tamarind chutney and a mango-cilantro chutney, just a little dot of each.
SPACE Salmon croquettes, a Southern (US) treat, made very simply with canned salmon, egg, salt, pepper, and cornmeal. Served with a blend of ketchup and red salsa.
SPACE Tex-Mex latkes, made with sweet potatoes, red potatoes, red onion, egg, chopped cilantro, cumin, dried coriander, cayenne, salt, and pepper. Served with sour cream.Cookies and Tea or CoffeeThe cookies were prepared in advance by me, then decorated by my RLSO and our guests, standing in the kitchen and/or around the dining table while I fried the latkes for the above meal. I served caffeine-free English breakfast tea for those who didn't want the caffeine, and Turkish-style coffee for those who wanted to stay awake all the way home.
SPACE Joe Froggers, a very dark molasses cookie with loads of ginger, spices, and rum. I cut these into stars-of-David, shields, menorahs, dreidls, and shields. We decorated them with white frosting and silver candy balls.
SPACE Holiday Cookies (my mother's only name for them), very pale, flavored with lemon and almond extracts. Different from sugar cookies, these are sturdier and more flavorful. I cut these into shapes, too, and we decorated them with colored frosting and sparkling sugars.
SPACE Stained Glass Cookies. Holiday cookies, but with little shapes cut out of them. I drop broken hard candies into them. During baking, the candies melt into see-through shapes just like stained glass.
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Eloquent Conversationalist
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Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 12:24 am
During the holidays it's traditional for my family to make peppermint pinwheel cookies
It's a basic sugar cookie dough but then divided, one half gets green food coloring and peppermint extract while the other half stays as is. Roll the doughs out lay them on top of one another then roll it jelly roll style, put it in the fridge to tell firm up for a while then slice and bake.
We also make popcorn snowballs
it's really just a new spin on the rice krispy treats, you basically follow that recipe but instead of using rice krispy use freshly popped popcorn. We usually add food coloring to the marshmallow mixture for a more festive feel. Also once the popcorn and marshmallow mixture is mixed together carefully (it will be a bit hot and extremeeeeeely sticky) get some of the mix and form it into a ball, and there's popcorn snowballs
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Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2008 6:40 am
During the holidays I usually end up going to other people houses so I mainly make appetizers. I make my deviled eggs, but instead of adding mustard like the recipe usually says you should, I use ranch dressing. Also I tend to make my double batter chicken pieces with my home made honey mustard(I tend to make this in gallon sizes because people love it and ask for it at home).
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Eloquent Conversationalist
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Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 10:00 am
Okay, I've got a holiday coming up on the 9th-11th of March. It's called Purim, and one of the "themes" of Purim is trickery. Costumes, masks, practical jokes, general silliness and fooling people. There's also a tradition of not just having a festive meal (which comes with almost every Jewish holiday), but also of handing out gift packages of foods, called mishloach manot. All that's really required is that the packages contain at least two different types of food (an apple and an orange are okay; two apples are not), and that they be ready to eat right then. My personal tradition is to send out foods that look like something else. I've made "cheeseburgers" out of doughnuts and candies, sushi out of marzipan/candy, flowers out of vegetables, and so on. I don't HAVE to do this, but I enjoy it. I also like to package them in pretty boxes (Chinese food type containers, little biscuit tins, flower basket looking thingies, and so forth). So, foodies, help me out! Help me come up with a good "trick" food to give to my friends. Bonus points if you help me figure out how to package the food in a fun/attractive way, too.
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Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 2:07 pm
oh that's a tricky one (no pun intended). You could do the hamburger thing again except with a cupcake
you could make a " cheese pizza" from cookie dough, jelly and cream cheese and put the slices or a small "pizza" in a small cardboard box that flips open like a pizza box
or "cupcakes" from meatloaf and mashpotates for "frosting", you probably could put food coloring in the mashpotatoes to make it more convincing. Not sure what you'd what to do about packaging.
or a "jelly filled doughnut" that's actually puff pastry with your choice of savory filling, in a small krispy kreme box
maybe even a "burrito" with puff pastry or some other dough witha a fruit filling inside. You could probably put it in any mexican fast food take out bag
sorry that's all I got
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Eloquent Conversationalist
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Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 8:24 am
Ooh, those are fun ideas! I'm writing them down in my holiday planning notebook right now.
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Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 10:07 pm
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Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 6:45 am
I personally love Christmas when it comes to making holiday foods. Baking is my specialty, so of course I'm all over the decorated cookies, gingerbread houses, pies, candies, etc. I also adore the Christmas dinner my grandmother makes us every year. I've been gradually starting to help her so that I can learn her culinary secrets and spend some much-needed time with her. It's just an all around good holiday for the culinary world. biggrin
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