Weekend Dinner Ideas, Including Christmas

I'm in the mood for a very festive weekend, since we very certainly will have a white Christmas here in Boulder. To kick off a weekend of special dinners, I'll start with grilled sea scallops and tomatoes with olive vinaigrette from Gourmet magazine. No, I'm not planning on lighting the barbeque that's buried under a foot and a half of snow on my patio, as the grilling only refers to using a grill pan. Sunflower has jumbo sea scallops for $11.99 a pound, and they also have organic on-the-vine cluster tomatoes for $1.99 a pound, a very good price.

There are so many traditions for Christmas Eve, including tamales in New Mexico, and seven fish dishes in Italy. We tend to lean towards seafood, and I hope it doesn't sound like cheating, but rather than spending the whole evening by the stove, I'm going to have Whole Foods' fabulous premade Maryland style crab cakes, which are on sale for $9.99 a pound. For a veggie, I'll repeat a side that was a huge success at our Thanksgiving table, Swiss chard gratin, a recipe from Whole Foods. The light sauce made with Comte (available in Whole Foods' cheese department) wonderfully dresses up a favorite vegetable for a holiday table. One of Lundberg's special rice blends will also go on the side; I adore their Black Japonica, but I think they also make a Christmas red rice blend that would certainly be appropriate, as well.

For Christmas Day proper, we'll bring out a beautiful standing rib roast of beef. Recipes for this abound, and the current issue of Cooking Light has a tempting one, rosemary-Dijon crusted standing rib roast. I'm more likely to follow the directions in Mark Bittman's trusted book, How to Cook Everything, inserting a few garlic slivers and making a red wine au jus. In addition to the au jus, we'll have a simple horseradish sauce from Bon Appetit. Sides will include golden potatoes with caper brown butter crumbs, Brussels sprouts (probably just simply steamed, and served with the horseradish sauce), and possibly a repeat of the roasted beet salad recipe from a friend that was such a hit at Thanksgiving. A store-bought buche de Noel is the only dessert I'd consider, but desserts aren't much of a focus in this house.

Which will get us through a very celebratory, but hopefully not highly caloric, weekend.