Christmas Is Almost Upon Us

With Christmas at the end of this week, it's time to get serious about planning some food. Here are a few guides to help you out: Best Christmas Ever from Epicurious, Holiday Headquarters from Whole Foods, and Ultimate Holiday Cookbook from Cooking Light.

Reminder Re Christmas Ideas

If you are still struggling with your Christmas menu, here's a reminder of the Christmas guides I posted a while ago to help you out.

Quick Christmas Appetizers

Food and Wine magazine has assembled a slideshow of quick and delicious Christmas appetizers, but I know of one that's even quicker: smoked salmon spread from Whole Foods. Can't go wrong there or with anything else in its vicinity, like the precooked shrimp. And it's a helpful spot for getting your fish count up to seven for the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve!

Holiday Tasting At Lucky's

If you are scouting around for new ideas for your holiday table, the Lucky's Market in Boulder will be holding a Holiday Tasting Fair tomorrow, the 20th from 11 to 2.

Christmas Menu Ideas

Since UPS informed me this afternoon that it's already too late to have delivery by Christmas guaranteed via ground shipping, it must be time to start thinking about Christmas menus, so here are a few guides to help you out: Christmas Unwrapped from Epicurious, Celebrate the Holidays from Cooking Light, and Christmas Recipes from Food and Wine magazine.

Weekday Dinner Ideas

And oh what a week, including Christmas.  Prior to the excesses, we'll keep it light for tomorrow.  The organic eggplants for just 99 cents each at Sprouts through Wednesday have me thinking of a vegetarian dish from an old favorite cookbook, Mediterranean Light, which therefore doesn't have a link.  The book's eggplant gratin is a much lighter version than others you might find on the web (the whole idea of this cookbook is to take an already healthy cuisine and even lighten up on that).  As written, it calls for making a tomato sauce from scratch, but using a quality jarred pasta sauce like Muir Glen Organic reduces the steps to baking a couple of eggplants at 450 for 20 minutes, layering sauce and sliced eggplant with herbs (I might sneak in a bit of cheese) and baking for 30 to 40 minutes.  A nice prelude to the rest of the week.

For Christmas Eve on Tuesday, we've recently gotten into toying with the southern Italian tradition of the Feast of the Seven Fishes for Christmas Eve, following a spectacular dinner at I Trulli in New York City last year (you can see their 2013 menu here, and I had the squid ink pasta and the swordfish last year - so good!).  Being in Boulder this year, my attempt will be far more humble, involving four fish at most and only two courses for the family.  The basis will be creamy lobster pappardelle from Cooking Light.  Whole Foods has very fine lobster tails on sale for $6 each through the 31st.  To increase my fish count, I'm thinking about adding a few shrimp and also bay scallops.  If we start off with an appetizer of Whole Foods' lovely smoked salmon spread on rice chips or Nut Thins, we're up to four fish.  This past Wednesday's New York Times had an article on the seven fishes that said you could also count a salad  including anchovies in the dressing as one of your fishes, but I'm not that eager to reach seven.

Christmas Day tends to be a standing rib roast in this house, a fairly straightforward dish to make (especially since the outside meat griller man gets put in charge of this inside roast).  Sides are still a bit in flux.  I'm thinking about mashed potatoes with crispy shallots from Food and Wine magazine, plus some roasted asparagus ($1.88 a pound at Lucky's in Longmont through Christmas), and also a beet salad recipe received from a friend that I think would go well with this dinner, although I think that recipe was originally intended as one for Thanksgiving.

We'll attempt to compensate for the excesses on Thursday with something ascetic like a tofu stir-fry, incorporating some of that $1.88 a pound asparagus previously purchased from Lucky's.

Which gets us through the week in a hopefully sane and relatively healthy manner, and we haven't even incorporated a bouche de Noel!

Christmas Menu Help

Happy solstice and welcome to winter!  If you're still working on menu plans for Christmas week, here's a reminder of some guides that might help you out.

Christmas Culinary Ideas

If today is the 17th already (eek), it's certainly time to start thinking about all those Christmas foods, possibly including brunch and Eve as well as the traditional dinner.  Although with temperatures expected to hit 65 today in Boulder, I'd rather be thinking about it at Rockefeller Center, where the snow was falling so prettily on the tree at the start of the Today Show this morning.  In any case, here are a few guides to help you out with your planning:  Christmas Unwrapped from Epicurious, It's Beginning to Taste a Lot Like Christmas from Bon Appetit (that one includes a menu for a Colorado Christmas as well as an article on the all-time worst holiday foods, have to check that one out), and Celebrate the Holidays from Cooking Light.  Pull on the shorts and t-shirts and start planning.

Holiday Tasting In Superior Today

I haven't had time to check Whole Foods' calendar for a bit, and just saw that the store in Superior will host a Holiday Tasting today.  Here's what they say:

Holiday Tasting

Sunday, December 15th

2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Superior Whole Foods Market, Free

Holiday Tasting

Get ahead of the Holidays! Join us in each dept. at the Superior Whole Foods Market for an afternoon of Holiday samples!  Enjoy music and Bell Ringers from our adopted school- Ryan Elementary in Lafayette.  Let us help you with your menu planning or Holiday Ordering!

Merry Christmas To All

For all those observing it, or simply going with the holiday mood, best wishes for a very merry Christmas day.  I'm thinking my standing rib roast for dinner is going to be spectacular.

Christmas Recipes Reminder

Happy Christmas Eve.  If you're still angsting about Christmas dinner, here's a reminder about the post I did a bit ago about various online guides to Christmas dinner from my favorite sources.

Weekday Dinner Ideas

With Christmas falling on Tuesday this week, this will be no ordinary post of daily fare.  Tomorrow being Christmas Eve, I'm torn between two traditions within my experience.  With connections to New Mexico, I'm tempted by the Christmas Eve tradition of serving tamales.  My understanding is that because tamales are so time-consuming to make from scratch, this serves as a very special meal.  However, they are just plain too time-consuming to me to make from scratch, especially with some fine frozen ones available at our natural food stores.  So that's a possibility, while another part of me is leaning towards fish, a nod to the Italian tradition of the Feast of the Seven Fishes for Christmas Eve.  Seven's a bit much, but I think I could make my way through at least two, maybe three (smoked salmon spread from Whole Foods as an appetizer would be an easy first).

Christmas Day at my house is perhaps rather unimaginative, but it is scrumptious:  a standing beef rib roast from Whole Foods, accompanied by a horseradish sauce made with lowfat sour cream, steamed Brussels sprouts, roasted beets, and potatoes, either baked or mashed.  I keep telling myself that some year I'll do some elegant potato gratin, but that just never seems to happen.  This year I'll go so far as to fancy up the mashed potatoes by doing mashed potatoes with crispy shallots from Food and Wine magazine.  I can go so far as to add a garlic clove or two to the cooking potatoes and to fry some shallots on the side.

Then the rest of the week is easy - leftovers!  No, I won't really do that three days in a row, so something light and healthy will slip in there, probably an easy veggie stir-fry over brown rice.

Christmas Recipe And Menu Guides

If the season is so stressfully busy, that must mean it's also time to start thinking about Christmas dinner.  Mine's pretty primordial, centering around a hunk of meat, a standing rib roast from Whole Foods, very simply done.  But if you're in the mood for more creativity, check out these guides for some ideas:  Christmas Unwrapped from Epicurious, Bon Appetit's 2012 Christmas HQ, Celebrate the Holidays from Cooking Light, and Holiday Recipes from Whole Foods, which features gluten-free and dairy-free sections.

Holiday Tasting At Pearl WFM Tomorrow

The Whole Foods store on Pearl Street will be hosting their big Taste of the Holidays shindig tomorrow.  Here's what they say:

Taste of the Holidays

Saturday, December 15th


11:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Whole Foods Market Pearl Street, FREE

Join us for our annual Taste of the Holidays event where we'll help you plan your holiday meal from appetizers to desserts. We'll have tons of yummy food from each department in our store and beautiful music from our friends Adam and Jon. This tasting will also feature beer, wine and spirits pairings from our friends at the Wine and Spirits Store!

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.

More Whole Foods Holiday Tastings

Yahoo. For those of us who missed last weekend's big round of holiday tastings, our local Whole Foods stores will offer us a second chance tomorrow afternoon. Here's what's happening at the Pearl and Superior stores, and maybe the others are in the act, too (I can't check everywhere!). And don't forget, if you're out at the Superior store tomorrow afternoon, do also head across the street to Superior Liquor for their wine tasting and bottle signing to benefit our beloved Boulder Valley Humane Society. Here's what Whole Foods says.

Pearl Street Store

Saturday, December 17th

Holiday Entertaining Tasting
1-4pm FREE

Stop by the store for a taste of the season with our Holiday Entertaining tasting. Each of our teams will be samplilng some delicious dishes to help you plan your holiday meal.

Superior Store

Saturday, December 17th

Entertaining Appetizers
3:00pm-6:00pm Free

Join us throughout our store for samples of party favorites and entertaining appetizers. Order from our Holiday Menu for the perfect party!

Christmas Recipe Guides

With just ten days remaining until Christmas, I guess it's time to get serious about planning what will be on the table. There are several excellent guides out there offering recipes, menu plans, videos, helpful tips, and the like. My favorites include Christmas Unwrapped from Epicurious, Bon Appetit's Christmas Food, Cooking Light's Ultimate Holiday Food, Saveur magazine's Holiday, and Holiday Recipes from Whole Foods. That's more than enough to get my planning started.

Saturday Is Holiday Tasting Day

This Saturday, the 10th, is shaping up to be our Boulder natural foods tasting day for holiday ideas. Here, at a minimum, is what is going on.

Alfalfa's

Alfa la la la Holiday Tasting Fair
Saturday, Dec. 10th
Alfalfa's Inside and Outside
11am-3pm
FREE

String the lights, bundle up, and come on down to Alfalfa’s for a bit of holiday cheer. We’re kicking off the season by sampling holiday foods both classic and new. Outside we’ll have piping hot chocolate and snowflake cookies. Inside there will be tastes of everything that makes the holidays, well, the holidays.

Oh, and come a little early if you can. At exactly 11 am, we'll unwrap and reveal Boulder’s newest and biggest citizen — Alfie! Our gift to Boulder, our gift to you.

Sunflower

"Holiday Tasting Fair! 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm. We will be sampling items from our holiday platters and delicious desserts. Yum!"

Whole Foods, Pearl Street

Saturday, December 10th

Holiday Entertaining Tasting
1-4pm FREE

Stop by the store for a taste of the season with our Holiday Entertaining tasting. Each of our teams will be samplilng some delicious dishes to help you plan your holiday meal.

Whole Foods, Superior (they're also doing a holiday kids club event that afternoon)

Saturday, December 10th

Holiday Tasting- Holiday Meals and Sides
3:00pm-6:00pm Free

Join us throughout our store for tasty samples of items from out Holiday menu and more. Let us do the cooking for you.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Dinner Plans

I don't usually get around to planning for the weekend until Friday, but hey, we're talking Christmas here. My plans are still a bit in the formative stage, but here's what they're looking like.

Christmas Eve will be an easy festival of shellfish, centered around the lobster tails that Whole Foods has for $7.99 each (yes, you can get tails for less elsewhere, but these are from Maine), and Whole Foods' own fresh crabcakes. I tried the crabcakes when they were on sale a couple of weeks ago, and they are definitely worth the $12.99/lb that I last saw. They're also making them in cute cocktail sizes, in addition to full sized cakes, and the smaller size might work better with the lobster tails. For a side, we'll do Lundberg's fabulous wild rice blend, which I picked up for a steal at the Vitamin Cottage sale that recently ended. The veggie has yet to be determined, and I'm hoping tomorrow's new sales might provide some inspiration.

For Christmas dinner itself, we'll have an array of appetizers to get ourselves and our guests through a few hours before dinner. Easy ones will include hummus with lots of veggies (don't forget organic baby carrots for just 99 cents a one pound bag at Sunflower through tomorrow) and a few crackers, shrimp cocktail (lots of beautiful cooked shrimp made it to my freezer during that spectacular one day sale a while ago at Whole Foods), and endive spears topped with herbed cheese and smoked trout or salmon. You can go with a formal recipe for this, something like endive spears with smoked salmon, horseradish cream, and dill, but I've been making it for years just using a prepared herb cheese like Boursin or Rondele (the latter on sale at Sprouts through tomorrow for the excellent price of $3.99 for an 8 oz container), topped with the trout or salmon, and maybe a bit of fresh dill.

The centerpiece of Christmas dinner will be a standing rib roast, and no, I won't reveal where I decided to get it. I've yet to look up recipes, but it will probably be very simple, with some embedded garlic slivers, and an au jus finessed with some red wine from a good bottle (but not as good as the Corison cabernet that we'll open to go with the roast). The roast will be accompanied by our favorite, simple horseradish sauce from Bon Appetit published nearly a decade ago. The current issue of Bon Appetit will provide inspiration for the sides, including potato gratin with gruyere and rainbow chard and radicchio saute (check out the Christmas colors!). As for dessert, that will be a surprise to us, as friends will be bringing it. What a feast.

Christmas Dinner Idea Guides

Looking for a little help with your planning for Christmas dinner? Here are some guides brought to you by my fave cooking magazines. Check out Bon Appetit, Epicurious.com, and Saveur for great menu ideas, how-to videos, and the like.