When we got married we started a tradition of having my mother-in-law over for breakfast Christmas morning. Previous menus have included French toast casserole, a strata and scrambled eggs but this year I decided to go a bit fancier with Rachael Ray's take on Eggs Benedict. Her Canadian Benny's:
... were insanely good. As I usually do with her recipes, I tweaked things slightly. Instead of whole grain bread I used English muffins and instead of frying the eggs, I poached them. I also added the cheddar cheese to the sauce instead of melting it over the eggs. The sauce was so good we were all spooning it over the hash browns (made with red bliss potatoes, green pepper and onion). We washed this tasty breakfast down with some mimosas.
After this filling breakfast I can't believe we had room for dinner only a few hours later, but we managed to find some room. Dinner is always at my stepgrandmother's house. Before we ate we noshed on some olives, two different kinds of cheese spread (one was gorgonzola with dried cranberries and chopped walnuts and the other was a goat cheese with dried cherries), as well as some shrimp cocktail. I was too busy chatting and forgot to take pictures and by the time I remembered the plates were looking a little picked over.
The Christmas meal is always the same every year: roast beef studded with garlic:
Yorkshire pudding made with the beef drippings (this was a particularly good batch this year):
Green beans with slivered almonds:
Whipped potatoes with lots of cream and butter:
and a salad with mixed leaf lettuce, grape tomatoes, celery, scallions and a tangy vinaigrette:
My plate with a little bit of everything:
It was all really good. Sadly, we didn't have time to stay for dessert since we still had to make a stop at my sister-in-law's house to see all of SP's family. I hear there were cookies and an almond cake with raspberry sauce.
I am so glad the Bennys turned out wel1! I am definitely going to add the cheese to the sauce next time - that's a great idea.
ReplyDeleteMadeline - they were amazing! I couldn't believe how good the sauce was. It was so much easier to add the cheese to the sauce...that way I wasn't fumbling around with the tinfoil tent and the eggs weren't overcooked.
ReplyDeleteWe had a traditional Roast Beef and Mashed tater Christmas dinner at my mom's too!
ReplyDeleteThe other folks got a little creative and went for a non-traditional dinner.
I liked my mom's roast beef dinner the best!
Merry Christmas!
ReplyDeleteThat Yorkshire pudding looks especially good!
Jessy - we always do the roast beef dinner and I can't imagine having anything else at Christmas.
ReplyDeletetfp - Welcome back! The pudding was quite tasty!