French Christmas Meal 2014

Snow, turkey, Christmas tree, presents...these are the elements that make me think of Christmas.

In our region, it hardly snows; in my family, we seldom eat turkey.

So there you go, we celebrated Christmas with no snow, no turkey, but with Christmas trees, plenty of presents, and scrumptious foods.

Seafoods are usually on the menu in our region since we are very close to the sea. On Christmas Eve, we started our celebration with slice of salmon or tuna on a toasted bread spread with savour cream, then sprinked with some chopped shallots. A few drop of lemon juice added some fragrance to the combination. Then we had rolled ham spread with cream cheese. Other finger foods including carrots cut into stick form, some nuts, and some pomelo.

Celebration would not be completed without a glass of champagne.

Another French Christmas tradition : eating foie gras with onion on a toast, then sprinkled with some salt. This is a heavy meal, not everyone can digest well the foie gras. I stopped eating since several years ago.

One of the signature dish of my FIL : scallop with wine sauce, in my family we like to eat it with panfried apple.

As mentioned in my previous post, finish one's plate means mopping the sauce with a slice of bread. Here I had no problem cleaning the sauce on the pan as it was too good to leave them to waste.

We continued to the cheese section : crêpe stuffed with cheese (not sure what type of cheese), the two went along very well.

My MIL signature dessert: raspberry Christmas cake. The traditional Christmas cake is made of lots of butter so it was very heavy. My MIL reduced the butter and matched it with rasberry, very refleshing.

Hubby saw Mangosteen imported from Malaysia so he decided to buy two. Very expensive, at 20€/kg, these two costed around 2€. My MIL mentioned that French love to try out exotic fruits during Christmas season.

Santa Claus passed by earlier this year as the little girl was a bit sick, she went to bed without eating dinner days before. Luckily she recovered on Christmas Eve, after meeting Santa, she was able to stay with us.

Here the little angle, very satisfied with the presents, waiting to blow off the candles as she was also celebrating her birthday. Yes, she has turned 5!

Christmas day lunch. Here were the appetizer.

We had this wine from 1996 to go along with the meal.

Boudin blanc : one kind of stuffed sauce with apple. Apparently it was a very old tradition to eat this during Christmas, but we don't do it often. I'm not a big fun personally.

We did not eat capon like every year, instead we had beef fondue. Again, not a big fun so I didn't eat much. We had the leftover Christmas cake and Tiramisu as dessert.

After the meal, the sun was shinning so we decided to go for a walk in the park nearby.

We also had our annual family photo taken. This year we are blessed with Awena joining our family.

Hope everyone had a blast like us this year, and wishing everyone a prosperous year ahead!