Christmas Brunch
Merry Christmas to all of our friends, family and blog readers!! Hope you are all taking the time to slow down, process this crazy year and spend time with your friends and family, even if it is virtually. We have always loved celebrating Christmas ever since our daughter was born. It’s been a couple of years since she figured out who Santa really was ;-), but this was the first year that she bought both of us gifts using the money she saved up, so it was extra special.
Another thing that was extra special was the Christmas brunch we cooked this year. We prepped most of these dishes on Christmas Eve while listening to our favorite Christmas songs amidst making paper snowflakes and decorating sugar cookies. My ex-boss Kevin once told me that there are very few years that we get to celebrate Christmas while our kids are still living with us so we should never fail to make the most of these precious opportunities. I always remember this during Christmas and Diwali and it helps me go that one little extra mile more :-)
Below, we share the Christmas brunch menu items that we cooked together as a family.
Kugel with Cherries (Link to recipe)
Our friend Annemarie was kind enough to share this recipe with us. This was a dish that her mom made for Christmas every year and Annemarie highly recommended it. She was absolutely right. This dish was amazing!! With Jewish origins, our daughter loved this dish stating that it tasted like cheese cake. Note: While the recipe called for canned cherries we replaced that with frozen cherries.
Overnight French Toast Bake (Link to recipe) and Homemade Whipped Cream (Link to recipe)
When we posted about making Challah bread, our friend Mary suggested that we make this version of French Toast with the leftover bread. We prepped this dish with store-bought brioche bread the night before and baked it on Christmas morning for a delicious addition to the brunch menu. Highly recommend complementing this dish with the homemade whipped cream. You will never use store-bought whipped cream again!! This whipped cream is light, fluffy and can be used with many dishes.
Bebinca (Link to Recipe)
As part of our Weekend Indian Thali Project, when we made the Goan Thali, we had promised that we would make the famous Goan layered dessert - Bebinca. And what better time than Christmas to honor that promise!! This dish is a true labor of love. Each layer gets baked for upto 10 minutes and then the next layer is added on and baked. We made 8 layers in total. And the final result was totally worth all the effort. A slice of Bebinca with the home-made whipped cream was truly a slice of heaven on earth.
Vegetable Quiche (Link to recipe)
Ever since we tasted this dish almost 8 years back at our friend’s place, who is originally from France, we have wanted to make this dish but were never brave enough. We decided to take the plunge on Christmas to give this dish a try and we were pleasantly surprised with the result. The rich, creamy and savory flavors of this dish complemented the sweetness from the other menu items perfectly.
Sous Vide Lamb Chops (Link to recipe)
Since we don’t eat ham which is the traditional meat eaten during Christmas, Vikram decided to make these Lamb Chops with garlic herb butter instead. He cooked the lamb with the Sous Vide (a tool that is used to precision cook meat by professional chefs) for a couple of hours and then seared the meat on a pan for a final flourish.
Sugar Cookies (Link to recipe) and Royal Icing (Link to recipe)
This easy sugar cookie recipe is perfect for baking a batch of cookies to quickly get to the fun phase of decorating with the family. We all know that decorating cookies is where the true fun lies!!
We were watching Olaf’s Frozen Adventure (please don’t judge!!), where Olaf visits multiple homes and tries to find a Christmas tradition for Anna and Elsa. As I sat replete after the satisfying Christmas brunch, I contemplated what our Christmas Tradition was. We bought our very first Christmas tree the year our daughter was born and ever since then, we have added on something new to our Christmas celebrations. Whether it was baking cookies for Santa, writing letters to Santa, decorating our home, watching Christmas movies or making Cherry Kugel this year - we have done it all. So which of these would I call our family tradition? Then I looked up at our Christmas tree and saw that we had added on a Christmas ornament each year since our daughter was born - starting with a simple ornament with our daughter’s hand-print, an iron man ornament when she was into super heroes (she still is), soccer ball ornaments since she LOVES soccer and so on to a quarantine ornament for this year. And I realized that our Christmas tradition was to buy an ornament celebrating every year that our daughter has been with us.
Have you figured out what your Christmas tradition is?
