Today I made the broccoli casserole that we will reheat to have with our turkey. I also made the Barefoot Contessa’s smoked salmon spread for our hors d’oeuvre.

Christmas Eve dinner with our two children and five teen-age grandchildren was spiral sliced ham, pineapple, mashed potatoes, corn, baked beans, dinner rolls and garlic knots. Dessert, after opening gifts, was assorted cookies: molasses, orange, lemon, cranberry-coconut cookies, pecan pie bars, Buckeye bars, chocolate crack.
Dinner on Christmas Day with my sister and her husband was roast beast, mashed potatoes, yams, turnips, roasted green beans, garlic knots and dinner buns, and chocolate-peanut butter cheesecake.
Too much food, but all was delicious.

I made two 1 1/2 lbs. beef tenderloin roasts. I laid them together in a v-rack and roasted them at 425*. Since they were two separate pieces I timed them based on the recommended time for one piece, ie. 15 min per lb. Well instead of 25 minutes they took more like 50 minutes to get to 120**. So I sliced the one roast into steaks and finished them in my new Breville smart air oven. Could be 2 roasts take more time than 1 or my oven is off. Anyway I served the steaks with sweet potato fries and salad and garlic bread. Steak was great!!

Sunday was leftover Korean Chicken wings with roasted broccoli. Christmas dinner was potluck style as I had both my siblings' families - 14 people in total. So I roasted the prime rib, made honey wheat rolls, and roasted the broccoli and green beans. My sister roasted garlic potatoes. Sis-in-law brought appetizers - bacon wrapped w/brown sugar crackers, white bean hummus with basil and crackers, shrimp w/cocktail sauce, and she made an green apple-cranberry salad. Dessert was mainly the cookies which I will share on the baking thread. Been eating leftovers the last 2 nights. I did throw a pork roast into the slow cooker yesterday which we will probably eat on Friday.

Yesterday I made a big pot of corn chowder; it will give us several meals of leftovers. Dinner tonight is boneless chicken breasts simmered in my "garden special", which is tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, celery, diced carrots and/or zuchinni and/or summer squash or whatever else was ripe and left in the garden at the end of the season. It will give us a couple more meals with the final remnants made into soup.

Our Saturday dinner was venison sausage and pancakes, with blueberries frozen from our garden and maple syrup from our sugaring operation last spring. It won't be too long before it is sugaring season again here!