I used to host a gathering every year around Christmas like this one here in 2009 or this one last year but this year, I decided not to hold any for one reason or another – one being the fact that I was down with a slight flu and did not really feel up to it. In the end, we had a simple dinner on Christmas Eve – just the three of us, Melissa, the mum and me.
I could not find any dinner rolls at this new bakery in town – Tea Street, I think it is called so I bought their garlic bread instead…
Come to think of it, I should have sliced them and toasted them a bit as they were a bit too big for us to have one whole bun each.
Melissa cooked this mushroom potage…
– Campbell’s, of course but she added some bits of bacon to it and that certainly served to enhance the taste.
I grilled the pieces of Salisbury beef in garlic butter…
– they’re actually beef patties, Marina brand…and they’re not bad really. We all enjoyed eating that and for one thing, there wasn’t any need to worry about them being too tough and having to saw vigorously through them prior to eating. I also grilled the mushrooms and boiled the snow peas and young baby corn while Melissa made the potato salad.
At the same time, Melissa made this very nice baked macaroni cheese with bacon…
…which all of us enjoyed a great deal.
To go with our dinner, we had sparkling grape juice…
Nope, we did not have any wine even though we do have at least half a dozen bottles in the house – mostly red and a couple of white. People keep giving us but the truth is we’re not really into drinking that much.
There was also this fruit cake that I got from Philip for dessert…
but we were already too full by the end of the dinner that we could hardly eat anything else. In the end, I just had to wrap it up again and put it back into the fridge.
So, there you have it – our very simple Christmas Eve dinner…
– nothing great but with some Christmas songs playing on the cd player, it certainly didn’t seem too bad after all…
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 