Merry Christmas everyone. Where Thanksgiving is pretty much a traditional feast, Christmas trends to be the total opposite. Where so much of the focus is on decorating the house, buying presents, getting them wrapped, and all the activities surrounding my favorite time of the year. The food for Christmas trends to either be super fancy or really casual, and a bunch of fun.
Christmas brunch fits perfectly into either category, because you can do fancy or easy. As the centerpiece of your brunch is a beautiful quiche, some tasty meat, be it bacon, sausage, ham, or even a cold meat tray. Then you can add to that a sweet bread, and a fruit of some kind.
For your beverage of the meal, you can set up a juice bar, which then you can add bottle of champagne to, so people can create their own, or do a little bloody Mary bar.
So my present do you is to give you a base recipe for a lot of these, that you can customize yourself.
Basic quiche
Start with a frozen pie shell, you can leave it in the aluminium foil pan, or place it in a fancy pie pan and pre bake it for 20 minutes at 350.
Make your basic custard.
- 4 large eggs
- 3/4 cups half and half
- 1/8 t ground nutmeg
Mix together and pour into cooled pie shell and add your ingredients of choice, your favorite cheese, meat, or sauteed vegetables. Place back in oven for 45 to 50 minutes and bake it until toothpick comes out clean. Serve it either warm or cold.
Being Christmas morning and all the thrill of the presents being opened, instead of baking from scratch, try making some banana bread earlier in the week( look at earlier posts and see the recipe) or you can buy a tube of cinnamon rolls and bake them, to make them extra special unroll them and add some dried cranberries to them, reroll them and bake as directed.
Serve a nice fresh fruit salad, or maybe even a yogurt parfait. In my opinion you can’t go wrong with either option.
Finally create something fancy to drink be it a flavored coffee, a fancy juice bar, or a nice refreshing punch.
- 2 liter bottle ginger ale
- 1 container frozen orange juice concentrate
- 1 46 oz bottle cranberry juice
Mix all together and serve it in a punch bowl, with slices of Orange, lemons, limes, and fresh cranberries, and an ice ring.
Last but not least the most important part of the brunch, you and your family and friends. Remember Christmas is a season of hope, love, family, and faith. Merry Christmas everyone.
Natilie Cavnar is a cooking fanatic who loves to try new recipes, and create some of her own, ask her what you want at thenormalchef@gmail.com.