Hearing about other people's traditions is often interesting. When my wife and I got married we decided to start a Christmas Eve tradition where we'd pick a country and plan out a dinner consisting of items from it. We're making sure we've got the necessary ingredients for this year's meal and it brought to mind how comforting and fun family traditions can be.
So what does your family do this time of year (or any time of the year) that you look forward to and helps make the holiday feel like the holiday for you?
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We (my family) mostly stick to the local traditions. Both Christmas and New Year's Eve dinners got to have a potato-mayo salad, a fancier salad with dressing, some rice, another carb, one or two meats. Ah, and my fake tiramisù, folks love it. Drinks are generally beer or wine for the dinner, beer or sangria for the lunch (summer heat restricts it a bit), with either non-alcoholic cider or soda for my nephew.
I often prepare newer-ish dishes but always filling that template that I mentioned above. Moroccan couscous, for example. Never restricted by cuisine because that gets messy. This year I'm going to tweak Ur's palace cake to serve it as dessert alongside the tiramisù, my sister loves those cheese-based sweets.
New Year's Eve got to have sparkling wine. And rice with raisins for the folks here.
Typically we share gifts but we won't do it this Christmas, because we gifted ourselves with a family weekend in a city 600km from here.
I often prepare newer-ish dishes but always filling that template that I mentioned above.
We (wife and I) love trying new dishes and that is part of why we do a new country every year. Often the result is "Huh..." and we enjoy the experience even if the dish isn't a new favorite but every once in a while we stumble across something that ends up joining our repertoire.
This year I’m going to tweak Ur’s palace cake to serve it as dessert alongside the tiramisù, my sister loves those cheese-based sweets.
That sounds interesting. If you are a fan of historical recipes (and this isn't just a one off) I can't recommend Tasting History enough.
I follow Tasting History! That channel is amazing, it's the perfect mix of theoretical and practical. And it's also great to have someone actually testing and showing the recipes before I try them, adapting them straight from the source is a pain (I do this sometimes with De Re Coquinaria, but I'd rather not).
The palace cake is from another channel, The World that Was. A third one that I'd recommend is Townsends, specifically for British/NA 1700s food.
Often the result is “Huh…” and we enjoy the experience even if the dish isn’t a new favorite but every once in a while we stumble across something that ends up joining our repertoire.
I think that I'm the only one doing it for the sake of history. My folks are more like "I like this", "I don't like that". Isicia omentata (Roman burgers) was such a success that it became part of the main rotation, while tuh'u (Sumerian beet and meat stew) was... well, I liked it but my folks hated it.