Dinners of Christmas Past

We have a tradition in our family.  My dad and I cook Christmas Eve dinner.  We try to do something different and gourmet.  Our family begs for a "regular" Christmas dinner.  We keep ignoring them.

In past years we have made standing rib roast, porcini and wild rice stuffing, potato latkes.  We have made some interesting desserts.  It has been fun at times and at times my dad and I have vowed to order pizza the next year.

This we started off with spinach salad with raspberry dressing.  It was not well received.

 For dinner we had pork tenderloin with cranberry compote.  (I don't even know what that means.)

 

We also had Parmesan puffed potatoes which caused a potato peeling challenge.  I think I won. 

 

 My dad might argue though.

 

 We even let Saigie play! 

 We had a couple of other dishes, but the hi-light was definitely the Super Easy Strawberry Charlotte - which we felt the need to rename the Damn Difficult Christmas Snowball.  We tried this one year before and didn't have near as good of results as this year.  (We only had to make the cake TWICE this year.)

 Are you wondering what everyone else was doing while we were creating this delectable masterpiece?  They were having fun!!

 Ty and Tayte were fishing.

 There was washer throwing.

 Tanner decided to whittle us all Christmas presents.  Talk about last minute. 

But dinner was enjoyed by all! 

(Yes.  My older brother wears camo and packs heat to family functions.  ARGH.)

 And then we ripped into the gifts piled up around Mom's tree.
She was apparently very excited (or maybe frightened) about these oven mitts. 

 You wanna come next year?  You can be in charge of the compote!!