Bizarre Holiday Food Traditions

[lady_disdain]

I use a plain white sauce.

[Sharnita]

I use a plain white sauce.

made of what?

[buvezdevin]

I use a plain white sauce.

made of what?

A plain white sauce is usually flour, butter, milk and maybe salt.  You cook the flour a bit in melted butter, add milk and cook to thicken.  Used to be very standard, and with variations and additions, is a base for homemade Mac n Cheese among other very common dishes - the cans of soup recipes came along in many cases as modifications to dishes which originally used white sauce.

[elephantschild]

We always have the log o'cranberry sauce. DH serves it that way because it drives his mom nuts. (I don't eat it; I don't care.)

Here's another one. MIL always insists there be a platter of prunes and apricots at Christmas dinners. No one eats them. DH says no one ever has. But they MUST be there. OK, then.

It's like there MUST be a butter lamb at Easter. We don't argue with her, we just let her bring it.

[oz diva]

Slightly off topic, as it's not my holiday tradition, but the thought of using cream of vegetable soup as a base for a casserole/salad is absolutely bizzare for me (and not in a good way) cream of whatever soup is served as soup in my house. Crazy, but there you go. 

what would be a sane base for a casserole in your opinion?

Casserole is made from braised meat and usually tomato, stock and wine with vegetables added eg
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/1104/hearty+beef+casserole

[Luci45]

I use a plain white sauce.

made of what?

A plain white sauce is usually flour, butter, milk and maybe salt.  You cook the flour a bit in melted butter, add milk and cook to thicken.  Used to be very standard, and with variations and additions, is a base for homemade Mac n Cheese among other very common dishes - the cans of soup recipes came along in many cases as modifications to dishes which originally used white sauce.

Exactly! I sometimes make the white sauce, add mushrooms and onion to get a substitute for the cream of musroom soup. The canned stuff has too much salt - and I thought that even as a kid, but ate it anyway.

[Bijou]

This is an expanded white sauce.
Lightly caramelize some chopped onions and a little garlic powder in some butter.  Add some paprika and cook for about 30 seconds to get the aroma, then add some flour and stir to make a roux.  Add some canned chicken broth and when it thickens up a bit, add some Julianne cut sun dried tomatoes (the ones that are not real dry and hard), then sprinkle in some shredded cheddar cheese and add a little half and half just to make it creamy (you could use milk).  I have it over a nuked potato or maybe some scrambled eggs.  My favorite!

[Sharnita]

This is an expanded white sauce.
Lightly caramelize some chopped onions and a little garlic powder in some butter.  Add some paprika and cook for about 30 seconds to get the aroma, then add some flour and stir to make a roux.  Add some canned chicken broth and when it thickens up a bit, add some Julianne cut sun dried tomatoes (the ones that are not real dry and hard), then sprinkle in some shredded cheddar cheese and add a little half and half just to make it creamy (you could use milk).  I have it over a nuked potato or maybe some scrambled eggs.  My favorite!

Some of that sounds a lot like the ingrediants in a cream soup, which is why I am a bit confused ove why cream soup seems so strange.

[buvezdevin]

I think it is the difference, for some, of a canned cream soup, condensed or not, which often as thickeners, preservatives, and usually has a lot of sodium, vs. A home made cream sauce or soup.

I prefer to make things myself, in part to have to my preference, in part to "know" ingredients.  That said, sure, I will leverage some commercially available options, and did so a lot more often before I worked from home, when cooking often needed to be done in a shorter period.

[EmmaJ.]

The green bean casserole is a must-have at our family potluck Thanksgiving dinners.  I chose to bring it a couple years ago and made it with fresh green beans, a homemade white stock with fresh mushrooms, and home-fried onion rings.

No one would touch it.  I got the stink-eye from everyone.  It was different. 

Lesson learned - do not mess with tradition!

[JeanFromBNA]

We had the relish tray too. Sweet gerkins, sour gerkins, black olives, green olives and slices of bread and butter pickles.

But i never could figure out what it was for. My grandmother would slap me in the face if I ate the little things off it and tell me it "wasn't for snacking" but I swear that's what the adults did too. (and my male cousins, who were allowed to 'snack")

I miss the relish tray because my mom always made it and it was so pretty, but even when i was grown I looked, i didn't touch.

Are you saying that your grandmother expected the relish tray to remain uneaten? 

[baglady]

I make green bean casserole, but I insist on fresh green beans -- no canned or frozen. But yes, I use cream of mushroom soup and canned French-fried onions. I only make it for Thanksgiving and the occasional Christmas.

I know some people consider the sweet potato-marshmallow thing an abomination, but I love it, so I make it... once a year. And I make a small enough batch that it feeds those of us who like it, and nobody who dislikes it is obligated to have any!

The one I don't get is potatoes when there's stuffing. In my world, one hot starch per meal is enough (bread doesn't count). I do a semi-potluck Thanksgiving with friends; this year J. said he'd make the stuffing. T., who was doing the turkey, said, "OK, then I'll just do the turkey and gravy," then brought not only the turkey but another batch of stuffing and a HUGE batch of mashed potatoes.

The stuffings were very different (J's was made with wild rice, T's with bread), and I liked them both, but I didn't even get to the taters -- I bagged my limit on starches with the stuffings!

[StarDrifter]

Does anyone else remember the traditional holiday Swiss Colony Beef Log?

Poundcake, I may have to kill you. I just spent $17 on iTunes, downloading Mr Hankey's Christmas Classics (the South Park Christmas Album - not for the faint hearted. Very explicit, most of the songs have been rewritten South Park style), but why is that poundcake's fault?

One of the songs is Eric Cartman singing about a Swiss Colony Beef Log, and how that's what Christmas is all about.

I'd never even *heard* of the thing until that song, and now I really want to try one!

But our family's bizarre food tradition is probably the sheer volume of seafood that we eat at Christmas - we have turkey and ham, etc, but we also have cod, salmon, prawns, crab etc. It's an Australian thing and I love spending Christmas afternoon with my brother, having races to see who can shuck their bucket of oysters quickest. I won last year, but that was kind of by default - Bro sliced his thumb open with his shucking knife and had to withdraw.

[felix]

I was born and raised in Belgium and moved here when I was 12.  Almost all the traditional Thanksgiving food is something I had never eaten before. I don't ever recall eating turkey, ham, or pumpkin pie.  We had mashed potatoes but we never put gravy on them.  I never had stuffing before but who can resist!! 

The most bizarre to me is sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green bean casserole - my mom insisted on everything being made from scratch and her green beans were sauteed in butter with onions.  Most of all, though, I do not understand the Jell-O mold.  I can almost understand the dessert Jell-O molds, but some are made with vegetables. 

Our food might be bizarre too though.  Our Christmas spread includes freshly steamed prawns, lobster, and crabs with homemade mayonnaise as the dip; homemade smoked salmon (with vodka) on toasted bread with parsley and onions, and champagne.  For Easter we have rabbit 

[buvezdevin]

Our food might be bizarre too though.  Our Christmas spread includes freshly steamed prawns, lobster, and crabs with homemade mayonnaise as the dip; homemade smoked salmon (with vodka) on toasted bread with parsley and onions, and champagne.  For Easter we have rabbit 

Well, Felix, I know it is rude to invite oneself to anything, but were your family to invite me to partake of your Christmas feast, I would be quite thrilled with your traditional spread.  I would probably feel otherwise re the Easter bunny as your family does it, though not in any way wishing that you should do other than enjoy.  I have had rabbit as a dish, and it was delectable, and I was a vegetarian for an unrelated period of time, but the Peter Rabbit images of my nostalgia would probably give me pause for that Easter dish, though as a current carnivore I would have difficulty explaining it.