Recipes and Menus for December

Saucy Dressings aims to complete this post – four weeks’ menus and recipes, plus a few spare by the end of 2018.

Every year an additional week’s menu, with the links to the individual recipes, is added.

For food in season in December, follow this link.

For music to listen to while cooking in December, follow this link.

You might also be interested in these posts:

This featured image is Druids Bringing In The Mistletoe by Edward Atkinson Hornel –  on show at the British Museum’s exhibition on the Celts in 2015.


Week’s menu for December: number 1

Recipes and menus for December
….a time for fires….

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time of home”

Edith Sitwell

This month is all about Christmas…. and making it as easy and stress-free as possible. In between cooking sessions why not relax and treat yourself to the sparkling winter ballet, A Winter’s Tale, with the wonderful Royal Opera House performance with Sarah Lamb and Edward Watson. You can buy the whole ballet direct from Amazon, and you can see excerpts in the clip at the bottom of this post.

Sunday supper:

Monday evening poultry:

OR

Tuesday evening:

  • leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening meat:

Christmas day menu:

OR

OR

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

OR

Friday evening fish:

OR

Saturday lunch:

OR

FOLLOWED BY

OR


Week’s menu for December: number 2

Recipes and menus for December
Seen at the Rijksmuseum – ‘Enjoying the Ice near a Town’ by Hendrick Avercamp

“It is now December, and hee that walkes the streets, shall find durt on his shooes, Except hee goe all in bootes…Now plums and spice, Sugar and Honey, square it among pies and broth.”

Nicholas Breton, Fantasticks: Serving for a Perpetual Prognostication, 1626

Saturday lunch:

OR

OR

OR

AND

Sunday supper:

  • Two versions of chilli con carne – one with mince and the other with stewing steak – and a whole selection of accompaniments involving avocados, cabbage salads, and tomato salsa

Monday evening meat:

OR

Tuesday evening:

  • leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening poultry:

Thursday evening dinner party:

OR

OR

WITH COFFEE

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

Friday evening fish:

  • Dover sole with
  • rösti and
  • Italian marinated peppers – all covered in the Dover sole recipe

Week’s menu for December: number 3

“For some the best hour will come with the walk homewards in a gathering dusk, the winter sunset aflame in the west, and, as Dorothy Wordsworth put it, ‘the country very solemn in the last hour of twilight; it calls home the heart to quietness”

Agnes Jekyll, Kitchen Essays

Saturday lunch:

  • quick Christmas snack (brie with cranberry sauce and new baked bread)

OR

OR

FOLLOWED BY

Sunday evening pasta:

  • my daughter’s morel, vermouth and chicken liver sauce for pasta

Monday evening meat:

  • cranberry and stilton-stuffed fillet of beef

OR

Wednesday evening poultry:

Thursday dinner party:

  • with drinks: carpaccio of octopus with tapenade
  • starter: polenta, gorgonzola, chutney
  • main course: pork fillet alla Valtellinese with
  • vegetables: roasted carrots and parsnips with pomegranate and orange glaze and kale-ettes
  • pudding: Poor knight’s pudding

OR

Thank God it’s Friday cocktail:

  • maca martini

OR

WITH

  • Spanish almonds with cranberries

Friday evening fish:


Week’s menu for December: number 4

recipes and menus for December

“If turkey is so damned exciting why do we eat it but once a year?

Those vast swathes of white arid flesh, the very definition of dreary dyspepsia, are things to endure rather than enjoy.

But, like Lear raging against the storm, my words are lost in the torrents of seasonal sentiment.”

Tom Parker Bowles

Saturday lunch:

OR

FOLLOWED BY

OR

  • Speculaas

Sunday supper:

OR

Monday evening meat:

  • Polish Bigos

OR

Tuesday evening:

  • Leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening poultry:

OR

Thursday evening dinner party:

  • with drinks: special successful walnuts
  • starter: twice-baked cheese soufflé

OR

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

  • perfect Christmas cocktail

OR

….. and to nibble at with it:

Friday evening fish: