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:

• How Germans do an epic foodie Christmas
• Foodie Christmas present ideas

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.

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Week’s menu for December: number 1

“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:

• sort of Cypriot pasticcio
• sort of Greek salad

Monday evening poultry:

• duck in cola with
• orange carrots and
• pak choi

OR

• mulled wine-soaked slow-cooked chicken with
• best ever baked potatoes in their jackets and
• a green salad

Tuesday evening:

• leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening meat:

• roast veal with
• celeriac and
• Brussels sprouts with apple

Christmas day menu:

• lunch: smoked salmon with cucumber salad and soda bread

OR

• lunch: with the Chief Correspondent’s Preferred Cucumber Salad
• dinner: beef Wellington with Charismatic Christmas brussels sprouts and dry stone wall potatoes

OR

• dinner: Christmasy chicken with a raisin and vermouth sauce; carrot and coriander salad; rice; shredded dressed baby gem

• pud: Cartmel sticky toffee pudding… OR vanilla ice cream with dates and brandy

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

• Pink Gin

OR

• Terrific tangerine fizz cocktail

Friday evening fish:

• pronto prawns with fennel and chickpeas

OR

• sea bass fillets on a bed of chorizo and giant butter beans, deglazed with vermouth

Saturday lunch:

• vitello tonnato

OR

• Christmasy chicken salad with avocado and dried berries

FOLLOWED BY

• Nutella squidges

OR

• Smart Smartie Soufflé

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Week’s menu for December: number 2

“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:

• Smoked salmon – and many ideas for leftovers

OR

• An Astounding Spinach and Blue Cheese Soufflé-omelette

OR

• cauliflower soup with pesto and truffle oil

OR

• meat pie with history and festive spiced winter vegetable ferment

AND

• Two kinds of people molasses cookies

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:

• Gammon…. and all the trimmings
• warming, comforting, creamy, carrots with ricotta and spices

OR

• A very English, comfort food lasagne

Tuesday evening:

• leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening poultry:

• Partridge with
• Titanic salad

Thursday evening dinner party:

• starter: instant leek tart with galangal

OR

• starter: spanakopita Christmas presents
• main course: mulled wine chicken with perfect baked potatoes in their jackets
• pudding: Vin Santo and biscotti

OR

• pudding: Feli’s fabulous filled Bratäpfel for St Nikolaus

WITH COFFEE

• Sweetmeat: lovechild between Ferrero Rochas and Nutella

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

• The ten best champagne cocktails
• Cheesy, blushing biscuits

Friday evening fish:

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

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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

• Minty winter salad and peas, ham and feta…and leftover turkey if you have any…

OR

• Domini’s luscious lemon pickle chicken and avocado salad

FOLLOWED BY

• sweet Christmas pie

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

• manful braised celery with gammon and a middle-eastern saffron sauce

Wednesday evening poultry:

• chicken with spinach, with
• dal makhani and
• crushed lemony potatoes

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

• pudding: Mont Blanc look-alike mascarpone mousse with caramelised fruit inspired by Davide Oldani

Thank God it’s Friday cocktail:

• maca martini

OR

• Pink Delilah cocktail of rhubarb gin and blood orange liqueur

WITH

• Spanish almonds with cranberries

Friday evening fish:

• Popeye’s slightly Brazilian spinach and salmon pie

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Week’s menu for December: number 4

“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:

• Morbier and duck toasted sandwich

OR

• Creamy leek and apple gratin – comfort food incarnate with pork sausages

FOLLOWED BY

• Mince pies with orange cream cheese and truly booziful brandy butter

OR

• Speculaas

Sunday supper:

• herb and cranberry sausage loaf with
• Christmasy, starry, red cabbage

OR

• Snow White’s winter cabbage salad

Monday evening meat:

• Polish Bigos

OR

• Tak Tak carpaccio of beef
• Bratkartoffeln
• Boy George’s mushroom and watercress or rocket salad

Tuesday evening:

• Leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening poultry:

• Chief Taster’s maple syrup with mustard chicken
• medley of artichoke hearts, peas and leeks

OR

• Paul McCartney’s really rather good simple salad

Thursday evening dinner party:

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

OR

• starter: masterful sformatino di ricotta with black truffle sauce
• main course: baked sea bream with middle eastern carrots and mild patatas bravas
• pudding:  crêpes Suzette

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

• perfect Christmas cocktail

OR

• Richard Ashton’s Trinity cocktail

….. and to nibble at with it:

• dates and blue cheese wrapped in bacon

Friday evening fish:

• whisky and ginger salmon
• kalettes with cranberries and walnuts

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