side dish

There is enough craziness going on around Christmas, between holiday parties, decorating, buying gifts, and the actual Christmas day events, you don’t need cooking an elaborate meal for a half dozen people, or less, to be one of them.

If you will be having a houseful of guests, we recommend people sharing the cooking load. As host you have enough to do with cleaning and prepping – cooking shouldn’t all on you if you can avoid it. (If you’re guests are from out of town, that’s a slightly different story.)

However, we’ve seen far too many times where there is 1,001 things going on, and someone is trying to cook an elaborate seven plus course meal for their family of four. It’s just tiring, and then you can’t enjoy yourself.

So instead, consider the following meal plan to keep things easy, so you can enjoy the whole of your day.

Main Course

A traditional Christmas dinner includes either Ham or (Smoked) Turkey. Since Thanksgiving was just a few weeks ago (for those in the United States), we opt for a Christmas Ham.

The nice thing is most hams are a set it and forget it for cooking. Very little prep work, and just adding a glaze at the end. We’ll start ours a little after breakfast, and it will be ready for lunch. And to make cutting easier, we using go with a spiral cut ham, which is half or more cut for you, to make it even easier than other types of ham.

Side Dishes

I like to vary the amount of side dishes based upon the number of people I’m having. The more people, the more variety, but hopefully someone can help cook some of them. We usually have 2 to 3 side dishes for six or fewer people.

Homemade Macaroni and Cheese is something that works if you’re oven is big enough. It typically needs to cook at or near the same temperature as the ham. Slide it on a different rack, and you’ve got two things cooking at once, and this is way better than mac out of a box!

Sweet Carrots – will easily serve up to 6 people, and gives you some color. With the added sugar, its more like a candy than a vegetable.

My wife likes her father’s Cornbread for Christmas, and it works well. It’s easy to cook, and serves 8. So it’s just enough if you want a little left over for the next day, or double the ingredients if you have a lot of people coming.

Option 2 for Bread: Now I prefer Apple Muffins. It makes more, and takes longer however. This means I get some the next day or two for breakfast, which I like, but its a lot more prep – so it may not be the best option for a simple Christmas meal.

Dessert

There are two ideas when it comes to desserts for the holidays. First is to have some something like a cake or pie, which you each at one time. Two simple ideas would be an Apple Dump Cake or a Cherry Torte. Both of these are extremely fast to prepare, and taste delicious.

The second idea is to have a snacky type of dessert which can be munched on throughout the day, like a cookie. We recently made Shortbread Cookies which were a hit. They’re small and easy to snack on, regardless of the size that will be at your house.

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