Christmas Meals

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!

Since 2008 I have cooked Christmas day lunch (with help from my husband).  Also, I have always made a half breakfast casserole for the hubby and I to enjoy.  This year I planned on making the two usual meals and I made chili for Christmas Eve!

The chili was a hit!  We only had one small bowl left by the end of the night (leave a comment if you want the recipe).  The breakfast casserole is hard to mess up and gone within a couple days.  And for lunch, ham is always included as well as deviled eggs... the rest has varied.  This year my menu included:

ham

deviled eggs

mashed potatoes

dressing

veg-all casserole

green beans

rolls

After enjoying the Christmas Eve chili... my prep work began.  The breakfast casserole is mostly made the night before.  Here's me preparing the dish (in my new Christmas pjs):

Once the breakfast casserole was done, I tried to prep for lunch as much as possible... setting aside ingredients, the dish to cook it in, and attempting to prioritize:

Every year we have gotten an Apple Lane Farms ham... but this year we strayed and got a ham from Sam's. It tasted fine, but not as good as Apple Lane Farms. Next year we'll spend the extra to get the delicious, not just mediocre, ham. The deviled eggs were good as usual. The mashed potatoes... well, they ended up cooking too much and were dry and a little disappointing.  But I could eat a plain potato, so I liked it.  The dressing... was dry.  I've never been a big fan of dressing but I thought I'd try it.  I won't try it again and we threw it away that night because we knew the left-overs would not be eaten.  The veg-all casserole was delicious!  I may have to make it every year.  And I thought since we were having veg-all casserole we could have plain green beans instead of green bean casserole.  The green beans were ok.

Everything was a little crazier this year with a 6 month old.  While we were really getting into the cooking Cooper decided he didn't want to nap.  We'd tried for a little while to let him figure it out on his own.  After we realized it wasn't going to happen on his own, I went up there and patted him till he fell asleep.  Crazy boy was exhausted... just fighting it.

Overall, Christmas was great and everyone left full.  We survived our first Christmas with a kid!  I can't wait till he can enjoy all the magic Christmas brings!