Do any of you have some Holiday foods included in your typical menu that are nontraditional? I suppose the ideas my husband and I are thinking of aren't necessarily nontraditional all around so much as just unusual to our area and eclectic. It seems everyone around here is just having the typical ham and sides. I was thinking of taking a little inspiration from the Italian Feast of Seven Fishes and going seafood-related with it .
my parents and I usually go out to eat on the holiday, which we normally eat things we don't usually eat on our regular daily basis. My parents are heavy on holiday tradition, which they would order loster, duck, chicken, and some fish. We go to one of the nearby Chinese restaurants for dinner on the holiday, which has becomes one of our favorite places to go.
The only non-traditional food I eat around the holidays is seafood cornbread dressing. It's a Southern dish that includes the usual dressing 'stuff' - celery, onion, cornbread - but the meat portion is shrimp and/or craw fish. If you crave seafood, you would gobble this dish right up.
I wouldn't call it unusual, but it's certainly unconventional, by which I'm pertaining to a salmon casserole that is always served during our holiday meals. I'm not sure how the tradition got started, but there probably wasn't that much reason behind it. I imagine the thought process being that it was a very good dish and could satisfy a lot with minimal effort since it was pretty much just baked / left in the oven and forgotten until it's done. It's become one of my favorite dishes to look forward to every holiday season.
I have an Aunt that using cooks chillins , uha in which I don't eat , but she tend to think that they go with the holiday menu. I myself like to cook catfish and sometime gumbo. My reason is on Christmas I have a lot of family come home verses thanksgiving, so I tend to stretch my food more on Christmas cooking gumbo and catfish.
I almost always do stuffed mushrooms for Christmas Eve, and this year I think I'm going to do whole artichokes. I always like to include a few things that are super good and a little more work as the things that sort of put the meal a notch above anything else for the year. We tend to do "holiday" meals all year round, because, generally, they are actually easy and, like others have said, feed a lot of people. I'm pretty good for a whole turkey even not on Thanksgiving, and roasts at least twice a month during the winter. Ham is also in my regular rotation when I find it on sale. If I do ham, I always do grits casserole, another southern dish that might not be part of a regular menu.
