It’s Christmas Day now! Last night we enjoyed a lovely seven fish family dinner today. Traditionally, we go over my brother and sister-in-laws, but this year with COVID we stayed home. These days, we are still be extra careful, especially since transmissions have risen, even amongst families. We ate really early today since my daughter had to work, so I was up very early. Once dinner was prepared and finished, I sat down, fell asleep, and woke up three hours later. Oh My!

Well, I had enough energy to challenge myself to bake two loaf breads and set up for a Facebook Live video First, I’ll talk about our Christmas Eve dinner, baking loaves and then our Christmas Day dinner. What was on the Christmas Eve menu:

Seven Fishes: This is a tradition in my husband’s family.

For the seven fishes I put together, muscles dijonnaise, scallops wrapped in bacon, shrimp, lobster, squid, haddock, and salmon. We also had Turner’s favorite stuffed clams and oysters Rockefeller. I made a red sauce for the lobster pieces, salted the salmon, steamed the muscles, baked the scallops wrapped in bacon, served shrimp cocktail with homemade dipping sauce, fried calamari, and baked haddock. A little something for everyone. My daughter and I can’t eat shellfish since we are allergic, so the lobster and the shrimp were for my husband. I didn’t realize until today that my younger son likes lobster. My husband doesn’t like salmon, so the more for me, my son, and my daughter. My daughter thinks she’s allergic to anything that has a shell because she had a bad reaction to clam chowder when she was little, so she a little apprehensive to eating the stuffed clams, oyster’s Rockefeller. The only one who eats the muscles are me, so I have them for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. This isn’t something my brother and sister-in-law usually have, so it was a treat for me to cook what we all enjoy. I cooked the angle hair pasta ahead of time, and also simmered cream with basil for the pasta. We started with a caesar salad and went from there. Dessert was simple and easy (fresh strawberries, kiwis, and small vanilla cupcakes. I bought some lemon bars from one of my favorite stores (Trader Joe’s). Anything here, that shows a link will have a recipe.

After my long needed nap, I ran a Facebook Live session and talked about The Lavender Farm in Harwich, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I use this lavender, hibiscus mix to make lavender hibiscus lemonade. The recipe is right on the package. The first time I made it, it was really strong, so I diluted it a little more than the package says. The second time I used my judgement and my own taste to make it the way I wanted. I also added sliced orange pieces to make it festive looking. It’s also a great addition to a white wine or seltzer water with an extra slice of lemon, lime or orange. Then, I baked a cranberry walnut bread I haven’t made in years, and my daughter came in just in time to help me with the banana bread recipe.

The cranberry bread recipe I lost. It was in a metal container I brought over from our apartment to our house in 1993. When we had our kitchen remodeled, I put some boxes down in the basement and completely forgot where the container was. I found it recently, and was so excited because it has recipes from when I was first on my own and collected over the years. The bread recipe was from the Boston Globe Magazine – this dates back a while! It was listed under Home For The Holidays. The back of the receipt page talks about tea parties they used to have at the Harborview Lounge in the Boston Harbor Hotel every Sunday afternoon in the month of December. The recipe is worn, has food stains all over it, and it ripped on one side. It also has listed “Martha Starke’s family recipe). Maybe she was the real Martha Stewart of those days. I wonder if she is still alive. I tried to Google it, to no avail, nothing was listed.

If you’ve gotten to the bottom of this post and haven’t seen any links to the recipes, I am still working on them. Thank you for visiting. If you have subscribed, you will get a notification when the recipe is posted.