The snow glistening through the Christmas lights and all snowmen leading to the hub of Christmas feast… how about adding to the fun ‘n’ frolic of the festival with excellent ideas for Christmas dinner party?
Give your dinner party a tinge of novelty with creative recipes from traditional dishes, and let the Christmas spirit linger, with your guests who would always remember the festive food, with ‘lip-licking’ delight.
Here are a few excellent ideas for Christmas dinner party:
•    Candy cane chicken : Bored of preparing your chicken, the conventional way? Try candy cane chicken with boneless, skinless chicken breasts, finely chopped baby spinach, feta cheese, crimini mushrooms, bell pepper, purple onion, garlic to spice up the variety in the dish. Onions, pepper and garlic go into sautéing, later joined by mushrooms and the other veggies, cooked till tender, and then mixed with feta. The chicken breasts are layered with feta cheese mix, rolled and placed into a casserole dish, which then goes into baking. A delicious dish for your Christmas dinner party which may make other mains ‘chicken’ out !
•    Earl grey breast of duck with citrus and honey : Sweet ‘n’ tangy the combination is mouth-watering, making the dish ‘quack’ its way up as one of the excellent ideas for Christmas dinner party. Boneless  duck(muscovy) breasts  are pricked(with toothpick) and  sprinkled with salt and pepper. The duck is first fried in a skillet, and then  roasted, while shallots go into the skillet with the remaining duck fat, for sautéing. For the sauce, a mix of orange juice, broth and tea leaves with the shallots are brought to a boil and allowed to simmer for some time. To the strained juice, add honey. Add the sauce to thinly sliced duck –meat and well,“Quack, quack!”
•    Prosciutto Pork Roast : Butter, parmesan cheese, Spanish jamon, minced garlic, dry white wine,  black pepper and fresh rosemary for the fresh herb flavor go into the making, into a food processor. The mixture is then inserted into the various slits made into the Prosciutto Pork roast, wrapped up in plastic food wrap and then refrigerated for a day. The prepared boneless pork loin roast goes into a preheated oven  for roasting. An excellent idea for Christmas dinner party especially when you feel you are poking into the trenches of traditional cookery, for something unique.
•    Roasted rosemary fillet of beef  with Pinot Noir sauce : To take a slight deviation from the customary Christmas dishes, make up your Christmas dinner party with ideas that would hold your guests in sway. Here are fillets of beef (oven-ready, tied center-cut fillet of beef, is rubbed with kosher salt and pepper and then seared); the mustard mixture of fresh rosemary leaves, Dijon mustard, is rubbed over the seared beef fillet(in olive oil). Once cooled, the fillet goes for roasting in the oven. For the pinot noir sauce, pinot noir or any dry red wine, minced shallots, tomato paste, rosemary sprigs, ground pepper, creamy polenta, reduced-sodium beef broth, sautéed kale, unsalted butter, are part of the ‘creation’. The sauce is made in a roasting pan by adding wine first, bringing it to a boil, and then the shallots; once cooked, rosemary sprigs and broth are added and brought to a boil. Once done the pan is removed, stirred in butter and seasoned with pepper.
•    Crispy salmon with lemon- brown butter sauce: An excellent idea for a Christmas dinner party would be to pick something from the cultural potpourri, so seafood for the occassion, which are more synonymous with the Italian culture of Christmas celebration . Here, salmon fillets seasoned with kosher salt, pepper  and brushed with soy sauce, is cooked in a skillet for a couple of minutes before transferring it to the oven for a 5 minute roasting. Lemon zest, thyme and ground pepper are added to heated  butter and stirred on low flame for a minute. Drizzle the sauce over each fillet and serve roasted tomatoes and sautéed broccoli.

Food is the soul of any party and the festive spirit gathers its energy from the flavors of the kitchen, and our excellent ideas for Christmas dinner party invigorates the party zeal, with a streak of creativity for a fulsome, flavorsome dinner.

Photo Courtesy : cookbookspecial.wordpress.com