And now it’s time for “Hey, what are you making for Christmas?”  In my head, that had a fun jingle that went along with it.

We’re hosting Christmas Eve for my family this year and even though my house is not even close to clean (Oh that dust bunny in the hallway?  Don’t mind him, he’s the closest thing we have to a pet.), I’m going to focus on other things instead.  Like food!

We’re serving this goat cheese and beet salad (it’s a favorite of my mom’s), this lemon olive oil cake (with Sweet Cow vanilla ice cream, of course), fresh bread (thanks, Whole Foods), this Christmasy Kir (cocktails are a must) and most importantly, beef stew!  Which we actually made last night, so it’s currently hanging out in our fridge getting extra tasty.  You know how stews love to do that.

Don’t you just love that photo filter that’s created when the lens of your phone camera is dirty?…

There’s homebrewed nut brown ale in there!  Which I cooked together with caramelized onions and I thought the smell was going to kill me, it was so good.  And then Joey tasted the beef and proceeded to lay on the floor and tell me he’d died and gone to heaven.  We’re just a tad dramatic over here.

We’re bringing Caesar salad (except with real croutons, not weird, scare-everyone-away chickpea croutons) and buttermilk biscuits to my father-in-law’s on Christmas day.  Oh and my mom and I had a phone conference last night to discuss her Christmas dinner menu and we settled on root beer ham, mashed potatoes, cornbread stuffing, sautéed green beans and chocolate cream pie.  Oh my god.

What are you making?!  Tell me, I wanna drool over it know!