Our Holiday Menus

The holidays are full of fun, frolic, and potentially fright if you’re dealing with stressful travel or social situations. Whatever that happens in the next two weeks, there’s plenty of good food to be had. I’d like to know how you’re celebrating Christmas and New Year -- what you’re eating and drinking, specifically. It doesn’t have to be pure, 100% Vietnamese food.

In fact, that’s never how my family has celebrated Christmas. We’re Catholic so we go to mass on Christmas Eve and then come home, take off our nicey church clothes, and eat for a few hours. In Vietnam, we attended midnight mass and went home for Reveillon, the French term for a holiday dinner. We’d open our gifts when the clock struck twelve that evening. Once we arrived in the U.S., we got lazy and went to mass earlier, but never gave up the gift opening time. We actually moved it up!

As a kid, my friends thought that I cheated by not waiting until morning to rip into the wrapped gifts. They also didn’t understand why we made dozens of yule log cakes (buche de Noel cake) to gift to friends, family and neighbors. On Christmas Eve, we had roast goose or turkey with stuffing featuring  sticky rice and chestnut. It was and continues to be a delectable mash-up of wonderful food.

For many years I made Christmas Eve dinner for my parents but next Monday, my mother and I are doing it together. I’m also going to enlist my nieces and nephews, who are old enough to handle knives well. Mom is roasting Cornish game hens stuffed with the aforementioned dressing with a little cognac in there for good measure. (As always, my sister Tasha will seek out the crusty bits of rice for herself.) My mother will also make a creamy corn and shiitake mushroom soup, our modern take on the Chinese canned cream corn soup.

As for me, I’m in charge of the deep-fried cha gio imperial rolls. We’re in Dungeness crab season where I live so fresh crab meat will be mixed into the shrimp-pork-jicama-and-cellophane noodle filling. Lots of fresh lettuce and Vietnamese herbs and nuoc cham sort of make cha gio our salad course. We’ll also roast cauliflower because it's simple and something tasty that I picked up this year. My mother loves sweet potatoes so I’ll have to figure something out for them. We need a green vegetable so it’ll be green beans. For dessert? Assorted cookies and small pastries that I’ve baked and whatever that my mom has around that she wants to tantalize us with. Here's a recap of our menu:

Creamy Corn and Shiitake Mushroom Soup
Cha Gio Imperial Rolls with Lettuce, Fresh Herbs and Nuoc Cham
Roasted Cauliflower with Indian Spices
A Sweet Potato Something (perhaps with Ginger and Tangerine Peel)
Stir-fried Green Beans
Roasted Cornish Game Hens with Sticky Rice and Chestnut Stuffing

Fresh Fruit
Assorted Homemade Sweets

My father will have lots of wine flowing to make sure we sleep well on December 24.

What will you be feasting on?

Let us all know. It can be as simple as posting your menu as a comment below. Add a link to a photo, if you want to make our mouths water more! Or email me a photo of your holiday spread and I’ll post it here.

Comments

[Simon Bao]

Andrea, for this year's Christmas celebration we won't have anything resembling a Vietnamese feast, nor even many Vietnamese dishes. (This Christmas Eve, we're doing a kind of Julbord, a Christmas smorgasbord.) But, two years ago my housemates asked me to come up with the Christmas Eve menu, and to slap a Vietnamese spin on it. Not easy, as I grew up without any Christmas traditions and no matter how often I ask around, I seldom learn of any traditions among other Viets.

Friends and colleagues and neighbors here, however, hold a Christmas Eve "Feast of Seven Fishes," an all-seafood feast that's observed by some Italians and also by a lot of Italian Americans in Philadelphia and elsewhere. The specific dishes that are served vary from family to family, so we felt comfortable in coming up with our own selection of dishes as well.

Our feast started with a soup course, and it was "inspired" by Canh Sa Lach Soan. Except I used a shrimp stock, and replaced the actual shrimp with tiny bay scallops and some tautog (wreckfish). Tautog live by eating crabs and shellfish and so have a nice compatible flavor. Xup mang cua, crab and asparagus soup would have been a good choice also, except we'd eaten that often enough and I wanted something different.

Next was a small plates course, with Chao Tom (shrimp on sugarcane) and Cha Cua (baby crabcakes) with salad, and also mussels and clams cooked in a lemongrass broth.

The entrees course, served with rice, was a boneless version of Ca Chien Sot Ca (fried black sea bass with hot/sweet/spicy tomato sauce), a boneless Ca Kho ("claypot" striped bass in an orange-caramel sauce), and a large mixed veggie saute with seared sea scallops on top. With the exception of the shrimp, it was all very local seafoods.

The meal was missing some squid, obviously, but we did get in 7 dishes, and more than 7 kinds of seafood. Dessert was just some citrus fruit to hold everyone over till after Midnight Mass when the *real* desserts get served.

I don't know that there's ever been a Vietnamese Feast of Seven Fishes, I don't know what an Italian American would make of the meal, but it struck me as something that makes good sense for Christmas Eve. Seafood is light enough that no one slips into a coma during the first carol at Midnight Mass. And there is a huge Viet repertoire of seafood dishes that could be assembled together as a Feast of Seven Fishes. It was quite fun and we've done iterations of it since, and I think it's now established as a Traditional Option for Christmas. But a word of caution, any such Feast requires a team approach. Never try such a thing on one's own. (Never!) :-)

[Andrea Nguyen]

Simon, you make me laughing and feel hungry at the same time...

[Simon Bao]

Andrea, a few other *emerging* traditions I can share with you. Not well-established yet, but perhaps on their way...

* Holiday Quickbreads: These started with my godbrother making them and then giving them to us and also giving them to Vietnamese in the neighborhood. Then it slowly transformed into people asking him to make extra loaves so they could also pass them around, take them to parties, surprise friends. The small mini-loaves. Sweet quickbreads with fruits and nuts aren't unusual in the USA, but as we don't have anything quite like them, these little quickbreads have been very popular. Banana-walnut, banana-coconut, orange-cranberry, apricot and almond, almost any of them *except* pumpkin and spices. Which is reviled, mostly. Now, I make them, and I'm asked to make more. And friends who stop by to pick up their "order" are sullen and disappointed if the mini-loaves aren't already in plastic wrap and then done up like presents, in festive holiday wrapping paper with ribbons and bows. One can buy these quickbreads in supermarkets and bakeries but not one ever seems to. People seem to want them "home-made" and "gift-wrapped." :-) Try the banana-coconut one sometime, it's the "must have loaf" of all of them.

* Christmas Peas, also known as The Three Wise Peas: I don't know who started making this at Christmas, or who introduced it to Viets here. I know I was already eating it 10-15 years ago but now it shows up in lots of homes, at dinners or even at parties. It's simply 3 peas: sweet peas, snap peas, and snow peas, cooked and dressed with butter in which you've cooked off some mushrooms, shallots and tiny diamonds of sweet red pepper. Every other dish on the table at a Christmas party might be pure Saigon or Danang, but I'm no longer surprised to see Christmas Peas sitting among those other dishes. And I never see any Viets cook Three Peas at any other time, only Christmas.

* The Famous "Only One Meat" Issue: You're serving your household only one meat dish at Christmas Eve, but as you know, when Viets celebrate and feast we tend not to offer Only One Meat. A real feast, that requires seafoods and pork and duck and maybe chicken, beef is lovely, veal for special occasions, even goat if you know where to order it. But Only One Meat? We use to go through that with my godbrother who'd want to present us with American style holiday meals - but those feasts come with Only One Meat. It's a Big Meat, it's typically a large and expensive roast, but still... a feast with Only One Meat. Thanksgiving with just a turkey, Christmas Eve with only a ham, Christmas Day with a rib roast, no other meats - and Easter with a leg of lamb. Lovely meals with lots of tasty side dishes, in some eyes, but other eyes kept focusing on the fact that there was "Only One Meat." That's when we drove him nuts suggesting a turkey AND a ham, a rib roast AND some roast pork, a leg of lamb and also some LeeDoe Buhds. ("Little birds", also known as Cornish Game Hens.) When he said there was no room in the oven for all that roasting, I went out and bought him a counter-top rotisserie cooker, which he also did not have any room for. And gave him a rib roast to go with it. One year, one of us persuaded him to serve us each our *own* individual, personal, whole roasted LeeDoe Buhd... in addition to the big ham. :-)

[Laurent]

Hey Andrea,

your reveillon menu looks delicious. Ours will be typically French: a way of staying close to home even when far away. We will eat foie gras as an appetizer (I tried Thomas Keller's "au torchon" recipe this year and hopefully it will taste good) followed by guinea fowl stuffed with an herb butter and accompanied with cauliflower gratin (a coincidence we both thought about serving poultry and cauliflower in the same meal). My friend Bertrand will cook Gruyere gougeres as an amuse and marquise au chocolat for the dessert.

Although food will be typically French, the guests will be as diverse as it gets since the "cooks'" wives are Romanian and Japanese, respectively.

On another note, I bought your book a couple of months ago and had only flipped through it very quickly. It's only today that I read the introduction that I found very moving. I fully agree that cooking is a way of keeping one's culture alive and pass it on to the next generation. I haven't had a chance to test a recipe yet but I might try the Bun Cha or Bahn Mi rather sooner than later.

Happy holidays.

[Andrea Nguyen]

Simon, I don't believe you about the 3 wise peas. When did you start seeing them in Philly? I'm going to have to check out your Viet food myth.

Laurent, ooooh, foie gras au torchon. That is quite a coincidence with the cauliflower and fowl. It is the season for vegetables like cauliflower. I added a romanesco to thrill the kids, who thought they were eating little Christmas trees. Thank you for your comments about the book. Heritage and culture are very important for me when it comes to food.

Hope you both had great holidays.

[Cynde]

My family had always celebrated Christmas Eve and opening presents by midnight. And of course, lots of food. This year, we had Chicken Salad (Goi Ga), Cha Gio, Com Chin, Mi Xao, Hu Thiu Xao, Chicken curry soup (Ga Care) eat with french bread, and for desert we had che (three kinds of beans). For enterntainment, the adults gamble and drank Martell....while the kids enjoying opening their presents.

I will be marrying a filipino guy soon and, I have told myself not to lose my culture and tradition. It so important to keep that whether it is food receipes or valuable things, as long you can pass it down to other generation. Thanks for sharing.

Since I don't know how to cook pho ga, I'm going to compare your receipe with my sister's receipe. Hope it turns out okay.

[Andrea Nguyen]

Cynde, nice Christmas Eve menu! That's so funny that your family opened gifts early too. Glad to know that ours was in good company.

The only gambling that happened at our house on Monday night was a fierce game of Monopoly.

Try out the pho ga and see what happens. You can do it! Once you get the knack for it, come up with your personal version.