Christmas Day - 5 stars

i'd like to start this post out by saying that i can't believe i didn't take pictures of our christmas dinner! what on earth?? i think the lemon drops that tony made must have been too strong. :-)

tony and i stayed home for christmas, and my parents came over to spend christmas day with us. we opened presents, and then proceeded to eat and drink. a lot. it was a blast. we also played a game called ticket to ride, the card game. it's fairly easy to pick up, but requires you to grasp a decent amount of strategy in order to win. my dad, who had never played before and grumbled about how poorly he was doing throughout the game, won. of course. he always wins. :)

my parents gave tony & i a new dish set for christmas. you may have noticed that the foul pastel-toned striped plates are no longer in the photographs, and we're using more rustic, ceramic square plates instead. we LOVE them. anyway, i did take pictures of the table setting, below. this was the first christmas dinner that i've hosted.





i made an antipasto platter for the appetizer. tony and i went to delaurenti's (at the pike place market) on christmas eve and basically ordered one of everything from their deli. it was FANTASTIC (and easy). tony made us lemon drop martinis to have with our antipasto platter. YUM!



for dinner, i made a large caesar salad (with bacon!) to start. for the main course, i made pancetta and gruyere stuffed potatoes (soy cheese in mine) and lobster stuffed beef tenderloin. i purchased this gigantic 8 lb tenderloin from costco for it - i have never purchased that much meat (or spent that amount of money on one cut of meat!) before. we only used 3 lbs of it - the other five went in the freezer. i did have intentions to serve roasted asparagus with it, but we decided that there would be more than enough food without it. i also was supposed to make a bearnaise sauce to go with the tenderloin, but in the interest of time (it was close to nine o'clock, i believe, before we ate christmas dinner!), i ended up skipping it.

everything was wonderful. the food, the company, the drinks... thank goodness my mom was there when i butterflied (for the first time) the tenderloin, stuffed it and tied it with twine. she did the majority of it for me, so now when i attempt it again, i'll know how to do it. i would have just sliced the tenderloin in half lengthwise (not cutting all the way through to other side though), but to butterfly it, she cut it into thirds (sort of) lengthwise. i won't bore you with too many details of this - mostly because i can't regurgitate them well yet. :-)

for dessert, my mom brought a chocolate torte with a blackberry coulis. mmmmmm, it was wonderful, rich, decadent, everything a chocolate torte is supposed to be.

what a wonderful, special christmas. :-)

(p.s. - if you would like the stuffed tenderloin recipe, please email me. it's really long, so i decided to leave it out. i'm posting the caesar dressing recipe in a later post, and i didn't have a recipe for the stuffed potatoes.)