A Time For Traditions Our Readers Offer Their Favorite Menus For The Holiday Season

Christmas Eve is one night of the year when I don’t have to wonder what to make for dinner.

For a good dozen years now, my menu has been the same: creamy clam chowder, cheese-filled spinach tortellini in a marinara sauce and black bread (homemade if I have time), all washed down with a hearty holiday ale.

I’m not sure how it started, but I know why I keep it up. The mixture of tastes and textures is somewhat odd, but satisfying. It’s easy; for those weeknight Christmas Eves preceded by a day at work, the chowder base and marinara can be prepared the previous night.

Above all, the combination of colors - the white chowder sprinkled with dill and sweet paprika, the green, tomato-sauced tortellini topped with Parmesan cheese - is the edible essence of Christmas itself.

Favorite family foods are among the most enduring of all the traditions associated with the holidays. When we asked, a couple dozen IN Food readers called our Cityline service to tell us about theirs.

Some are elegant.

For four decades, each Christmas Eve, Cheryl Martin’s father, Clarence Fode, has hosted a fresh Dungeness crab feed at the family farm in Lind, Wash.

“Even when he started, it was kind of a splurge,” says Martin, who remembers when the guest list included only her, her parents and three brothers. “He wouldn’t just get the little, 2-pound crabs, they had to be the big ones.

“We’ve grown to a family of 26, and all of us still get together. He enjoys having everyone come, and we look forward to it all year long.”

Some are simple.

When Diane Stepak was growing up in Texas, her father always made a vegetable oxtail soup on Christmas Eve, with warm bread. Today, Stepak skips the oxtail, but she still carries on the tradition.

“Whatever is around the kitchen that isn’t for the holiday meal goes into the soup,” she says. “You have this wonderful smell going through the house. You sit down, and everybody is excited about the next day, and it’s sort of a calming influence.”

All help define the holiday season, one kitchen at a time.

On Christmas Day, Doris Carlson makes “square meatballs” - her family’s name for breaded, deepfried venison. (Says Carlson, who hunts along with her husband and four sons: “I usually get my own deer.”)

That’s followed by a homemade fresh coconut cake. “It’s a lot of work, but they always expect it and love it and it’s all gone by the end of the day,” she says.

Many families follow ethnic customs. Shawna Taylor’s half-Italian mother makes her killer lasagna only once each year, on Christmas Eve. “The trick is not to get anywhere near her while she’s cooking it,” Taylor laughs.

Glory Gibford Grandinetti and her relatives devour an Italian feast featuring homemade ravioli, meatballs and a stuffed sirloin steak simmered in spaghetti sauce, called brasiolle.

Says Grandinetti: “My nephew saw a family on TV having turkey for Christmas and said, ‘Mom, why aren’t they having ravioli?”’

While you probably won’t see anyone on the tube sit down to a holiday dinner of lutefisk, that’s what Sue Collins’ Scandinavian parents serve up along with lefse (tortillalike potato flatbreads), lingonberries and homemade potato sausage.

Her father orders the dried fish from Seattle and “lutes” it himself in lye and water starting a couple of weeks before Christmas. “It’s got to be cooked right, or it’s kind of slimy, kind of mushy,” Collins says.

He bakes it now instead of boiling it, which tended to, well, aromatize the whole house. “But I never noticed that when I was a kid,” Collins says, “probably because I had my mind on what Santa was going to bring me.”

Fish is also featured in Czech-born Milena Robison’s Christmas Eve menu from her homeland, a tradition she traces to the folklore that the barnyard animals talk at midnight. “You can’t eat something that will be talking in a few hours,” she explains.

While meaty carp are specially bred for the occasion in Czechoslovakia, Robison settles for halibut or thickly sliced sole, dipped in flour, eggs and bread crumbs and fried. There’s also potato salad, canned cherries (to remind her of the cherries from her grandfather’s tree) and a dessert such as an apple strudel.

And in Wellpinit, Wash., seafood is at the center of Sara White’s holidays, since she married a member of the Tlingit tribe from Alaska whose family still fishes commercially there.

They have crab and clam chowder on Christmas Eve and salmon and halibut on Christmas Day. “People always say, ‘You don’t eat the traditional Christmas foods,”’ White says. “But my children don’t think it’s Christmas if we don’t have seafood.”

Following the standard turkey for Thanksgiving, David and Sherrie Hibbard got tired of doing it again at Christmas. So they decided to sample holiday food traditions from other cultures, starting with one of their favorites, Mexican.

Today, some 15 years later, they’ve tried the likes of Russian, French and Dutch, with Greek in the works for this year. “We’ve had a lot of fun with it,” Sherrie says. “When we did Mexican, we had a pinata, and with Dutch, it was wooden shoes.”

Sunny Chaney’s family enjoys their own ethnic tradition, one started by her grandfather, quite by accident, more than 60 years ago.

One Christmas Eve when he was first married, Chaney’s grandfather stayed out celebrating a bit too late before coming home to his wife, whom he had promised to take out to dinner. The only thing open by then was a Chinese place.

“Now, the whole family, wherever we are, we go out for Chinese food,” Chaney says.

Christmas food traditions aren’t always about dinner.

For more than 20 years, Irene Weil has served a puffy German pancake (also known as a “Dutch baby”) following Mass on Christmas morning. Mary Ann West of Chewelah furthers her festivities by making a similar recipe, using eggnog in place of milk, for the morning after Christmas Day.

Andrea Wilson’s family feeds on chocolate gravy and biscuits - a fonduelike sauce over buttered biscuits, from a recipe handed down by her Southern grandmother. “With a tall glass of milk, it’s superb,” Wilson says.

Then there’s the Christmas morning menu at Barb Silvey’s parents’ place. Says Silvey: “My mom makes enough ham and cheese omelets to feed an army - big, huge, whole bunches of them - and biscuits with sausage gravy like you’ve never had.

“Then we all get sick and lie around because we’re so full. Then we go to the movies and come home and have tacos for dinner.”

However high the plates are piled, the same basic truth applies to Christmas meals as it does to Christmas gifts: When all is said and done, it’s the thought that counts.

Off and on, for many years, Virginia Merritt and her late husband, Earl, had unexpected company for Christmas. Actually, they expected company; they just weren’t sure who was going to show up.

It started when Earl rescued a stranded motorist one Christmas Eve, found out she had no holiday plans and invited her home for the night.

From then on, when they had no other plans themselves, the Merritts would set an extra place at their Christmas table. They called it the “stranger at the gate,” after a biblical verse.

“(Earl’s) job was to find a stranger who needed a meal, and he usually did,” Merritt says.

After all these years, she may not recall what she served them, but she remembers those visitors well. “We had some real odd characters, and some real nice characters,” she says. “It made Christmas more interesting.

“That was, I thought, the best tradition we had.”

Brasiolle

Glory Gibford Grandinetti’s father, Carl, makes this using a recipe from his mother. Now Glory and her two sisters are learning it, too.

Large pot of spaghetti sauce (your favorite recipe or good quality store-bought)

6 pieces top sirloin steak, each about 4 inches wide, 7 inches long and 5/16-inch thick

Filling:

1/2 pound Italian sausage

1/2 pound ground beef

1 small onion, diced

Bread crumbs (about 4 slices worth)

1 tablespoon parsley

1 tablespoon oregano

1 clove garlic, diced

1/2 cup Romano cheese, plus more to season meat and for garnish

2 eggs

Let spaghetti sauce simmer on stove. Season steaks with Romano cheese, salt and pepper, to taste.

Combine filling ingredients. Divide into six portions and place on steaks; roll up (starting with the long side) and tie with butcher string.

In a large pan, brown steaks in a little oil over medium heat, turning, for about 30 minutes. Add steaks to pot of spaghetti sauce and simmer until tender, about 3-4 hours.

Remove steaks, remove string, and cut into pieces about 2 inches wide. Serve with sauce and additional Romano cheese.

Yield: About 20 servings. (Recipe can be halved for smaller groups).

Puffed Eggnog Pancake

From “Marlene Sorosky’s Season’s Greetings,” this rich recipe is a Dec. 26 breakfast staple at Mary Ann West’s house.

6 eggs

1-1/3 cups eggnog

1 cup flour

3/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 pound butter

1/2 cup sliced almonds

1 tablespoon sugar

Powdered sugar (optional)

Fruit-flavored pancake syrup (such as blueberry, boysenberry or strawberry)

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

In a large mixing bowl, beat eggs until frothy. Add eggnog, flour and nutmeg, beating until well blended (batter will be slightly lumpy).

Place butter in a 9- by 13-inch glass baking dish and place in oven until butter is melted and sizzling (do not let brown).

Remove from oven and immediately pour eggnog batter into pan. Sprinkle top with almonds and sugar. Return to oven and bake 15-20 minutes, until puffed and brown.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar, if desired, and serve with berry syrup or other toppings of your choice.

Yield: 6 servings.

Chocolate Gravy

Spoon this sauce from Andrea Wilson’s Arkansas grandmother over your favorite biscuits for a special breakfast.

1 cup sugar

1/3 cup cocoa

2 tablespoons cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon salt

2-2-1/2 cups milk

2 teaspoons butter

1 teaspoon vanilla

In a saucepot, combine sugar, cocoa, cornstarch and salt. Gradually stir in milk and bring to a boil. Add butter and vanilla; reduce heat and cook until thickened, stirring frequently so the mixture does not burn. Serve over buttered biscuits.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by A. Heitner