Hey Pipoman, share your Christmas menu with us. Always makes

[japple]

my mouth water. I'm sure you're up to your ears in feeding others, but when you get a chance, I'd like to hear what you and your staff prepared.

As a former Army brat, we dined in the mess hall for several holidays. Those are some of the happiest memories for my siblings and me. We had great feasts, though not nearly as upscale or diverse as yours, and some of the Army cooks were very talented. That is where we first saw a roast sucking pig with an apple in its mouth (Ft. Lee, Virginia), which (of course) made me cry. All the dependent children got lots of attention from the GIs who couldn't make it home for Christmas.

Just remembering Christmases of long, long ago.

[hippywife]

1. Good thinking, japple.

I'm sure he's been up to his eyebrows for days! I'm curious to hear what he's come up with, too.

:hi:

[pipoman]

2. Sorry I missed this thread at the time..thanks hippy!

We did have a Christmas/Holiday Brunch on Dec 20th..Santa, etc. The menu was roasted turkey, pot roast w/pan gravy, fingerling potatoes and carrots , dressing (my 80 year old mentor has shown me the light on making fabulous stuffing), smoked ham, Mashed, turkey gravy, maple sweet potatoes, green bean casserole (the only time campbells cream of mushroom is in the restaurant), cranberry relish, of coarse all of the regular breakfast items. 12 kinds of pie, tiramisu and chocolate caramel cheesecakes, cookies, salasds..




A hog from Father's day 2008


Hope you all had/have a Great Holiday and New Year.

[hippywife]

3. Is that you dressed as Santa? lol

So how many did you serve do you think? And would you care to shed that stuffing light on the rest of us? ;)

[pipoman]

5. No, not me...it is my suit though..

We served just shy of 300 in 3 hours.

The stuffing..for those who don't know, my mentor is 80. She has been in the restaurant business for 50 years. Now she advises me, makes salads, pies and other desserts, is quality control and is the frugal patrol, saving bits of this and dabs of that, otherwise destined for the trash, either to feed herself or a friend, or to integrate into another dish. One of the things she cabbages onto are bread heels, and other scraps of bread, religiously and carefully breaking them up and adding them to a bun bag in the freezer. Which brings us to the dressing. She despises the use of commercial croutons (pronounced kra-ton if you are an 80 year old German woman) for use in dressing, so she drys out her bread stash adding dinner rolls or other bread to get the volume we need. We use around 1 1/4 full sized commercial baking sheets loosely packed with bread cubes per full size, 2" deep hotel pan/steam table pan. We then melt butter in a skillet and saute' finely chopped celery, dried onion (which she says carries the buttery flavor throughout the stuffing better than fresh onion), salt pepper and poultry seasoning. While that is cooking we take chicken stock, add around 4 eggs per hotel pan of stuffing, and just a bit of heavy cream, to that we add the celery/onion/butter mixture, which we then pour over the dried bread mixing by hand just until all of the bread is saturated. The raw stuffing is very wet going into the pan, sloppy in fact. The pan is covered and baked at low temp (275 convection) for an hour or so, then the foil is pulled and returned to the oven to brown, dry out some and puff up. It is pretty simple, gets raves on the floor.

Hope all is well with you and yours my friend.

[Warpy]

7. Damn, that's my recipe

scaled down for groups of 30 or so, of course. I found that out about dry onion, too. That stuffing can be the base for adding other stuff to jazz it up, from innards to sausage to nuts to fruit.

[pipoman]

8. IMO

dehydrated onion gives great onion flavor without the onion burping later. I also use a dehydrated Asian garlic, same, no nasty garlic burps but good garlic flavor in the dish. My theory is that fresh onion and garlic oil is the culprit in the onion/garlic tummy after we eat it, the dehydration process removes much of that oil which is replaced with water, wine, butter or what ever when reconstituting the product..don't know if this is correct or not, just a theory.

[japple]

4. Wow, you really put on a spread. Those elves are too cute.

I guess you had to take some time off after all of that, at least I hope you got some R & R. Thanks for posting, and a Happy New Year!

[pipoman]

6. Thanks,

yes, right.I erred above...this meal was on Dec 13, not the 20th. I was able to get away to Cali to visit my son Dec 18th to 23rd. I may update my old thread in February after my 2 year anniversary at the restaurant.


on edit...next big meal will be Valentine's Day...I am excited to have it fall on a Sunday this year..should be big!