My Jewish family had our traditional christmas day: open presents (I got tree fungus!) and watch a movie (we saw Up In The Air which was quite good). For dinner we invited over one of my mom's Buddhist co-workers and had another traditional meal of Raclette. Raclette is sort of a swiss fondu that we discovered during a trip to Montreal many years ago. Appropriately enough, it starts with the eponymous raclette cheese:
After acquiring a slice of raclette cheese you place it inside the raclette maker, which is a device that melts the cheese on the bottom and while on top it grills items that you will pour the said cheese over. The middle slots melt the cheese faster, so those are always prized. It uses a lot of electricity (actually dims the lights in our house) but we only pull it out once a year or so (usually on Christmas).
While you can pretty much pour the raclette over anything we generally have a staple of items: gerkins, cocktail onions, boiled potatoes and french bread. We made a few changes this year, we couldn't find any french bread so we used bagels instead. I also supplemented the gerkins with conventional dill pickles which, quite frankly, I prefer anyway.
The meal itself is delicious, mainly becaues of the massive amounts of cheese it involves. It's incredibly unhealthy and very bad for the environment, but you're allowed to have a few of those every year.
Coming up next, our Christmas Day desserts. Plus, a post on Hannukah if I get around to it.
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