About the noche buena section
December 4, 2007
Filed under Home-cooked meals
In my experience, between Christmas and New Year, the most harassed member of the family is the one assigned to cook. From the budgeting to the preparations to the actual cooking, the cook has to come up with ideas that will be an acceptable compromise to the individual tastes and preferences of every member of the family. Most times, the cook has to respect traditions too. Who says it’s easy? It doesn’t help that some guests can be so rude as to criticize the food they are served. I tell you, by the time New Year’s Eve arrives, the cook starts to feel the stress.
Enter the noche buena section — simple dishes made festive and articles that encourage you to take a new approach at cooking for Christmas and the New Year. And enter a new philosophy in holiday cookery: Cooking for Christmas without frivolities; celebrating the New Year without excesses. Recipes and cooking tips that relay the same message over and over: A meal is not special only because it is expensive and difficult to prepare. The most ordinary dish can be transformed into something so spectacular that it will deserve a place of honor on the noche buena table. No hard labor either. After all, the cook deserves to enjoy the holidays too.
As with the rest of the recipes in this blog, the recipes in the noche buena section are not meant as eye candy. See, my idea of a perfect noche buena is a meal where everyone is relaxed and cheerful enough for great conversation and the occasional bantering that is the hallmark of every family get-together. Hence, the recipes here are meant to be cook-friendly so that whoever does most of the cooking will not feel ready to drop from exhaustion by the time everyone arrives to sit down for the noche buena meal.
It follows that my idea of a perfect Christmas Day is one where the kids can move around freely (in comfy clothes instead of feeling itchy and ill at ease in fineries that are more appropriate for a funeral) without the adults telling them all the time to stay away from the food lest they ruin the masterfully crafted meals that are so picture pretty that one wonders if they’re there to be eaten or just to be admired from a distance. My idea of a perfect Christmas Day is one where mommies and daddies can relax and not have to worry if their kids will have to go hungry because the food look more like sculptures than familiar edible stuff.
It’s so obvious to be pointed out but the whole point of the noche buena and the Christmas Day family lunch or dinner is to get the family to sit down together for a meal that everyone can enjoy. It doesn’t have to mean an overload of expensive food. In fact, it doesn’t have to be any kind of overload, period.
To browse the noche buena section, start with choices for the main dish (Lechon, stuffed turkey, smoked duck or roast chicken?), the New Year’s eve menu suggestions (chicken satay, pork teriyaki, potato salad and mango rum sorbet or rib-eye steaks, mashed potatoes, buttered vegetables, and peaches and cream) or view the snippets of all the articles in the noche buena section.
Edited on November 30, 2008
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