Easy Christmas Dinner From Start to Finish | Allrecipes

We're getting festive today and I'm teaching you how to make a complete Christmas dinner just like I used to have and the number one thing I'm promising is that it will be easy. I'm also promising that it's going to be special and absolutely delicious. Let's go. I'm going to start with the easy side dish Delmonico potatoes. These are just a creamy, super rich, and cheesy potato casserole. It's sometimes made with shredded hash browns. I'm using the frozen diced hash browns. Something about this makes it sound less like a breakfast casserole and more like a dinner casserole. I'm gonna start out just by dicing up some onion. I didn't really know what Delmonico potatoes was. I saw some TikToks with it and it looked delicious but I Christmas-fied this one. I'm just gonna cook this up briefly with a little butter. A lot of recipes I saw use cream of chicken. That's just the old hash brown casserole. This meal is too special to bring out the cans. I'm gonna go ahead and add in the onions while the butter is still melting. That way that flavor really comes out. Cook this for about two minutes and then add in some seasonings. I'm just going in with some salt, pepper, and a little garlic powder. Now we're making it super creamy by going in with some heavy cream and milk. It is the holidays. We're gonna make things rich and indulgent and delicious. Once it's heated up, I'm gonna go in with just a little bit of nutmeg and our cheeses. There's lots of different variations. I think the original only had parmesan cheese but most of the versions I've seen have some sort of cheddar in there. So I'm going in with white cheddar and then some parmesan cheese. Just stir that till it's melted and we pour it over the potatoes. These can still be frozen. I've got them like kind of partially thawed. You could also just cut up your own potatoes if you want to. I told you easy. It might not look that thick now but as the potatoes cook they absorb this milky mixture and the whole thing thickens up and gets nice and creamy. Lightly grease a casserole dish, 9 by 13. This is one of the things you can make a day ahead of time and just stop right after I top it with the cheese. You know I shred my own cheese. If you get an eight ounce block of white cheddar and shred it yourself, you get more than two cups. If you buy an eight ounce package, you only get two cups. The parmesan, I took it the shortcut. At this point, you can have it made ahead, cover it with foil, and stick it in the fridge. It's good for a day. When it comes time to bake, uncover it. It goes into the oven 350 degrees for about 30 to 45 minutes. Then we uncover and put the broiler on for just a couple minutes till it gets nice and browned. That is not your grandmother's hash brown casserole. We are celebrating. That is what the butter is all about. It might look a little loose to you right now but trust me, as it sits and it does not take long, it all tightens up and it is so rich and creamy. See, it's kind of like scalloped potatoes but without all the work and they definitely taste fancy. The cheese on top forms this little crust and what's inside tastes almost like a loaded mashed potato. When you can get a bite that also has some of that brown crusty cheese. Oh my god. The potato part is like velvet. If you cut up your own potatoes, you're going to have a little more structure in there. Like a bite of a potato but using the hash browns like this, I mean they melt in your mouth. The flavor is so good. These are special enough that the adults will appreciate but also they're comforting enough that the kids will devour them. We're off to a fabulous start. I'm going ahead and making the dessert because this is something you can make ahead. You can even do this one two, three days before. Peppermint bark cheesecake. This is an almost no bake situation. If I've gone all out for such a special dinner, I like taking the easy road when it comes to dessert. The only thing you have to bake is the crust and it starts with Oreo cookies and like who doesn't like that? So I'm just going to pulse these. Make an Oreo crust. Pulse your cookies until they're nice and fine and then I'm just going to go ahead and add the pulse and then we press it into our pan. I give it a little spray mainly for the sides so that when we put our cheesecake filling in, it comes out easy and then just kind of press it in. This goes into the oven 350 degrees for about 10 minutes or until it's fragrant and lightly toasted. The star of the show is the peppermint bark. It does not have to be this fancy one, okay? A lot of times this can be given as gifts so if you have been fortunate to receive this and don't know what to do with it, I'm telling you right now what to do with it. Then you're just going to chop this up. You need about a cup chopped for the filling and then you need a little extra for the topping. Peppermint bark, cheesecake filling and whipped cream. You can use cool whip here if you want. I'm going to make fresh whipped cream because it is Christmas. Worth it. Oh my crust is done. That needs to cool completely but now we can mix up our filling. Ready-made cheesecake filling. You can get this at the grocery store. It's usually by like where the cream cheese is. To that I'm going to add in whipped cream. Fold that in. Just kind of lightens up the cheesecake filling a little bit. This cheesecake filling doesn't set up like a baked cheesecake does though so whenever I use it, I call to freeze it. It won't freeze completely, it just freezes solid to where you can get a nice slice out of it. Okay, once that's mixed then in goes the star of the show. It is as easy as that. Okay once this is nice and cool, in goes the filling. I feel like I could just eat that filling with a spoon. Now I'm going to top it with a little more of the peppermint bark. Like you can't really tell just by looking at it exactly what it is. So we put a little more on top to really sell it. I feel like you can't see enough peppermint so you can chop up some candy canes or some more peppermints or skip this step altogether. Now it just kind of adds a little more of the peppermint look. See what I mean? And that's the easy dessert that everyone will love. Now this goes into the freezer until you're ready to eat. As much as I want to taste this right now, we'll have to wait till we serve up dinner. Green bean bundles. We have these once a year and it's at Christmas Eve and it's just my mom's thing. I think it's a lot of people's thing though. I'm using these little haricots verts. They're just the thinner, more tender green beans. You can just use regular if you want. I saw some recipes with canned green beans. Let's not do that though. I've gone ahead and par cooked some bacon for about 10 minutes in the oven. This is going to give it a head start. I've seen too many recipes where if you get the bacon crispy, the green beans are all shriveled to nothing or if you're cooking them till the green beans are perfect, your bacon is still like halfway raw and chewy. With my recipe, I want them to be, I want my green beans to be tender and my bacon to be crispy. It's going to cook in this like sticky, sweet and salty kind of situation and because I'm using the tender green beans, I don't have to blanch them beforehand. So you want to take, I don't know, whatever you think a bundle is. Eight green beans. I'm going to take a piece of my par cooked bacon, wrap it around and then secure it with a toothpick. This is another great thing. I'm doing it now because I want to show you the other things you can make ahead. It's the perfect one you can make or assemble the day before and then just pour the glaze over and pop them in the oven. Boom. Okay, here's your bundle. Let me show you the glaze. When it comes time for the holidays and butter goes on sale, stock up. It's in everything. Sweet and salty for the salty. Worcestershire, a little soy sauce, garlic powder for the sweet, a little brown sugar and as it cooks, that brown sugar is going to thicken this up a little bit, make it a little syrupy. Fit them in whatever casserole dish you want. You just want them to be in a single layer. All right, then you're going to pour your glaze in. You don't want it to submerge the green beans. You want to leave some surface area exposed so that that bacon can get crispy. Then you've got something for them to flip around in and as they cook, the green beans are going to let off a little liquid too. You can do it all the way to this step the day before and then it's ready to go in the oven. This is like how to keep your holiday dinner super easy. That's what we want. No soggy bacon here. That bacon is like crisp on the edges, sticky sweet. These are like the perfect salty sweet combo. My kids don't like them when they're too sweet. This is not that. Green beans are still crisp tender. These green beans have absorbed so much of that sauce. It's like a roasted vegetable where it's brown and toasty on the outside but still crisp tender on the inside. It's another one. Everybody's gonna love it. Everybody's gonna love it. Are you ready for the main attraction? It's time for the main course. If you're in my house, 100% of the time on Christmas we are having beef tenderloin. It is a special occasion. This is not something we do all the time but for Christmas we do. Now last Christmas I showed you several things with beef tenderloin, several sauces and a you know a classic way to prepare it. I have not shown you what I'm about to show you which is the foolproof perfect beef tenderloin but first I'm going to make the sauce for today which is cowboy butter. I've made this a while back. My daughter just loves like a buttery sauce to dip her steak in so that's what we've been doing a lot of. So you start with just some salted butter and then it's just about finely chopping a lot of flavor and adding it in. So I've got some garlic, parsley, chives and thyme, Dijon and then some lemon, a little zest and juice. I love this part. It really brightens it up. There's a lot of richness on the holiday table so having something like lemon in there kind of cuts through it a little bit. Just a little bit of juice. All right and the smoked paprika like I said when you're thinking about cowboy you're thinking about the campfires so using the smoked kind of gives it that smoky hint. Some salt and then just a little bit of chili powder and crushed red pepper and then finally just a little bit of pepper. Get in there, mix it up and you want to make sure your butter is softened so that everything mixes in well. How many times have you heard me say color equals flavor? This is the most colorful butter you'll ever see. I really do like to get in there with your hands just to make sure every piece of butter has some flavor. All right so now you're going to want to roll it into a log that way you can decide later if you want to slice this and add it to your warm tenderloin or melt it either way. You can do this on parchment paper or wax paper or just simply plastic wrap. Good to go. You're just going to stick this in the fridge until you're ready. Now let's talk about the tenderloin to go with it. Now I've gone ahead and trimmed off the silver skin and the chain. You can get your butcher to do this for you. This could not be any easier okay and you want to do this probably the last thing you do. Contrary to what you think and contrary to the standing rib roast that a lot of people do on Christmas, this does not take long to cook at all. You're looking at half hour tops and then resting time. So get you a pan and line it with foil. All right then place your tenderloin on this skinny end. I'm just going to fold it under today. We're not even going to mess with twine. I just really promised to keep everything easy for you. All right so I've just got some melted butter and I'm just going to add in a little bit of soy sauce just for flavor and I'm going to rub this all over the tenderloin. It went ahead and kind of solidified on there because the meat is still kind of chilled but now we've created something for the spices to stick to and as far as the spices go, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. That is the extent of the prep. When you have a nice expensive cut of meat like this, you really don't have to do that much to it. Here's the part where you're like there's no way that's going to work. This goes into the oven at 500 degrees. Based on how you like your steak, you're going to go about 25 minutes. That will get you medium rare but don't don't overdo it. You can always go back and cook it more. This is fine for us because my mom usually likes her steak well done. So this end piece is still going to you know probably be closer to medium medium well. This nice like juicy part in the middle is going to stay a good medium rare. Oh yes, oh yes. It's like you seared it but you didn't have to. It's got a nice crust. Oh that looks good. So you have to let this rest for at least 20 minutes before we slice. I'm just going to get a little sample of our beef tenderloin before we put it on the platter. Oh yes, see that's the way I like. I'm more of a medium kind of girl and as you get like I said closer to the center, it will get more rare. That was 24 minutes. If you want a little more medium pieces, go more like 27 minutes. Let me just get a little taste see how we did. Perfect. I love doing things like this especially when work pays for it. Oh I got to get the cowboy butter. This is what it's all about. This just became the perfect Christmas beef tenderloin. Holy smokes. It's just so good. I just got so excited. Okay so here is the finished beef tenderloin. Serve it with our cowboy butter two ways. I'm just going to give it a little head start here. The dinner is done. We'll do the salad on the finished table. We're going to whip up a couple little appetizers and get the party started. So for my two appetizers, we are doing shrimp remoulade. My mom always will do like a shrimp cocktail. Basically the same thing. I'm just like elevating it one little bit by adding a dip. I'm using store-bought frozen pre-cooked shrimp because this is what all the stores use anyway at their little shrimp cocktails they sit out. I've already partially thawed these. I'm just going to let them finish thawing. Most recipes like have a ton of ingredients to them but I'm going to show you how to make this super easy because I guarantee the ingredients to make your remoulade are already on your fridge door and this is how I make it because this is the way I learned to make it. The guy that really taught me how to cook when I worked in a restaurant, he was from Louisiana and he just would go to the fridge and just pull out a bunch of stuff, put it in the food processor and we had a remoulade. Green onion is probably most classic. Some celery. Really just go for those inside pieces with the leaves. You could finely chop everything and just stir it together like as if you were making like a tartar sauce. I like some fresh parsley in there. The main ingredient is mayonnaise because it is a creamy sauce. Now we head to the fridge door. Let me show you how we finish it off. Okay you always get a little like grainy mustard. That's kind of like the look of remoulade so Worcestershire, yes. Hot sauce. Of course I'm going to get a Louisiana one. Then you want something like pickly and briny. So you can just do capers, olives and then sometimes you'll see chili sauce. We already have cocktail sauce so I could use that or just ketchup. You just kind of get all the condiments like this and that's what you use. So you've got your tangy with some ketchup, some mustard, the vinegar from the hot sauce also gives a little heat and then you want something salty and briny. I usually put capers. Sometimes I'll chop up some pickle and I'll throw in a couple olives. Oh I almost forgot one other thing. Lemon. It's going with shrimp so you know blend it up and that's our sauce. Then you taste, season, adjust if necessary. Don't pat yourself on the back because it's perfect. And so our dip for our already cooked shrimp is ready. And then you just sound fancy. It sounds like a special event when you're like oh for appetizer we're having shrimp remoulade. Doesn't that sound good? This with the ice cold martini. Get ready. About to have a party. Appetizer number two is for the adults and the kids. I found this recipe. This is actually an Ina Garten. It's called caviar dip. I just thought everybody used creme fraiche and that's not gonna appeal to the kids. So I saw this recipe and I was like that really sounds like my favorite kind of dip with just potato chips. So it starts with some softened cream cheese and some sour cream. Take a lemon, squeeze some juice. So instead of that dried ranch packet that we do use a lot, we're just going to use fresh herbs. You just want to finely chop green onions. You can do the green and the white part. And a little bit of fresh dill. You could also whip this up in the food processor if you wanted to. All right and then just a little splash of cream or milk. Just enough to kind of get it loosened up. And then just salt and pepper. Now Ina stirs her caviar into this dip. We're just going to serve it on the side so that we can make everybody happy. This is also a great base if you want to stir in some smoked salmon or chopped up salmon. I know we just always eat a lot of seafood on Christmas. This is our Christmas Eve dinner which is more special, more fancy. And then our Christmas day. Wow Ina would be so disappointed in there. And then our Christmas day is lasagna. What do y'all serve for Christmas? We don't really do Thanksgiving. We're done with the turkey by then. Dip is done. Obviously you could do this one a few days ahead of time also. But I'm doing all this in one day so it's not impossible for you to do it all the same day. See if this will make the kids happy. So here's how we're going to serve this up for kids and adults alike. Dip on your tray. It will also pair very nicely with some crudite. Always serve your caviar with a plastic or pearl spoon, not a metal spoon. We're going to put chips all around. Appetizer number two. Okay let me get one more sample. Guys it's time to set the table. We need to finish our final thing which is the salad. This is called quick Christmas salad so it is just simply a dump and go situation. It involves a store-bought dressing and really whatever you want. This is just an extra. My kids love salad and then it's perfect for like if you don't eat the green beans but you still need a little veggie in there. So I've just got some mixed greens. Top it with some pecans. This is like all the flavors of winter. Some salty shredded parmesan cheese and then some tart and sweet dried cherries. So you've got it all going on here. You got a little sweet, got a little salty. Tends to be the theme of the day. And then you just use a store-bought balsamic vinaigrette. The dinner is complete. But first, happy hour. You've seen this before so I didn't show you again but you can always go back and look at freezer door dirty martini. But for entertaining this is the way to serve up cocktails. As soon as we get over to my mom's everybody wants a little ice cold martini but you don't want to stay in there and have to make you know eight of them. There's eight of us adults but it's all right here and it is ice cold. And I've just worked hard today so I just deserve this. You know me. Three olives. Slightly dirty. Look at that. Ice ice baby. I'm so happy and I'm so proud of this spread. You've already seen me taste everything but just let me show you a picture of the perfect plate for Christmas dinner. Perfect bites all around. Let's not forget about our peppermint bark cheesecake. Does that not look incredible? All those little bites of peppermint bark with that buttery Oreo crust. I'm gonna end it right here on this sweet note. I could care less if that cheesecake filling was made from scratch. The creaminess and the crunchiness and then the chocolate with those little bites of peppermint in there. This is the perfect way to end Christmas dinner. Best described it just tastes like Christmas.