Christmas Day in Saudi

Since yesterday was our first married Christmas and we celebrated it in Saudi Arabia, I thought I'd give you an idea of what we did.  It was just the two of us, so it was pretty low key, but we still had a nice Christmas dinner.

We had presents under our tree, or maybe trees over our presents?

Steve really wanted a steak, so he made this Pan-Fried Steak.  The meat selection here was far from the best, but it turned out alright in the end.

I also made Baked Brussels Sprouts Au Gratin, Red Pepper Risotto, PW's Parker House Rolls.  This was a pretty big affair, because I just don't cook more than one thing at a time.  It's too much coordinating to get more than one thing on the table at the same time, and the amount of leftovers would be ridiculous.  To help move things along quickly we did some mise en place which generates a ton of extra dishes, but spread out the work to less busy times.

Ready for dinner.

The Parker House Rolls were a learning experience to say the least.  Rolls really aren't challenging, but I did have to cut the recipe in half, since when PW cooks she apparently feeds a hoard of people, but us not so much.  Well I think we can all see where this is going.  Despite the fact that I rewrote the ingredient list with the new amounts, I still managed to use the original amount of butter instead of half.  On the plus side, we didn't need to butter the rolls at the table!

Let me teach you a lesson about cooking rolls in the oven.  They don't need to bake for 50 minutes, I promise.  I managed to make two baking sheets perfectly fine, but the last one, let's just say it got a bit toasty.

Napping after a big dinner.

We were also going to have Spinach Artichoke Dip to munch on, but guess who can't get artichokes?  They've had them at the store in the past, but not right now I guess.  The lack of dependability on the grocery stock makes it hard to plan dishes with slightly exotic ingredients.

We also had a bit of the Chocolate Biscuit Cakes leftover from baking earlier in the week.  These are basically a British version of no bake cookies, but so much tastier!  We've got a lot of unusual items at the grocery here, like digestives and drinking chocolate, which made this recipe possible.

So delicious.

Dishes galore after we were done cooking!

We also made these tasty pizza pretzels for Christmas Eve Dinner.  They didn't look amazing, but they sure did taste great.

Pizza pretzels!