Sonoma County cooks recall their family favorite holiday dishes
Unlike Thanksgiving, the Christmas table can vary widely from family to family, with favorite dishes passed down from the Old World to the New or from one culture to another, sometimes through marriage.
Depending on your ancestry and the predilection of your own taste buds, you can cross many borders while developing a standard repertoire of winter holiday must-haves.
We surveyed four of Wine Country’s chefs and growers to discover their most iconic Christmas dishes. The result is a delectable smorgasbord that ranges from a traditional Midwestern Rib Roast to Italian sausage stuffing, Southern beignets to a Creamy Rice Pudding, traditionally served in Sweden on Christmas Eve.
If your holiday table has room for another tradition, you may want to incorporate one or more of these dishes into your own menus, for Christmas Eve, morning or afternoon. Who knows? Maybe they will be so successful that you’ll have to bring them back, year after year.
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Shelly Kaldunski, chef/instructor for the Santa Rosa Junior College’s Culinary Arts Program, grew up in Sebastopol celebrating the holiday Italian-style, with a big feast on Christmas Eve.
“Turkey, ham, ravioli -- we had all of it, and the turkey was always stuffed,” she said. “In the past 10 years, on the weekend before Thanksgiving, we make the sausage that we’re going to use for the Thanksgiving and Christmas stuffing.”
The family makes their own sausage with oregano, garlic, rosemary and fennel seeds, plus some kind of olives. “My grandmother always put in black olives,” she said. “But I’ll put in the Castelvetrano Sicilian olives.”
If you don’t want to make your own, you can purchase high-quality sausage to make the stuffing, which calls for day-old bread such as ciabatta; mushrooms, onions and celery sweated in butter; eggs and chicken stock for moisture; plus lots of spinach.
“ I just eat stuffing sandwiches after the holidays, because it has everything: meat, greens and carbs,” she said. “Throw a little cranberry on there, and it’s perfect.”
On Christmas morning, Kaldunski pays tribute to her Eastern European roots by making a Chocolate Babka to dunk into coffee.
“It’s like a brioche dough, and you lace it with chocolate and cinnamon, and proof it and bake it,” she said. “With coffee, that’s all you need.”
Her recipe for Chocolate Babka is found in “Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook,” for which Kaldunski served as stylist and contributor.
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Growing up outside of Sweden, chef Helena Gustavsson-Giesea of Station 1870 in Santa Rosa used to decorate her Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, which is also the big night for eating in that country.
“We do the Julbord, a Christmas smorgasbord,” she said. “It always had the Christmas ham and the meatballs and the beef ribs and the side salads, warm and cold, and herring and eggs. We also do the gravlax and the smoked salmon.”
The smorgasbord is divided in three parts, with cold appetizers to start, then the warm table with entrées, followed by the dessert table, laden with candies, puddings, fruit compote and cookies.
One of the traditional Christmas puddings begins as a morning rice porridge, which is given to Santa with a shot of schnapps on Christmas Eve. The leftover porridge is mixed with vanilla, sugar and whipped cream and served as a dessert, topped with fruit and berries.
“It’s got a tapioca feel to it,” said Gustavsson-Giesea. “The rice is creamy.”
At Christmas time, the chef misses the glow of candles in her native land, and the fresh snow glistening in the morning sunlight.
“It’s a time when we socialize a lot,” she said. “We go to Christmas concerts and do a lot of activities, like ice skating on the lakes and cross-country skiing.”
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Healdsburg Shed co-owner Cindy Daniel of Healdsburg grew up in Louisiana, where she used to make beignets following the recipe of her childhood friend’s mother.
“We used to eat them elsewhere, but at home, we used her recipe,” she said. “It came from a book I still use, called ‘Talk About Good’ from the Junior League.”
On Christmas Eve, Daniel starts making the dough for the beignets. In the morning, all she has to do is roll them out, cut and fry them.
“The day is totally messy, with presents and paper all over, and one thing on to the next. It’s just the four of us on Christmas Day, and we pad around all day,” she said, of her husband, Doug, and two sons.
When her two sons were in elementary school, the family went off and lived in Paris for a few months in the winter, and they became addicted to a thick, French sipping chocolate, which she now serves with the beignets.
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