AIBU - to say Christmas Dinner is not the meal to go wild on flavours?

Me too! I was reading it thinking most of it sounded rather delicious, even if I might have to have one plate with some items and then go back for a second plate with different combos!

Truffle cauli cheese sounds amazing!!

Christmas Dinner is literally the most boring meal that exists. Oh look, some meat and potatoes mmmm so festive and special 🤣

Just enjoy the lovely meal and all her hard work!

No, you don’t mess with Christmas. It’s an awful lot of flavours?! I’m no chef, so who knows.

That's where OPs sister got her menu from!

I really like the look of the parsnip stuffing. Just googled the recipe. Everything together would be overkill but a couple of fancy sides is nice.

I would go and enjoy it but make my own Xmas dinner at some point between Xmas and new year

These are all really solid chefs to take inspiration from and I would be very heartened!

I think a lot of the negative reactions on this thread are a bit overblown. Ultimately it's fun to have fun with flavour and I bet the majority of those will be delicious.

Those honey and gochujang carrots need to be balanced really carefully though (and kept on the other side of the plate, or preferably on a different plate, to the truffle cauliflower).

It sounds lovely, but I agree, the simplicity of a Christmas dinner is what works.

Champagne cranberry sauce is a champagne-offense. Maybe it means cranberry sauce (cranberries and sugar), with a glass of champagne while you are watching the cranberries pop?

I would save the fancy ingredients for canapes. Maybe have one elevated side.

Just googled the gravy and found this https://www.joshuaweissman.com/recipes/my-ideal-thanksgiving-dinner
which gives the recipes for a lot of it.

I feel that there's a sort of umami, truffley faction in this meal and a hot/sour Asian faction and I'm not sure how well that will work but I suspect a lot of it is more about having slightly wanky descriptions for perfectly normal things- I suspect that a lot of the elements will seem unremarkable (cranberry, bread sauce, gravy, pigs etc) when you actually come to eat them with the added flavours just being in the background, and the main thing the recipes are doing is making things sound complicated and cheffy. I could describe my cranberry sauce as "cranberry, orange, port, brown sugar and clove sauce with an infusion of cinnamon" but I don't- it's just cranberry sauce and those are the ingredients I use to make cranberry sauce, they don't need listing out for everyone else.

Anyway, I wouldn't say anything- her meal her choice, and it will probably be absolutely fine.

FWIW my view is that at least one or two things on the plate should be very simple- some simple steamed broccoli, say- as a contrast to the richness of the other dishes. But that's just a personal opinion.

Far too many different flavours and combinations.
But I would want the traditional Christmas dinner only for Christmas Day. Then leftovers for Boxing Day.

This. Why would you want fish and rosemary gravy for turkey? Or at all really?

I think there are too many flavours that don’t go together - I’d definitely be passing on some of the stuff to try and make a more cohesive meal.

I’ve never heard of bonito, and Google tells me it’s fish. Please tell me Google is wrong and your sister isn’t really making a rosemary and fish gravy?

As they say on MasterChef, there needs to be a point to all those flavours and they need to work together. There's too many elements on the plate that just don't work.

I'm adventurous and I don't mind adventurous for Christmas. The problem here isn't adventurous.

The problem is a try hard who doesn't know when to stop and reign it in and marry the flavours together. There's no harmony. It just doesn't sing.

Grace Dent would not approve and GreGg would be super rude and probably make a dodgy comment.

I’m very much looking forward to my sage and onion paxo stuffing this year OP. I might even chop my carrots in to sticks instead of rounds if I’m feeling ‘fancy’. So as far as I’m concerned, yanbu.

Mix marmite into the oil, heat up and coat potatoes

How do you make marmite roasties?

I love a traditional Xmas dinner so I agree with don't mess with classic,BUT she's cooking and hosting and clearly enjoys doing it.
I would ask if theres gravy and cranberry sauce though and if not bring my own.
Whats for pudding?

Boke!

I love adventurous food and will happily eat anything that has been deliberately buried in sand, dug up wriggling and sold as extra fermented. My family compete to find the deepest food niche we can.

Those flavour combinations are an abomination though, sorry.

After that lot I’d definitely want to be back at my own home later that day for whatever joys that lot brings my digestive system!

You should absolutely not go .... and give me her address and let me know what time we will be eating!

Seriously though, she is hosting, she can cook what the hell she likes - and so can you. So do yourself a traditional Christmas dinner another day. If her food doesn't grab you, so what? You have family and food, so be grateful for that and enjoy the whole occasion, take the emphasis off the food.

@StacksOfSnacks The list of food made me laugh! What a pretentious load of bollocks! She’s no idea about flavour combinations at all. It’s just a list of individual dishes pushed together and NO decent chef would serve this up.

Rosemary goes with lamb. Who wants it in gravy with beef? Or turkey for that matter? She’s making fairly standard vegetables and throwing in extra ingredients with no thought as to suitability. Who wants truffle and marmite on the same plate? Has she ever been to a Michelin starred restaurant? She needs to - she might learn something!

Eat it to be polite but not on the plate at the same time! The execution of some of this isn’t difficult by the way, it’s just stupid. Get your own lovely dinner at home and enjoy every flavour as it comes! (Although I do cook my carrots in butter with star anise - thanks Tom Kerridge!)