To think serving a starter with Christmas dinner is unnecessary. And weird.

[Kavalier]

Am hosting DH's family for Xmas dinner for the first time this year. MIL always does a prawn cocktail starter and they will miss a starter if I don't serve one, so I will. I think it's very odd though. AIBU?

What, no foam?

Amateur.

Clearly you get Marie rose air with PRAWN and bread sauce foam with TURKEY. The sausagemeat will probably be a crumb too.

It's sous vide TURKEY. Obviously.

Maybe the ROAST course will include textures of potato (roasties and mash).

If you're really unlucky, you'll get cubes of jus rather than gravy too.

OBVIOUSLY sous vide turkey.

What about cauliflower 72 ways?

Pay a toddler to squash the roasties and then get the dog to lick them. Voila, deconstructed roast potatoes.

You can probably pay the toddler in chocolate coins amuse bouche.

CAULIFLOWER may be taking us into 11 course territory, unless the CHEESE is an optional extra.

The menu presumably comes with drinks/wine matching too. You'd hope.

There's definitely scope for some sort of aeriated cheese sauce, and dehydrated cauliflower in there though.

I bet sous vide cauliflower is horrible. It probably looks like cauliflower and then turns to hideous mush in your mouth.

It has to be HERITAGE caluliflower. Vegetables that aren't heritage vegetables are given short shrift in my home.

No prawn cocktail Christmas day starter? Wash your mouth out OP!

I can imagine squoosh. the heritage vegetables are the ones you forgot about at the back of the veg drawer, no?

It will have to be 'CAULIFLOWER: heritage cauliflower as many ways as we can be bothered with, possibly three' then. The questions is: should it be served before or after TURKEY?

Oh my days, i read the questions and had to go have a lie down!! No starters..... What is the world coming to?! Honestly, why dont you just eat from a paper plate too.

After obviously. As it's heritage cauliflower in a vanilla cloud with rosewater tears.

Textures of Brussels sprouts obv

Well done squoosh. That sounds both genuinely disgusting and plausibly like a dish we'll be seeing on masterchef: the professionals sometime soon.

Yanbu. In full agreement with you, Op.

Thank you. I'm widely known to be a very talented pretend chef.

Marcus (swoon) would be proud.

Yes, textures of sprouts, and maybe parsnip shavings and accents of stuffing.

It does sound menu worthy.

Always had a starter....

prawn cocktail or melon

The textures off sprouts has to include Brussels sprout purée thats been reformed and moulded (with the aid of weird setting agents) into Brussels sprouts shapes. Like those spherified pea things that were all over wanky cheffery a while back, but with added pondering the futility of the universe.

And maybe we could replace the chestnuts (which look like brains) with actual brains. I wonder if you can get Turkey brains anywhere... Or even if you can eat turkey brains.

Brains.

Damn. How could I have forgotten all the offal.

Turkey sweetbreads and annoying cousin intestine. Served with liver and heart sauce.

I think the chestnuts should be ones that have been ingested and then anally ejected by Iberian mountain goats.

It isn't Crimbo without them quite frankly.

Calamitously I think it's all about the gels now. Sprout gel, parsnip gel, potato water reduction etc