"christmas breakfast" news and stories

• Shake up your holiday breakfast routine with one of these Mexican-inspired egg dishes.
• Portland continues to be in the midst of a major winter storm and Leslie Cole thinks it's the perfect time to channel your inner pioneer by making butter.
• Brush up on your egg skills prior to Christmas morning, so that you'll be able to turn out breakfast like a champ.
• Bake up spiced quick breads in cans for a quirky and charming touch.
• Winemakers lend a hand to one another as well as to an assortment of charities.
• For the gluten-free folks, a party shouldn't mean a potential minefield of snacks. Bring your own to ensure snacking safety.
• Honeybells are a more elegant (and more expensive) variety of the mineola.
• "Fast" food that won't make you regret dinner an hour later.
• Use instant dried polenta in place of standard pizza dough for a chewy crust.
• Roasting beef or a turkey on Christmas? Here are roasting charts that will guide you through the process.

We always associate gingerbread with either Gingerbread houses or Gingerbread men. But how about a cake or cookies or a cobbler or pancakes?

Our friends over at AOL Food have some recipes for gingerbread you might not have thought of doing. Like the Gingerbread and Pear Dessert, Lemon Iced Gingerbread and some Gingerbread Pancakes. The Apple-Gingerbread Cobbler looks like the perfect thing to eat on a cold winter's night in front of the fire (OK, the television).

There are also recipes for Gingerbread Snowflake Cookies that would look great on your Christmas table or on the tree.

Want even more gingery ideas? Check out:

• Gingerbread House Cupcakes
• Gingerbread Family Cookie Cutters
• Guinness gingerbread records
• Gingerbread man pan
  

Even though cookies are de rigueur for the season, not everyone is a cookie baker and I, for one, am not about to hold that against them. Particularly if, instead of cookies, the non-cookie baker is serving up some delicious, flakey, buttery croissants on Christmas morning, like Melissa of Banlieue Blog. She worries a bit that her family will be disappointed by the lack of prettily decorated cookies, but after one bite of delectable pastry, I will bet that they'll be willing to overlook just about anything. Is it too late to invite you to my house for breakfast, Melissa?

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Growing up, my mom's Christmas Eve revolved around kneading, brushing on butter, cinnamon, sugar, and rolling dough for our traditional Christmas morning cinnamon rolls. We'd have to wait until after breakfast to open our presents (our stockings were a pre-breakfast ritual, natch) but it was worth it. The scent of cinnamon, cloves and caramelizing brown sugar would fill the house as we unwrapped tiny bars of fancy soap and pretty pencil erasers. I'd shove a Hershey's kiss into my mouth as I longed for the hot, buttery circles of dough.

Now, any family celebration of the mundane or spectacular variety centers around bacon, biscuits and good coffee (this year's pick is Thundermuck from Columbia River Roasters). In the morning, I'll be mixing flour and baking powder and cutting in butter while my husband keeps letting our oldest son sneak slices of bacon as they come off the pan. What do you make for Christmas breakfast? Do you make it the night before, or is it a family cooking ritual? Or do you just skip breakfast and go straight to the chocolate (which I've done many a Christmas morning)?

[Photo Sarah Gilbert]