FOOD // A Very Vegetarian Christmas

After all the busyness and build-up, I can hardly believe that Christmas has been and gone for another year! We had a lovely, family-focussed day with church in the morning (okay, that part was just me), presents around the tree, festive music, quizzes, endless puppies, fireworks (thanks neighbours!) and a sleepover with the nephew on his first Christmas day!

Oh, and it might have featured the odd mouthful of food too..

As a vegetarian, Christmas dinner can be a tricky thing to navigate. So many restaurants seem to pluck for a salad or pasta-based dish for their vegetarian alternative, but it's just not the same and I would much rather have a traditional Christmas dinner, minus the turkey and sausages. This year, however, we stayed at home for dinner and my family really excelled themselves in catering for my fussiness!   

Inspired by Morag over at Mo'Adore, I thought I'd share my very vegetarian Christmas menu. If you can bear to look at another morsel of food ever again, here it is..

Starter:

We traditionally have a soup of some sort to start us off, but it always feels so heavy before a mammoth main course, so this year we opted for something lighter instead..

Melon, raspberries and a homemade cantaloupe ginger sorbet, made according to this recipe over on A Crafty Lass. 

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Main Course:

While everyone else was busy munching on their Italian-style turkey and bacon-wrapped sausages, I was enjoying this..

A parsnip, cranberry and chestnut loaf, from this BBC Good Food recipe - so good that even the meat-eaters tucked in!

We served it with homemade cranberry sauce, a lemon ciabatta stuffing (from this recipe, minus the pancetta) and all the usual trimmings: roast potatoes, brussel sprouts, honey-roast parsnips, marmalade carrots, gravy and yorkshire pudding. Yum!

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Dessert:

Of course no Christmas feast is quite complete without something ridiculously sweet to top it all off... though we did wait a good 4 hours before we were able to enjoy any of this..

A salted caramel chocolate torte (this recipe, though with an amaretti biscuit base instead of a digestive one), made by moi, with a little help from my dad. 

And a good old fashioned sherry trifle made by mum, just in case one pudding wasn't enough!

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Embarrassingly indulgent, but oh so very good! 

What does Christmas dinner look like in your house? Whatever it was, I hope it was good.
More importantly, I hope you had a very happy Christmas surrounded by people you love!