Christmas Dinner Menus – RecipeTin Eats

Holiday entertaining is officially here! I’ve pulled together a range of Christmas Dinner menus to inspire you – from elegant to make-ahead, budget conscious to high-impact feasts. Here’s to stress-free planning and your most delicious Christmas yet!

Christmas is the Grand Prix of menu planning

I menu plan for a sport. I secretly get a thrill out of figuring out the optimum combination of dishes that balance oven space, prep time, richness, flavours and serving temperatures – not to mention dietary and budget requirements – so everything lands beautifully on the table without chaos!

So this years’ Christmas gift to myself is to indulge in putting together a range of Christmas menus for sit down dinners. I’ve got everything from sophisticated and elegant to “wow” factor ones, a really great low-cost one ($6 a head!) to speedy-prep one. I thought you might find them useful too – so here they are!

Browse the Christmas recipe index for more ideas

1. Effortless Elegance

This is the kind of menu you’d expect to see at a white tablecloth restaurant – only you get to serve it at home where you can kick off your shoes and be as loud as you like!

1. Coquille Saint Jacques – scallops au gratin!

2. Roast Beef Tenderloin with a dreamy mushroom sauce, Fondant Potatoes and Sautéed Garlic Green Beans

3. Panna Cotta – elegant and a lighter way to finish a rich meal

2. Go Big or Go Home

A menu built for gasps! A mighty prime rib, potato gratin topped with melty brie, oysters with a glittering pile of granita…but those pavlova bombs will steal the show and be whispered about for years to come!!

1. Oysters with Cucumber lime jalapeno granita

2. Garlic Prawns with homemade crusty bread for mopping

3. A big juicy Standing Rib Roast with Red Wine Sauce with Brie Dauphinoise Potatoes, Spicy Maple Roasted Carrots with Whipped Yogurt and Garlic Sautéed Spinach

4. Pavlova Bombs

3. The Aussie Classic

While all the other menus are designed for groups of 4 to 10 as sit-down dinners, here’s a big-format menu for a crowd, focussed on all the heavy hitter classics for a big Australian Christmas gathering!

1. A glistening Maple Glazed Ham

2. Roast turkey – whole or breast

3. A side of salmon! Magnificent seafood centrepiece – choose from Christmas Baked Salmon (reader favourite!), Parmesan Crusted Salmon or for something special, a miso marinated Salmon!

4. A big bucket of prawns with your favourite prawn dipping sauce

5. The best Potato Salad of your life (thanks Mrs Brodie!)

6. Australia’s favourite Christmas Salad continues to be this Roast Pumpkin, Spinach and Feta Salad! Pine nuts not optional. 🙂

7. A big Pav piled high with berries and cream or a colourful Trifle! (PS You can buy the cake and custard but please please please make your own jelly, it’s sooooo easy and tastes a gazillion times better!).

4. Make-ahead Dream

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it forever – the only grande centrepiece roast that reheats 100% perfectly is lamb shoulder. 🙂

1. Prawn Cocktail – Straight from the fridge to the table!

2. 3 hour or 12 hour Slow Roasted Lamb shoulder (the only roast that reheats perfectly!), Fall-apart Beef Short Ribs in Red Wine Sauce or Lamb Shanks in Red Wine Sauce (more lamb shank recipes here)

3. Make-ahead Mashed Potato Casserole – skip all or most of the toppings, seeing as there’s tasty sauces with the mains! Reheat covered, you’ll get a skin on it but just scrape that off.

4. Chocolate Mousse (beautiful classic French version) or Chocolate Puddings (easier, richer) – the only thing it needs is a dollop of whipped cream (stabilise it so you can make it ahead).

5. I’ve Spent 3 Days Cooking For You

For the cook who really wants to show off…!!! This is a pretty technical menu that needs to be started 3 days ahead with an estimated hands-on time of around 15 hours. The result speaks for itself – it is serious high-end cooking that will impress any professional chef!

1. Beetroot Cured Salmon – Stunning colours! Once you’ve tried homemade, you will snub store-bought forever. Thinly slice and plate individual portions. Vereeee fine-dining worthy starter!

2. Brioche with Whipped Butter (just beat softened salted butter then pipe into tall swirls and sprinkle with flakes or any fancy salt you have – like Rosemary Salt)

3. Beef Wellington – Iconic. Big impact. Time consuming. Technical. And oh-so-worth it!! Serve with Red Wine Sauce (yes, this calls for homemade beef stock – you don’t get off lightly here!!🤣). Caveat – this is a recipe in my first cookbook Dinner. Apologies to those who don’t have it, it is the only recipe in today’s post that’s not on the website. 🙂

4. Alternative main: Duck Confit. A little less daunting, impressive in its own way!

5. Sides – Creamy Mashed Potato, Glazed Carrots (you can make this while the Wellington is resting), Pomegranate Salad

6. Mirror Glazed Chocolate Cake – With a glaze so mirror-like you’ll catch your proud face staring back at you! This recipe has layers of chocolate cake sandwiched with creamy chocolate buttercream.

6. The Bargain Banquet

Here is a generous, celebratory 4 course meal that will cost less than $50*! A whipped feta to start followed by a creamy sweet potato soup, a golden crackling pork then an enormous pile of profiteroles for dessert, all of these were chosen specifically because you get great bang for your buck!

* I’m in Australia and I did a back-of-envelope based on current grocery store prices (Coles, Woolworths).

1. Whipped Feta Dip with Crostinis – I love how affordable this dip is

2. Sweet Potato Soup – proof that simple ingredients can make a luxe-tasting soup. Don’t skimp on the toppings! They elevate it from mid-week to dinner party territory. 🙂

3. Crispy Crackling Pork Roast with Gravy with Creamy Mashed Potato and Garlic Buttered Peas – At $8/kg, pork shoulder delivers maximum flavour and crackling excitement at a fraction of the price of beef. And yes, I promise your crackling will be seriously crispy if you follow the simple steps!

4. Profiteroles filled with cream

7. “I Don’t Have Time! 😭”

The lowest effort dinner-party-worthy menu I can think of. Everybody dies over the garlic butter with the chicken!! Serious plate-mopping situation. And it all starts with this ⬇️ – a 3 Minute Festive Brie. (Maybe 3 1/2 minutes – depending on how much champagne you’ve had!)

1. 3 Minute Festive Melty Brie – Serious. 3 minutes!

2. Herb & Garlic Chicken Marylands – Slathered in a simple herb garlic butter rub, zero maintenance in the oven. Makes its own butter sauce!

3. Easy Roast Potatoes – Uses small potatoes so you don’t have to peel.

4. Rocket Salad with Shaved Parmesan – The fastest salad in my repertoire. I make this a LOT.

5. Chocolate Covered Strawberries – This has saved me countless times! Melt chocolate in microwave, dip in strawberries, set in fridge. I especially love that it’s not too rich, and it’s bite size.

There you go! I hope you got some new ideas from these menu suggestions. But most importantly:

Don’t forget the most important ingredient….fun!

Christmas isn’t a cooking exam. It’s a bunch of your favourite people getting together to eat good food and have a laugh.

So don’t stress if something cracks, deflates, over-browns or needs a last-minute “fix”! Nobody is here to judge you, everybody is just happy that someone has gone to the effort to make a meal for them and to be around each other. 🙂

So crank up the music, accept chaos as part of the charm and enjoy the cooking as much as the eating. Relax, have fun and enjoy your own party! – Nagi x

Life of Dozer

I was supposed to be decorating the tree….but I got distracted!