Christmas Dinner At Our Home

We were very thrilled to host our first family Christmas at our home. I planned a menu of prime rib, Yorkshire puddings, mashed sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts braised in cream, green bean casserole. Our dinner went quite well. It did take a long time to cook the prime rib roast. I followed the recipe in Cook’s Illustrated (actually every dish was a Cook's Illustrated dish, come to think of it) and my hunk of meat was closer to 9 pounds than the 8 pounds called for, so it really took a long time at 250 degrees. However, it tasted wonderful, so it was worth the wait. I planned for dinner to be ready @ 4:30 realizing it might actually be 5:00 realistically, but then everyone wanted to open presents and I hadn’t put the roast in yet so the roast got put on hold. The gift opening took so long so when I went back into the kitchen I was 1 ½ hours behind schedule (I actually made a timeline on a spreadsheet!) so our dinner was actually on the table at around 6:30. Everyone loved the food and we all fit at the table so overall it was a great evening. One snafu: Our main floor toilet got stopped up just before bedtime so everyone had to either go to the basement or upstairs to use the bathroom. Luckily, that wasn’t a real problem. Dave got the toilet working again this morning. I spent the morning straightening up because the cleaning team came at 2:00 to clean the house. Thankfully!