Alternative Christmas Dinners

Christmas time is gorging time, but what if you don’t fancy eating turkey for every meal from now until January? Well help is at hand, as we’ve scouted out some alternatives to the Christmas classics.

Alternatives to turkey: Goose, fish and reindeer

We'll start with the big one – the meat – and get straight to the recommending. If you don’t fancy turkey, why not try goose? An OG Christmas classic much-loved by downtrodden loan clerks and green felt frogs, depending on which version of A Christmas Carol you watch, it’s got a theatrical edge. Goose feels like a dramatic meal, whereas turkey is just a big, daft-looking chicken with a funny neck.

Then there are the potatoes. The best roast potatoes are cooked in goose fat for that super-crispy, slightly-meaty vibe, and what contains goose fat? A goose, that’s what.

Of course, there are some downsides to inviting Mr Goose round for Christmas dinner. Goose can be harder to find than turkey, tends to cost a bit more, and you’ll probably end up with the same amount of leftovers as you would with a turkey. Oh, and we weren’t kidding about the goose fat either – get a bib, buy some extra kitchen roll, and prepare somewhere to lie down after dinner. We recommend a small pillow fort, with a Santa hat on the roof to make it festive.

If you want a Christmas dinner that tastes good but also shows off your disdain for kitschy festive flim-flam, go for venison or, better yet, reindeer. ‘No sacred cows this Yuletide season,’ you’ll say, picking a strand of Blitzen from your teeth and trying to avoid eye contact with the mortified nephew across the table.

Maybe you don’t want to spend your dinner crushing symbols of youthful imagination – that’s your call – but deer is delicious, lean, and so seasonal that they literally tell stories about it saving Christmas. It won’t be saving anything covered in gravy, but that’s neither here nor there.

If you fancy a fishy alternative, and also want to bring a bit of continental class to your festive feeding, try the Portuguese delicacy Bacalhau. The salted cod dish can be prepared in dozens of different ways, but the typical Christmas version sits alongside kale, potatoes and vegetables. It’s different, slightly more veggie-friendly, and thanks to the kale it may make you appear vaguely trendy.

Christmas pudding alternatives

With the main course done, thoughts move to dessert, and the seemingly inevitable Christmas pudding. Packed with rich dried fruit (as well as anything else that happened to be lying around at the time of making) and matured for days on end, getting through a portion on Christmas Day is a bit like trying to eat a sofa cushion. A spiced, fruity sofa cushion.

Then there’s the tradition of dousing the thing in brandy and setting it on fire, which doesn’t sound too smart when you consider the amount of highly flammable wrapping paper lying around on Christmas Day. But what to have instead? Rather than going for the cake which tries to do everything at once, we’ve picked out three options which hit the key Christmas pudding points.

If you fancy a fruit-packed dessert that doesn’t remind you of the Death Star, rustle up a stollen. A bready cake filled with dried fruit and marzipan, it’s a lighter alternative to Christmas pudding which doesn’t require endless mixing but still looks well festive.

The bibingka is the way to go if you fancy a Christmas dessert with a unique edge. A traditional Filipino Christmas dessert, it’s made with rice flour, coconut milk and eggs, cooked on top of a banana leaf – it wins bonus points for reminding us all that, somewhere out there, it isn’t raining sideways the whole time.

And if your favourite part of Christmas pudding is the mild pyromania involved in setting the thing on fire, go for a Baked Alaska. Cake, topped with ice cream, enveloped in meringue, then set ablaze with a blowtorch.

After going at your dessert with fire, you’ll end up with something that’s glazed and warm on the outside but cold and soft on the inside, leaving you feeling like a cross between a magician and a Bond villain. All that, and the lack of booze involved means the chances of keeping your eyebrows into Boxing Day are that much higher.

Alternative Christmas drinks

Finally, booze. Christmas drinking has come to mean one thing in recent years – mulled wine. Go to any Christmas market, and you’ll find vats of the stuff swilling about the place. It’s warming and tasty at first, but then you notice that every time you head outside, you catch the whiff of an undetermined array of spices and general redness. By midway through December the air is fully mulled, and a deep breath will have you coughing up cloves and bits of orange peel.

So what are the alternatives to mulled wine? Well, there’s mulled cider – and before you all start muttering the word ‘bullshit’ under your breath, there is a big difference. The lower strength of cider compared to wine makes it a smoother, fresher option. If you chuck in some lemon and a bit of whisky liqueur, you have a drink which has a genuine range of flavours, rather than tasting of a colour and maybe some nutmeg.

Want something non-mulled? Try out Ponche Crema, a Trinidadian liqueur made from condensed milk, eggs, rum and sugar that’s a bit like a souped-up eggnog. Take that ingredients list, flavour with nutmeg and cinnamon, and watch everyone go crazy for twenty minutes before falling asleep on the sofa, allowing you to change the channel on the TV without causing a diplomatic incident.

Or alternatively, just knock together a mulled wine without the wine? A fruit punch flavoured with the usual mix of festive spices and aromatics will have much the same convivial, festive effect as a mulled wine, but with fewer half-cut arguments over who ate the last of the After Eights. And in the end, isn’t avoiding enormous bust-ups and eating a lot what Christmas is all about? It isn’t? Well, it is for us.