Dominican Christmas

 EL REBU! (hahah means something like "disorder") ... Christmas is so much fun back at home!

Christmas is a really special holiday, which everyone expects throughout the year. It’s a time to bond with family and really celebrate the day Jesus was born. But to my family, this time of the year involves getting fat in a couple of days and eating as much as you can!

There is something you should know about Dominican people; they will take one day of holiday and convert it into four days of partying. Therefore my Christmas dinner consists of two Christmas dinners and one lunch the day after. Usually no one can really decide where to make the dinner so we end up with two to three Christmas dinners in ONE night!  Of course usually one involves my grandparents from my mom’s side and the other my grandparents from my dads side. Since we cant miss either, we must cut the night into two and go to both (its not like we have a problem with two dinners!),.

So, what my mom’s family really does is that all guests have to bring at least one dish of food. Since we have been doing these dinners for years we already know who brings what. The salad and best dressing are provided by my aunt (from my moms side) just because she can’t really cook; the last time she did we spent Christmas in the hospital. Its like everyone knows what not to eat or what to put in their napkin when no one is looking from the pile o food.

There is something from this dinner that makes us all come in the first place and that is my grandmother’s turkey. She does the best turkey ever! And I have to say that is probably 90% of the reason people still go to that dinner. She marinates the turkey two whole days before so that all the flavors are concentrated and the filling is the best part! She marinates it with salt, pepper, turkey stock and herbs and lets it all just come together in the fridge for two days. The filling is made out of raisins and the puree of sun dried tomatoes and other hers such as basil. She then fills the turkey with the mixture three hours before guests arrive and bakes it all for three hours in really low heat. The meat is soft and tender and it even attracts the neighbors into coming to say Merry Christmas just to see if they can get lucky with a piece. She makes three turkeys since my family exaggeration with food is always a tradition. There are about only thirty people in this dinner (and there are three turkeys) and there is chicken, lots of rice, paella (seafood rice), and pork. So, every year we decide what dinner to go to first by what we did the year before.

Now, when speaking of my dad’s side its something different. My grandmother cooks all the food for the family, which in total is about fifty people. But if you thought that because she is cooking everything that she would be more discrete about the amount, you were wrong! She cooks for like two hundred people and ends up with left over food for a week! The one thing we all expect is her special “moro de habichuelas”, which translates into rice and beans mixed together. This is a typical food for Dominicans but no one gets how hers is so special. Well. I know the secret! She makes the white rice first (no need to explain how she does that) and then she does the beans by adding lots of garlic, onion, and spices. She lets the beans boil with all the veggies and spices for five hours in low heat. She then adds the rice and mixes it all together, and finally adds a touch of hot chili pepper to make it a bit spicy. It’s delightful! The smell is amazing and you can perceive the wonderful aroma from far away.

So, when going to these two dinners, we all fast for like two days in order to git all the food in our stomach! Both of my grandmothers always want us to repeat and eat more. I have always wondered if it is because they forget about us serving ourselves the first time. But oh well, after such a meal there is only one thing to expect and that is the lunch of the next day. We call it “calentado”, which means the heating of all the left over food from both dinners, which is usually a lot). One thing is for sure, after being n my family dinner you are going to need two months of workout in the gym!