The holiday season is one of traditions – many, of course, relating to food and special meals.

Early in our own relationship we were surprised to discover that we both grew up eating the same Christmas dinner – roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. If you aren’t familiar with Yorkshire pudding, you should be! It is a simple egg-heavy batter into which you whip some hot beef fat before pouring into a hot pan (or hot muffin tins) containing a bit of hot beef fat in the bottom.

The pudding rises like magic when it bakes (in Yorkshire, puddings must be at least four inches tall to be considered a “Yorkshire pudding”) and tastes rich and delicious when covered with gravy. We each remember our own mother’s proud moments when early attempts came out just right. Now we hope for the best each year in our own oven!

A good friend of ours grew up near Chicago and his family’s Christmas meal was (and still is!) Italian beef sandwiches. He remembers his mother cooking beef in the slow cooker for hours before shredding it and serving with peperoncini on a hearty Italian loaf. Memories of the entire day center on those sandwiches and the smells and rituals leading up to the meal.

There are plenty of other regional favorites across America. If you live in Virginia, you are more likely to enjoy a ham, while if you live in Southern California or New Mexico, you may spend the whole day making tamales with your family.

Back on the peninsula, all baked goods from The Red Rooster Grocery were prepared in Grandma Petersen’s KitchenAid stand mixer. Grandma Petersen was Mark’s step-father’s mother. She was the wife of a Lutheran minister and we hesitate to even guess how many thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of cookies were made in that mixer before we were fortunate enough to inherit it.

Grandma Petersen spent much of the 1950s in Astoria, Ore., and it is her special holiday recipe that we Northwesterners could very well call our own. You will see that it features a lot of carrots – lucky for us we have access to the very best carrots grown by Nash’s! If you’ve got a crowd coming over to your house this year, consider introducing them to what has become for us, a Northwest holiday classic.

Stuffed Whole Salmon

1 whole salmon, 8 pounds

1 pound saltine-type crackers, crushed

4 cups minced raw carrot

1 cup minced onion

1 cup minced celery

1 cup chopped parsley

1 teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

1 teaspoon sage

½ teaspoon thyme

½ teaspoon dry mustard

2 eggs

1 cup melted butter

Mix ingredients in a large bowl. Stuff salmon as full as you reasonably can. Place in a greased pan and bake at 325 degrees for about 3 hours. (Excess dressing cooked in a dish will take about two hours to bake.) The presentation is really stunning, especially considering the simple preparation. Enjoy!

Update: Maui

In a small victory for those of us who have concerns about genetically engineered food, Maui residents narrowly voted to approve a ballot initiative implementing an island-wide moratorium on genetically engineered organisms until an environmental review proves them safe. Monsanto filed its obligatory lawsuit challenging the initiative in federal court and a coalition of environmental groups has now banned together to request either dismissal of the lawsuit or to let a state court decide the issue. We’ll keep you posted!

We wish our readers the very best this holiday season. The New Year is just around the corner and we look forward to a new world of culinary adventures in 2015. Until then, may we all “eat well and be well.”

Mark Ozias and Lisa Boulware are the former owners of The Red Rooster Grocery. Reach them at columnists@sequimgazette.com.