I loved having Christmas recipes grouped into one book that I was excited to explore. So many make-ahead choices were so helpful during the hectic season.

It will be a book I will use year after year.

A truly stunning Christmas cookbook! Gorgeous photos, luscious recipes for high end entertaining, even tips for dealing with holiday stress. Gives great good cheer even as I review this on a glorious June day. Now, where is that mistletoe so I can shamelessly kiss my husband? 5/5 stars

Pub Date 16 Oct 2018

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. Opinions are mine. #HomeMadeChristmas #NetGalley

The pictures in this book are stunning. The recipes are organized in such a way that tackling them feels manageable. However, several recipes require an experienced hand.

Genuine and pure conform food for Christmas and Easter celebrations. Hearth warning recipes with lovey results. Yvette made easy to follow tutorials with colorful pictures.

#HomeMadeChristmas #NetGalley

It seems most of us want new ideas as the Christmas holidays come upon us. Home Made Christmas by veteran cookbook author, Yvette van Boven, is full of new ideas to make our holidays more exciting. Many of the recipes are make-ahead, which help all of us save time during the busiest time of the year. Since van Boven is Dutch, she brings a European ambiance to the book, and includes recipes that aren’t made as extensively in the US.

Mincemeat may not be popular in the US, but when it is made the European way, and especially van Boven’s way, it is over the top and perfect for filling tiny tarts, thumbprints in cookies, coffee cakes, breads, and pies. It can be made far ahead, which lessens the stress of the holidays.

Other excellent recipes include: Krispy Christmas Wreaths (not those green marshmallow things) are chewy, crispy chocolate wreaths decorated with colored cherries, Syrup Pudding with Ginger & Orange (Yum), Sausage Buns with Fennel (easy), and Apple, Walnut, Cranberry & Brown Rice Salad. The Chocolate Caramel Pie is decadent, and Pork Rib Roast with Prune & Pear Sauce. There is also an excellent recipe for Red Cabbage with Pears & Hazelnuts which is a tradition in many homes for Thanksgiving and Christmas in families with German or Dutch heritage.

The photographs in the cookbook are excellent, and make it difficult to choose which recipe to make next. All told, this cookbook brings a unique collection of recipes that will be welcomed in homes during the holidays. The recipes are well written, and most are simple to make. The book is well-organized and the recipes are suitable for cooks at any level of expertise. Highly recommended and lots of fun.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.

Thank you Abrams for a review copy of Home Made Christmas,

This festive cookbook had a lot of good ideas for everything from Christmas morning breakfast to cocktails after dessert. The pictures were gorgeous as well. The recipes are well laid out and very easy to follow. This would be the perfect gift for the Christmas host who wants to shake up her menu a little without straying too far from the classics.

Homemade for Christmas is a cookbook that was years in the making. Yvette van Boven has written Christmas recipes for years in newspapers and magazines. Now she has brought them together in this yummy book. There are tons of recipes all great for adding to the Holiday table or just a way to bring the holidays to your kitchen year round. I personally love the fact that there are make ahead recipes. I know in my home, I have a small kitchen but I feed about 35 people every year during all the main holidays especially Christmas and Thanksgiving. I run on crunch time trying to get everything together and cooked so having some make ahead recipes is amazing. My right hand has nerve damage so I can only cut, chop, peel, and mix so much at a time.

There are over 100 recipes with step by step instructions. There are menu ideas to plan ahead the whole meal. There are tons of photos as well.

Side note some of the recipes are simple but most do take skill. These recipes are truly bomb shells not really simple country fare. Some of the ingredients are hard or expensive to come by as well.

I received this book from the Author or Publisher via Netgalley.com and chose to leave this review.

I really enjoyed this cookbook. The recipes were ones I would actually make and not hard to follow. I have several lined up to make now. I love the Christmas theme.

First off this book did not work for me but I think others may really like it. The photos were superb, the recipes looked easy to follow, but for me I was looking more of a homemade gifts. Like jams or jellies etc... Like I said just not for me, others will like the ideas she has for entertaining but again they were a little too extreme for me. I am more of an old fashion vintage keep it simple type of guy and for others this book might be what others would want for entertaining maybe not for kids and baking cookies and not worrying about the mess until later, that is for me, and yes I do my own clean up. Overall pictures good easy to follow.

.When I first hear about this cookbook, I had no idea how spectacular it would be. The photos alone held me captivated for hours. As for the recipes, there are some I can’t wait to try, but most that I know are out of my expertise. But who knows, maybe.

Chapters include Christmas . . . Stress-Relief Tips, The Morning, Snacks, Small Plates, Main Courses, Panty, Menus, and more, there’s something wonderful to be found on every page.

With recipes like . . . Squash, Feta & Sage Pull-Apart Bread, Oatmeal Pancakes, Pine Syrup, Advocaat (Dutch Eggnog), Spicy Goat Cheese Spread with Home Made Melba Toast, Deep-Friend Pickles with Buttermilk Dip, Shrimp Bisque & Creamy Anchovy Rouille, Portobello & Pear Salad, Smoked Chicken Salad with Grapes & Parmesan-Tarragon Dressing, Pork Rib Roast with Prune & Pear Sauce, Christmas Porchetta, Mashed Potatoes with Celeriac & Apple, Trifle with Salty Caramel, Cheesecake Cream & Chewy Brownies, Warm Custard Pudding with Banana, Belgian Waffles & Meringue to name just a few, you’ll turn your Christmas celebration into a gala!

While not as homey as I thought HOME MADE CHRISTMAS would be, I did learn a lot about flavor combinations I would never have thought of otherwise. And as I said above, the photos alone are amazing.

If you’re looking for to elevate your Christmas party and/or meal this year, HOME MADE CHRISTMAS is the book for you.

Homemade Christmasby Yvette van Boven includes over 100 recipes for the holiday season. The recipes included are best for more adventurous eaters. The majority of them would not go over well with the crowd I host. The pictures included are lovely, but the recipes are simply not for me. I cannot imagine convincing my family to eat broccoli pot pie. I did see a few dessert recipes that were good. The Trifle with salty caramel, cheesecake cream, & chewy brownies sounds especially good. I recommend you take a look at the recipes first especially if your family is not full of picky eaters.

Very festive! A book chock full of great recipes and tips for entertaining during the holidays. The recipes are accessible and do-able but have a special feel about them. I enjoyed the menus provided that give the reader a sense of how to pull together a large meal or even a small intimate Christmas dinner.

A gorgeous book that will give you that holiday feeling, whether you're preparing for a houseful or guests or just looking to enjoy a lovely cookbook full of Christmasy pictures. Glossy production values make it seem like a Martha Stewart book, but with more approachable recipes and entertaining suggestions.

We are always on the search for new innovative cookbooks for our TX Non-Fiction collection due to the popularity of our Cooking Demo event. These recipes were so unique that I actually bookmarked over 15 in the book due to their photographic appeal and easy to follow recipe and directions. We have three criteria we follow when it comes to reviewing cookbooks: 1. Are their photos after each recipe of the final dish. 2. Are the ingredients easily accessible. 3. Is the recipe easy to follow and will they please the crowd. I am happy to say that this cookbook fits all of that criteria.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. We will definitely consider this title for our TX Non-Fiction collection. That is why we are giving this book 5 stars.

Home Made Christmas is a gorgeous cookbook, filled to the brim with mouth-watering recipes for all holiday - and beyond - occasions. Each recipe includes a lovely well-staged picture, and there are helpful preparation tips. I have many pages bookmarked to go back and try, and I liked the feature at the end with a section of menus for different settings and crowd sizes.

For those like me who LOVES to get a head start on Christmas planning then this book is for you. This book is stocked with every single thing you need to have a great holiday without the stress. It has recipes for sauces that can be kept in the pantry, sweets, breakfast, lunch, brunch, and dinner. There are even menus included to give you ideas of what to cook so you can shop for all of your needs at once.. The menus are for everyone including vegetarians so there will be something for everyone. There are even homemade gift ideas included.

I can't wait this is going to really help me get into my groove this year.

I expected to like this book a lot more than I did. I cook everything home made, so it should have been right up my alley. First off, I assumed by the title that it would be homemade food-based gifts and goodies (cookies, fudge, canned jellies, mixes, etc.) and it is not that at all. It is simply a cookbook for Christmas entertaining of a decidedly sophisticated European style.

Pros:

There are many color photos, including lots of charming winter photos of the author and her European Christmas holidays (think her dog running in the snow, her shaking a cranberry margarita, people outside her house in the snow by a BBQ grill) and the food styling is quite spectacular.

Almost every dish has a photo.

There is a very European feel to it, which will appeal to people who are smitten with things like the Dutch lifestyle and Hygge.

The dishes are likely to please sophisticated foodies.

There are recipes for basics like homemade broths, mayo, compotes, etc. (though they are more complicated than basic ones).

Cons:

This is not a good cookbook for folks who are gluten free. Bread and flour are mainstays of most of the dishes, especially the breakfasts (which are very bread-based).

While there are some vegetarian recipes, they're heavy on dairy and eggs so this is completely out for vegans or people who will be hosting vegans.

The recipes call for expensive specialty ingredients.

Most of the recipes struck me as quite "frou frou." Homemade food can be delicious without being pretentious. This stuff seemed straight out of a gourmet magazine, not from anybody's family Christmas menu I've ever known.

Most of the dishes just didn't strike me as particularly appealing. For all the work they involved, they tended to make good photos (though not appealing, more artistic) but I rarely saw one that I'd actually want to eat.

Most of the dishes are complicated and take a long time to execute.

This example menu she assembled give examples of the dishes within:

Four Course Menu--
Rabbit (or chicken) Rillettes
Leek & Potato Creme Soup with Fried Scallops and Parsley Oil
Guinea Fowl with Prosecco-Green Grape Sauce
Broccoli Pot Pies
Mustard Gratin with Potatoes and Parsnips
Light Brown Pavlova with Poached Pears and Chocolate

This is a book that will strike a chord with a very specific type of reader. For those readers, I suspect they'll fall in love with it. It was not a good fit for my tastes or my family's needs, and I suspect it will not be a good fit for many others. I'd advise looking through it to see if it's your aesthetic before purchasing.

I received a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

The perfect addition to any recipe book collection. If you love homemade Christmas recipes then this book is definitely for you. I can wait to try making some of them this year for us to enjoy.

This is really a mixed bag for me.

First off, I love that there's a decent number of vegetarian dishes in here, yay for food that I can eat. Although I did notice one potentially vegetarian dish, the cabbage, that had fish sauce stuck in it. So hopefully any non-vegetarian hosts would catch that and not serve it to vegetarian guests thinking it would be fine for them. But there were also a lot of dishes that looked too froufrou for me to think about making for a holiday dinner. If I tried to serve some of these, my family would look at me like I'd gone off the deep end. The "beets, smoked curd, & roasted buckwheat" in particular looked more like an art piece than a side.

Secondly, I really appreciated the number of photos in this cookbook. But on the other hand, some of the pictures didn't look appetizing. Which is weird because overall the photography was pretty decent and then every so often there's a picture that just looks not appetizing. To be fair though, I'm not sure how anyone can make that "terrine of wild rabbit and pistachios" look good though. Ugh.

Overall this feels more like a check out from the library and sample a few recipes book than a must buy kitchen staple. I could never see myself, nor most other people, fixing a lot of the recipes in this book. It's still worth a quick look though to pick out a few recipes.

I'm not usually one to rush the holidays but Home Made Christmas put me in such a spirited mood. The recipes were cozy, rustic and some were special enough to give out as gift if one so desired. The photography was full of whimsy, yet reflective of holiday cheer.