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On Christmas Eve, we have a duck or roast pork with caramelised potatoes, braised red cabbage and gravy. For dessert, we have ris a l'amande, a rice pudding, and whoever gets the whole almond in it wins an extra present. Then we dance around the tree and sing carols.

I love spending time with my family and friends during the holidays, and my favorite holiday tradition would be the pozole that my mom makes almost every Christmas. It's the best!

My mother loved entertaining, and I've followed suit, so we have big celebrations for New Year, Passover, Thanksgiving and birthdays.

I consider a good dinner party at our house to be where people drink and eat more than they're meant to. My husband is a really fantastic cook. His mother is Italian and if you walk into our house, we assume you're starving.

My Italian granny and my mother made great spaghetti, but it wasn't a kind of southern Italian, Godfather-esque kind of thing - it was a wonderful, big mixing pot of all kinds of people - when you came home from school and your mum wasn't in, there were lots of people you could go to.

For holidays, I like doing special cheery touches around the table, like color-coordinating the plates and napkins to fit the theme.

I like to eat pizza and spaghetti pomodoro, and I'm crazy for dessert. I like all of them: cassata, cheesecake, biscuits.

For many of us, Christmas lunch is the most special meal of the year - and I certainly want nothing but the very best for this celebration.

I'm very Italian, so I love cooking for friends. Whether it's Valentine's Day and my boyfriend and girlfriends' boyfriends are away, or someone's in town, or someone had a baby, I cook.