Friday Favourites - The Festive Special

Well those Christmas commercials just keep on coming. I think I see 2 or 3 new ones everyday. I know because that is exactly how many different toys Abby asks for on a daily basis. Today I saw my most favourite one of all. The one I wait all year for. The Festive Special is back baby.

Over the years our family has spent a lot of money at Swiss Chalet. It's been our "go-to" restaurant for as long as I remember. My Grandparents were particularly fond of it. No weekend visit to Grandma and Grandpa's was complete without a trip to Swiss Chalet for a quarter chicken dinner and a Shirly Temple complete with maraschino cherry and plastic sword. I remember once eating take-out Swiss Chalet on plates my Grandma had warmed in the oven because it apparently went against her English sensibilities to eat directly from the take-out container. At the time it was a tinfoil dish with a crimped edge that folded over the cardboard lid. I wonder what she would think of the new high tech plastic divided dish with domed lid? I'm guessing she'd still be warming those plates in the oven.

As I got older we still ate at Swiss Chalet, but no where near as much as when I was a kid. Although when I was pregnant with Abby I ate a lot of Swiss Chalet. So much that eventually we didn't even need to order. Yep, we ate there a lot.

Now the Festive Special has been around since the dawn of time. It's a basic quarter chicken dinner with cranberry and stuffing. Back in the day you'd get a toblerone bar, but they've since swtiched to the decandent Lindt truffles. As much as I love toblerone bars, moving to Lindt truffles was smart because those things are better than sex. My mom was shocked recently to hear that I enjoyed toberlone bars. I had once professed to hate them and at the time I truly did. As kids, over the Christmas season we would ingest more than our fair share of Toblerone bars thanks to Swiss Chalet. Then Christmas would roll around and my Grandma's assumption was if Toblerone bars were good enough for Swiss Chalet to give out as gifts well then they were good enough for her too. What I ended up with was a severe case of Toblerone overload that took me years to get over.

Maybe when I head out for that traditional Festive Special dinner I'll order a Shirley Temple just for old times sake.