These are my two favorite recipes in that regard. This is stuff we have for Easter & Christmas, though, not frequently:
"30-minute" home-baked potatoes
(cooking takes 30 min. for 8 oz potatoes)
4 similarly-sized russet potatoes
scrubbed, dried, and poked on each side a few times with a fork
The goal is to time the meal so that the potatoes will stay in the oven until you are ready to eat them.
Preheat oven to 450 degrees, placing an open rack in the middle. Arrange potatoes evenly in a microwave oven. Cook on high at 3 minutes intervals, rotating or flipping each time, until they just start to “give” when squeezed. Transfer carefully to the oven, baking directly on the rack. Cook until a skewer glides easily through the flesh of each potato, about 20 minutes more. Serve or transfer to a low oven to hold.
When ready to serve, slice an “X” in the top of the potato and press on the ends of the potato to push the flesh up and out through the “X”. This lets the steam escape, which will keep the insides of the potato fluffy. If the potatoes have to wait at room temperature before being opened, the flesh will become dense instead of fluffy.
I would suggest you teach your husband to make these. He will love them; I think he’ll be more than willing to do the work involved. Nothing gives more satisfaction for the price than a perfectly-baked russet!
Beef
The beef–if you want the best steak for the money, IMHO, it is the top blade steak (aka blade steak). It has very nice flavor, it is reasonably tender, and a very nice price (considering it is steak), but here is the catch: It has a big seam of gristle running right through the middle. If you’re serving finicky eaters, you are kind of stuck making kabobs out of it, but really the gristle comes out very easily. It is not always available at grocery stores unless you ask for it.
Here is the problem: With steak, there is a degree to which you get what you pay for and if you do not know what you are doing you can ruin even a good steak by butchering it too thinly or unevenly–I have had to pass over many sad cases at our local grocery stores–or by cooking it incorrectly. If your family isn’t going to be left mooning for what the restaurants can do, you’ll want to go to the library and learn at the knee of Cook’s Illustrated, or from Bruce Aidell’s “The Complete Meat Cookbook”. I suggest you buy a big hunk of meat and cook it as a roast. It is much easier to get a great result at home this way. As you have noted, you can throw in a good bottle of wine and still come in far cheaper than if you went to a restaurant.
For holidays, though, I always go for a bone in prime rib roast, because it is less work. I always let it sit on a rack in my refrigerator with no plastic to age for 3-4 days. Even as little as 24 hours helps–you’ll get more intense flavor, it is more tender, and it costs you nothing but space in the refrigerator. (This is not a bad time to buy two roasts and freeze one, because prime rib is often a “loss leader” around Christmas–be sure to buy a roast with a fat cap covering its whole top.)
To dry-age: Untie the roast; the butcher will often have already cut it away from the bones. If not, cut the roast away from the bone rack (cutting right up against the bones), then salt and pepper all over (about 1 T table salt or 2 T kosher salt and 1/2 T pepper for a 7 lb. bone-in roast). Set the roast onto the rack of bones (to save space) and set in the refrigerator with no plastic or other covering. The idea is to let it dry. (If the fat cap is very thick, you can score it to let the salt in, but I don’t bother. I also salted right before cooking for many years, and it was good that way, too. It is the aging that counts.)
To cook it, you must have a probe-type meat thermometer. Yes, it’s $20, but you’ll save that the first time you make this. Let the roast sit out on the counter an hour before starting. Turn on the oven to a low heat. If you have an oven thermometer and know your oven is really at the temperature you think (ovens are often off by as much as 50 degrees, especially at the high and low ends of the temp range), you can roast as low as 200 degrees; otherwise, use 250 F. Cook until the roast is 110 F. If you are in a hurry, turn down just to 180 or so, but otherwise turn the oven and keep the door closed, allowing the roast coast to in to 120 F for rare, 125 F for medium rare. Then remove the roast from the oven and cover in foil.
This is very important: Whatever your husband or anyone else wants you to do, DO NOT THINK ABOUT CARVING THIS ROAST BEFORE IT HAS RESTED AT LEAST 20 MINUTES OUT OF THE OVEN, and preferably 30 minutes or more. My husband used to hate this, but that was before he cut too early and saw a) the grey rim, b) the raw interior, and c) all the juice all over the cutting board instead of the evenly-rosy beauty that he expected. You can let it sit out of the oven for an hour or so, even. If you are afraid it has cooled too much, it can be return to a hot oven (like your potato oven) for 5 minutes or so before you carve it, or even run it under a broiler to brown up the top more to your liking.
Does this sound like a lot of work? It really is a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, which is why I like this for holidays–it is obviously a Sunday thing and not a week night thing!!–but you’re already overburdened, so you may not want to do this yourself. Meat-o-philes, however, get into this kind of thing. Let your husband learn to do it. He will like the results enough, I think he’ll go for it. The main thing is that he needs a proper education to get results at home that can hope to compete with a restaurant. Send him to Cook’s Illustrated or books by Bruce Aidell’s…those folks know from meat, and because they are well-regarded and well-known, the library is very likely to have their cookbooks.
I grew up an only child in a pretty small family. While we didn’t have extravaganzas birthdays were a big deal and celebrated usually with dinner either a special home cooked meal or out to your favorite place depending on money and what the person preferred. My beloved is also an only child so it was similar for him, I don’t consider that to be stressful or over the top. My bday is just over a week before Christmas and I make a “big deal” so to speak because its Christmas for everyone but its only my birthday for me, if I had to choose I would take a bday gift every time (and I think Christmas is severely over commercialized) My (step) brother agrees and his birthday is the day after Christmas.
It sort of works out because both our birthdays and our anniversary are within two weeks time. So it’s generally a festive couple of weeks. 