Come and take a peek at Christmas dinner at our place! From an orange, clove and ginger glazed ham, spice rubbed and freekah stuffed spatchcocks to salads like radicchio, fennel, orange & candied walnut salad or roast zucchini, wild rice and cashew cream salad to a giant Pastel de nata or Portuguese custard tart, we have all bases covered! Merry Christmas!
Christmas Dinner is always a time for celebration but I also believe that nobody should be alone for Christmas so every year Christmas dinner tends to be made up of a mix of family and friends. Some have met before, some haven't. This year's Christmas was made up of my parents, Queen Viv and her son Michael and two of her friends from New Zealand Julie and Alistair who joined us for Christmas a couple of years ago.
Owing to a family situation (ahem!) Mr NQN's side of the family would not be joining us (it's too long a story but definitely not a boring story, one day I'll tell you all about it but it requires finger puppets ;)). And so we settled on eight for dinner. Then my trainer Nina mentioned that she and her fiance Garth would be alone on Christmas and were none too happy about it. "Well then come over and have Christmas with us!" I said. If someone looks sad at being alone at Christmas, I will just invite them. Mr NQN takes a deep breath and counts the chairs -I am happy to share a chair.
She is not just a trainer so I feel bad saying that she is just my trainer, we get along famously and our sessions are very entertaining. Also like most of my friends, she has different taste in men so I know that if we were ever single and went out, we wouldn't fight over men. In the last session she stopped to show me a video of her biggest actor crush called Terry Crews.
"Look! He has so many muscles!" she said exclaiming excitedly.
"Oh my god Nina, his body looks like a bag of oranges!" I said laughing.
You see dear Nina likes men that can build her stuff and pick her up over their head. I like sweet guys and she calls my crushes, "Pretty boys with too much hair gel." I call her crushes hulks. See? We'd never go for the same kind of guy.
I digress, this Christmas everyone brought something-Queen Viv brought a ham that I glazed and warmed. My parents brought seafood and Nina and Garth brought the champagne. Even a few weeks before Christmas I really had no idea what I was going to serve until it hit me when we visited Byron Bay and we had some gorgeously fresh salads.
Christmas is usually quite warm so I decided to recreate three of the salads that we had and make some roasted spatchcocks. It was ten people in total and I'm all for bigger crowds at Christmas having grown up in a relatively small family. We ran out of room especially when my parents brought a kilo of prawns and some of the plumpest, freshest Pacific oysters so we served each person's spatchcock on their plate.
Dessert was going to be something else altogether but I was flicking through a copy of a new cookbook. I know, I know, loyal readers will know that I have sworn off cookbooks because they are generally so unreliable but have you ever seen something and known that it was what you wanted before knowing what you wanted? Okay yes I sound drunk on cocktails but I'm not.
Anyway, I made it the day before Christmas and you know what? It was really terrible. Like GHASTLY and there was nothing I could do to fix the taste. Mr NQN tasted one bite and screwed up his face. So gnashing my teeth the night before I decided to do something that I knew would work but in a different form: a large custard tart with fresh raspberries based on the Pastel de nata or Portuguese custard tarts. And phew! Thankfully that worked because I was on the brink of sending Mr NQN out to buy dessert.
I also knew that we could always rely on my Dear Reader Matilda's cookies. Every year for the past few years she has generously sent me a box of her divine Italian cookies and every year I watch the postbox eagerly, never presuming she will but secretly hoping that she will send some! Her delicious biscotti and ciambelle are always looked upon eagerly by my friends and family and she is part of our family Christmas.
So enough about the dramas that always seem to befall Christmas, onto the recipes! And Dear Reader I really do wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and I must thank you so much for reading my little blog. I hope that Christmas is truly one in which you feel loved and appreciated and one where you find yourself smiling from ear to ear!
Lots of Love,
Lorraine xxx
So my lovely Dear Readers, what food do you look forward to most during Christmas? And what divine presents did you get? Do you eat yourself silly during Christmas? Or is that just me? ;) And do you always run out of room on the table (or is that just us?).
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