And A Merry Christmas Was Had By All

At least I hope so - in spite of the heat on your side of the world.

Thank you very much for my family gift, Aileen.  What a lovely surprise and a treasure. Lots of lovely family memories there, and now I have absolutely no excuse for forgetting people's birthdays!  Apart from my malfunctioning middle-aged brain, that is...

Daniel and I had a nice quiet day.  We enjoyed it so much last year, we thought we'd try it again.  Although we did have a dinner guest this year.  Tanya, our friend Mark's wife, is a doctor and she was on call Christmas day, so we invited Mark over to have a meal with us, and then we sent him home with leftovers for Tanya.

As is so often the case with us, the focus was on the food.  If you haven't already heard, we managed to get our hands on a locally produced smoked ham for dinner.  It was almost, but not quite, as good as Mum's, but easily the best ham I've had in the US; tender and juicy and flavourful.  The supermarket ham here is injected with a solution of water and some sort of chemicals to keep it tender, but it seems to me that if you cook it carefully you don't need all that junk, plus which you get ham that actually has texture instead of being kind of mushy. We had the ham for mains, with steamed vegies and a potato casserole that was made with garlic, cheese and cream. Mmmmmmm!  Oh, there was mustard and homemade cranberry relish on the side.

We had an entree, too, but I got all carried away by the ham so I mentioned it first.  For entree, I made a salad.  Pay attention to this one, because it's absolutely scrumptious:  2 baby fennel bulbs (or one large, which is all we could get), two firm-but-ripe pears, some toasted walnuts (or pecans) and some chunks of parmesan cheese.  Slice the fennel and pear very thinly (I used a mandolin for the fennel and a very sharp knife for the pears) and dress it with a dressing made from two tablespoons good quality olive oil and one tablespoon lemon juice seasoned to taste.  Sprinkle with the nuts and cheese and some of the fennel fronds. Enjoy!  It was enough for four entree servings.  I think it would make a lovely lunch with a few slices of ham on the side.

Mark didn't stay for dessert, and since we were both full, I made it later in the evening.  I made an apple galette on puff pastry that looked a lot fancier than the effort it took would seem to warrant.  Daniel gave me some good quality heavy-gauge baking trays for Christmas (the ones we had were cheapy old non-stick ones and pretty much worn out) and a couple of SilPat sheets to go on them.  Don't know if you've heard of them, but they're a non-stick silicone liner you can put on baking trays so you a) don't have to grease the trays, and b) don't have to keep buying baking paper. They're a lot easier to clean, too. I got to use a tray and a liner for the dessert, and they worked a treat.  Nothing stuck and, more importantly, the pastry didn't burn in spite of being in a 220-degree oven. 

Oh, I almost forgot to mention breakfast.  I made some corn and ricotta hotcakes with cilantro in them, and served them with an egg, a couple of bits of bacon and a few prawns, some fresh chilli sliced thinly, and oyster sauce.  There was an awful lot of the hotcake mix, but it actually kept very well so I cooked up the rest of it for lunch today (with ham on the side, of course).

We're not too sure how Maggie spent Christmas.  She disappeared when Mark came over and we didn't see her until much later in the evening.  We suspect she was holed up somewhere drinking mousenog and nibbling on crispy squirrel bits.  Dobie decided that since I wasn't using my pillow, he would...

What can I say?  He doesn't suffer from a lack of entitlement...

So all in all it was a good day, and I hope yours were, too.  I haven't been up to much today - just pottering around and working on a baby blanket for a baby that's due any day now.

I have a week's holiday ahead of me, so I've lined up some good books and plan to do not too much until I go back to work.

Cheers!