An Australian Christmas
So what exactly is an Australian Christmas? It's not really too different from a UK Christmas - just less focus on hot food and more cold meats. And obviously, like every Christmas, it varies from house to house. This is the Christmas lunch I've been having since a child and, having missed two already, I really needed one this year. We decided to celebrate our Australian Christmas on Sunday so we had lots of time to eat all the leftovers without infringing on our eating ability on the traditional Christmas Day.
We ate:
Prawn cocktail
Sadly, these prawns aren't up to scratch size-wise, but this was still tasty! Prawns with a 50:50 mix of crab meat (white and brown meat), avocado and home-made seafood sauce, all served on little gem lettuce. This has always been my favourite part of Christmas lunch (well, apart from dessert) and it was lovely with crab meat - although this serving was a bit too big for a starter.
Home-made seeded loaf
A delicious home-made loaf made by the baker of the house (husband, not me) which was perfectly baked. We will definitely be having this bread again.
The star of the show - a 2.7kg honey roast ham.
Sides of pigs in blankets, prunes in bacon and roast potatoes
Side of crispy kale with lemon
There was no way that two of us were going to eat all that ham, but I love having leftover ham to eat for days after Christmas. Part of it we froze (probably 1.5kgs) and we gave away another part of it, and then we stuffed ourselves silly on the rest. One night I made a super quick pasta with some of the ham thanks to Nigella's recipe of
pasta with ham, peas and cream
.
Pavlova with berries and cream
The other best part of Christmas lunch. I pride myself on being quite the pavlova expert now as I have yet to have one fail (and I've probably made around 10 now). The only problem I still have is that the pavlova sticks to the baking paper, no matter how much cornflour I put down first. I also discovered that it really doesn't matter about leaving the pavlova to cool in the oven - it will crack if you take it out, but seeing as you're going to cover it with cream and berries anyway, why does that matter?
How do you celebrate Christmas and what are some of your favourite foods?