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| Champagne |
Merry Christmas and happy holidays everybody! I hope you're all having a nice relaxing time, and, for those of us in Melbourne, enjoying the wonderful sunny weather! I've got an entire week off work and I am So Excited! Today I wanted to show you the meals I cooked for Christmas with my family.
Christmas Eve Dinner
Gravlax with potato pancakes, cucumber salad and chive-flecked crème fraîche
Mustard ham steaks, sautéed peas and hasselback potatoes
Chocolate salami and mince pies
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| Salmon fillet |
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| With mustard / gin / sugar / salt |
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| Dill blanket |
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| Ready for curing |
On the day itself, we made the remaining items. Normally I go for buckwheat blini with gravlax, but I saw a recipe for potato pancakes in Tessa Kiros' Falling Cloudberries, and thought it looked fabulous - mashed potatoes mixed with flour, egg and cream. (I thought they'd be dense and stodgy but were actually very delicate and light!) The cucumber salad was just a mixture of thinly sliced cucumber, salt, sugar, chopped dill and apple cider vinegar.
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| Gravlax, potato pancakes |
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| Potato pancake, gravlax, crème fraîche, cucumber salad |
What a fantastic combination! One thing I love about making gravlax at home is that it tends to be much less salty than commercially available smoked salmon. I also love the soft creamy texture.
For our mains, I had planned to coat a small boneless ham with mustard, bread crumbs and cloves, and roast it. However, when my dad asked the butcher for a "small" ham, he was given a really small circle of ham - less than ten centimetres thick. Whoops! (I suppose "small" is a relative term, so perhaps I should have specified exactly what I was after). Anyway, it was too small to glaze and roast, so Sandra used her mad knife skills to slice it into slices, then dusted the slices in English mustard powder and fried them on both sides. (Incidentally, this is the way we normally deal with leftover Christmas ham, and I daresay it's more delicious than the normal glazed ham!)
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| Mustard ham steaks |
On the side, we had sautéed peas (cooked in chicken stock with shallots) and hasselback potatoes.
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| Sautéed peas |
I just want to say that I did make more than one potato! I just forgot to take a photo until there was only one left, haha.
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| Hasselback potato |
Dessert (served much later!) was Nigella's chocolate salami and some of my mince pies. I must admit I wasn't too impressed with the chocolate salami - even though it looked cute, it was a lot of work (beating butter and sugar together, adding eggs etc etc), and I found the dough really difficult to slice, even straight from the freezer. I think I'd prefer a standard melt-and-mix Aussie hedgehog in future.
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| Chocolate salami |
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| Mince pies |
Christmas Breakfast
For breakfast, I just reheated the leftover potato pancakes and served it with gravlax, hard-boiled eggs, sliced avocado and chive-flecked crème fraîche. Yum yum yum, what a treat!
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| Christmas Breakfast |
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| Christmas Breakfast |
Christmas Lunch
Roast turkey
Gravy
Goosefat roast potatoes
Roast butternut squash with pine nuts and sage
Red Cabbage
Lunch was essentially a pared down version of last year's Christmas dinner - although I have to say it was pretty ambitious of me to think we'd be able to eat such a big lunch after all that other eating! Feedback to self: next year have the big meal at dinner, not lunch!
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| Roast Turkey |
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| Roast potatoes, gravy, roast butternut squash, red cabbage |
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| Goosefat roast potatoes |
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| Roast butternut squash with pine nuts and sage |
I had planned to serve Christmas pudding after lunch, but we were way too full to contemplate dessert! (It's a Fortnum and Mason Christmas pudding that I brought back from London earlier this year). I'm hoping to steam it up and share it with my family sometime before the New Year. Any ideas what I can serve before it? I'm thinking something Christmassy but not too big, hehe.
Merry Christmas everybody!
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6 comments
I'd be getting the 'small' ham again!! Looks delicious.
ReplyDeleteYum I'll have one of everything please! The hasselback potatoes looks awesome and so does your glavlax and potato cakes! Looks like you had a fantastic xmas :)
ReplyDeletePlease invite me for dinner one day. Please please.
ReplyDeletePS That mustard-fried ham idea is genius I say genius!
What a wonderful spread or spreads! I bet everyone hopes for an invite to your place every year! A very Merry Christmas! :D
ReplyDeleteHmmm yum and i need to try that way of cooking the ham because we always have so much left over :)
ReplyDeleteMmm, what a delicious looking Christmas feast! I love the look of the hasselback potatoes.
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