Our Family Festive Food 2015.

Duck for Roasting



Table setting for the Christmas lunch

Seafood medley

Grilled king prawns, lobster and charred spring onion

Roasted Duck

Our Family Festive Food 2015

 

I love Christmas food planning more than cooking itself. As a family, we have heated a debate about what will be our Christmas Lunch menu -- especially what will be the main course. Which meat? Which bird?

 

We had roast Turkey for more than 20 years. But not having a big family to feed even small turkey seemed too much. We then tried goose for a while.

Eventually, we decided on roast duck for our 2015 Christmas main course and the question became if one would be enough to have sandwiches on Boxing day?

After endless discussion, I made an executive decision to have duck two ways.

Roast duck and slowly roasted duck leg spring rolls.

 

My festive food planning and cooking starts in early December. I do enjoy this thought process more than anything else. It never fails to excite me thinking about our family festive food planning and cooking. Talking and drinking for hours.

The stages are:

1. Make cranberry sauce
2. Prepare duck gravy and freeze
3. My own stuffing (sage and onion based but with pine nuts, cranberries, chest nuts plenty of smoked bacon and good sausage meat) freeze without bread. On 23 December, I took it out of the freezer and baked with herbs, bread and butter. So delicious
4. Make spicy mixed nuts
5. My own bitter chocolate blocks. With ginger chilli , pine nuts, sea salt
6. Keep smoked salmon in the fridge during the festive season

Our Christmas Eve main course was stuffed and baked monk fish tail, followed by seafood pasta.

 

2015 Christmas Lunch  Menu

Starter:

Grilled lobster tail and king prawns  in chilli, garlic butter. Served with pickled cucumber ribbons and toasted bread (sough dough bread)

Main:

Roast duck with rosemary, ginger and orange

Roast potatoes

Creamed leeks, sprouts (quartered) with bacon and chestnuts

Mini sausages wrapped in bacon

Mini duck’s leg meat with plum spring rolls

Gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce

 

Dessert:

Fruits (strawberry, blackberry, melon) with raspberry coolie

Vanilla ice cream

 

New Year's Day 2016 dinner

 

Starter:

Grilled king prawns in chilli, garlic butter with char grilled pakchoi.

Main: Roast beef of sirloin (cooked nicely medium rare)

Roast potatoes and roast cauliflower with spices

 

No dessert was served: we are not keen on dessert specially at Christmas pudding, we like to have nice fruit salad with ice cream. After festive feast no one like to have sweet, only strong coffee with my bitter, nutty chocolate block.



Christmas lunch