Christmas Dinner! :)

Aloha! :)

I'm going to share more recipes/cooking methods today! :D I and my house mate had a Christmas potluck over at our place and we (and our friends) cooked up a really yummy storm! :) It was so delicious, every bit of our food. :)

We had such a fantastic dinner menu:
- Appetizer 1 (Prawn & Potato Salad) - made by my house mate.
- Soup/Appetizer 2 (Pumpkin Soup) - made by yours truly. :)
- Appetizer 3 (Garlic Bread) - made by friends.
- Main Dish 1 (Tomato & Mushroom Pie) - made by friends.
- Main Dish 2 (Roast pork & Crackling with Applesauce and Gravy) - made by yours truly. :)

Of course, I'm only able to share those that I cooked and the others, I'm pretty sure you can find online recipes of them! :P

25th December 2012

Appetizer 2/Soup
Ingredients used: Carrots (2), Pumpkin (1), Potatoes (3) & Milk (125ml).
Equipment used: Saucepan & blender.

First, I chopped the pumpkin into half, and poured olive oil all over the pumpkin before placing it in a oven tray and roasting it in a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees, for 30 minutes. Next, I chopped up the carrots and potatoes into small pieces, so that it will cook faster, and after the pumpkin is done, I placed all of them into a big saucepan and added enough water to cover the vegetables before bringing it up to a boil. Lower it to a simmer, once it starts boiling, and then wait till all the vegetables are mushy and soft and coming together to look like soup. Note: You may have to replenish the water once the level drops below the vegetables.

After all the ingredients comes together, I turned off the fire, and slowly poured the milk in while stirring with a wooden spoon. Wait till the soup is cooled down and then pureee the entire lot in the blender! And you will get:

Golden Creamy Pumpkin Soup (with Garlic Bread). :)

Once you are ready to serve the soup, sprinkle black pepper on top (optional). :) 

Main Dish 2

Roast Pork with Applesauce & Gravy. 

My recipe (Takes 3.5 hours in total)

I omitted some ingredients like the allspice in the applesauce, and I used canned gravy mix instead + roast drippings from the pork. And I didn't add potatoes because there was already a potato salad in the menu. :) I basically prepared the roast pork the same way as I did for the roast lamb (see the previous blog post), but I added more salt for the skin because I wanted a really nice crispy crackling. 

It was a really awesome recipe, just that it took much longer than I expected! 3.5 hours, close to 4! But the end product was so, so worth it! :) I loved the apples that accompanied the roast pork, so good! :) But that did take more time than I expected and lots of patience, luckily I had friends that were willing to do that with me! ;) 

The final dish:

Roast Pork with Apples, Applesauce & Gravy. :)

Featuring the rest of the dishes, no recipes because I'm not the one who cooked them. :) 

Appetizer 1

Prawn and Potato Salad

So, so proud of my house mate who did this dish! She was a little hesitant on cooking for the day because she said her cooking skills wasn't that good. But this tasted so yummy! :) 

Main Dish 1

Tomato & Mushroom Pie

The complete Set Up:

Christmas Day Potluck :)

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESUS!! :)   

Christmas Eve Dinner. :)

Initially, I really wanted to blog about the Christmas eve dinner, Christmas Service and Christmas dinner all together in one post. But then, now as I’m thinking about it, that’s going to be one gigantic and enormous post! It’s going to be so long! So nah... I’m going to do it post by post! :D So will start off with the Christmas Eve dinner that I had with my housie on 24th Dec! I was pretty stoked by the whole cooking thing because this is my first time cooking for people that are not family and that’s not a potluck either! Just planning about what to eat (and cook) and the groceries to buy were such a joy and a breeze, considering that all I had to do were to go online and Coles did the delivery!! :P  Haha. I’m so digging this cooking business! :) 

So the menu for that day was: Garlic Prawn Salad, Mashed Potato and Roasted Lamb with Carrot & Pumpkin with Gravy. I just realized that I really love to cook meat and I think that’s my specialty. I often get stumped when people ask me "What's your specialty dish?" when they find out that I like cooking or that I cook. And I used to answer "anything with a recipe.", which basically doesn't answer the question! Lol. Now, after much thinking, I do! :) Roast. Meat. :D  Superb combination, I must say! ;) And it’s easy to let your oven do the job instead of fretting about what could go more wrong on the stove! And unless the oven is faulty, then, yea I guess that would be the only thing that could go wrong! But if you’ve got the temperature right and sufficient time, I think that would be all you need to get the star dish nailed! :)

For the above dishes, I think it took me 2 – 2.5 hours to prepare and cook, including roasting time of course. And needless to say, the longest time was taken by the lamb, out of the 2 – 2.5 hours, 1.5 hours were done by the oven alone! Hee. :) 

Appetiser 1
The garlic prawn salad was really easy, I bought the already-marinated garlic prawns from Coles since it was at a discounted price ($11 for ~500g ). :P Stir fried the garlic prawns, added chopped cucumbers and tomatoes  and arranged it nicely on the bowl so it looked more picture-worthy! Oh and I also added a wedge of lemon for that tangy goodness! :)

Garlic Prawn Salad! :)

Appetiser 2

Moving on: Mashed Potato! 2nd easiest dish! I read online that it would be faster to place cold water and the potatoes into the saucepan and boil it till it gets soft. Use a fork to test whether the potatoes are ready! And the best thing is? You don't have to use a peeler to get the skin off (before cooking) because the cooking process does that for you! ;) Note: Do not peel off the skin immediately once it's done as it will burn your fingers!! Just wait 5 minutes, run it under cooling water and peel away! :) 

I used a potato masher like this: 

Mash up the potatoes, add a dollop of butter and lots of milk till you get the creamy consistency as desired! Chop some spring onions, fold it in, whilst sprinkling salt and pepper on top and you will get creamy, yummy, mashed potato!! ^^ 

Buttery Mashed Potato

Main Dish!

Roast lamb with Roast Vegetables (Carrots & Pumpkin) with canned gravy (+ fat drippings from the roast)! 

First, I prepped the lamb (bought a 1.3kg leg of lamb from Coles) by wiping the lamb dry with paper towels. Then, I rubbed the entire leg with salt; Salt is quite important, I reckon, as it is a good drying ingredient that makes sure the lamb is cooked perfectly. :) I don't add too much salt though for health reasons and also because the salt is pretty obvious and I don't want it to overpower the lamb. I leave the salted-lamb to dry out for 5-10 minutes before wiping the lamb with paper towels to make sure that it's completely dry on the surface. :)  

Note: If you want crispy skin, add an extra dash of salt on the skin to make it crispy! ;) 

Next, I rub olive oil all over the lamb and then I used a ready-herb marinade (it has rosemary, thyme and other herbs inside) to rub over the lamb. As the taste of lamb can get quite strong and not many people are used to it, I decided to add extra herbs and sliced garlic to take away the smell and taste of it! So, I used a sharp knife and made multiple deep incisions on my lamb. Place a slice of garlic and 1 sprig of chosen herb (again, rosemary, thyme, sage all works well) into a incision and do the same for the other incisions. Below is a pretty good example of how your lamb should look like after the prep. :) 

Garlic & herb incisions

After I'm done with the prep, my house mate chopped up carrots & pumpkin (with skin on). We then placed the lamb and vegetables together in a baking tray lined with aluminium foil (makes cleaning up an easy job) and popped it into a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees. :) Leave it to roast in the oven, turning the roast every 30 minutes to make sure it's cooked evenly on all sides. After 1.5 hours, take it out of the oven. The carrots and pumpkin should be done by now too! :) 

After taking out the roast, let it rest for 25 minutes!!! Very important step, even though by that time, you may be very famished and dying of hunger; but you still have to let it rest so that the juices of the meat (which would have risen to the surface due to the cooking) would have time to sink back into the meat again!! This helps to keep the juices in the meat thus making each and every bite a joyful and juicy bite! :)

I made the gravy next, following instructions on the can and adding 2 tablespoons of roast drippings from the baking tray into the gravy. :) And there you have it: 

Roast lamb with vegetables & Gravy. 

The complete meal: 

My Christmas Eve Dinner. :)

FYI, it was sparkling red grape juice in the glasses and not wine as we had to wake up early to go to church for the Christmas service yesterday! :) Thank God that the dinner tasted good and the whole experience was pretty successful! :) I do think that I over-estimated the amount of food that 2 people can eat, because we did have quite a bit of leftovers! :/ But it was still a good meal and fellowship. :) Praise God and Happy Birthday Jesus! :D