Christmas Day 2007

Hard to believe it is all over for another year! After lots of careful planning expecting there to be no left overs I still have a bursting fridge! How did I manage that!!!!! I will keep comments to a minimum for this post and let the photos speak for themselves! I apologise in advance for the crap formatting in this post, I just couldn't seem to get the photos to sit with the text like I wanted to!!!!

We had a thoroughly enjoyable day....with a few hiccups food wise, see my comments further down!

We started with canapes- hot smoked salmon with blinis (made the long winded way with yeast, don't know if I would do that again!),

caper mayo, red onion and chopped egg, smoked turkey breast with cranberry and creme fraiche, sundried tomato pesto palmiers,

Chilli prawns (made with Jessica's fab chilli and soy paste, they were a real hit!) with lime and saffron mayo, roasted red pepper and feta cream bruschetta.

Here's the lamb, before and after BBQing, I got given to lovely legs of lamb from my brother in law (fresh off the farm!!!) and I was so excited about making this as I had never attempted anything like it before. I used Jill Dupleix's Slashed Lamb recipe where you slash it to the bone, fill the gaps with a gorgeous stuffing of breadcrumbs, lemon zest, garlic, parsley, anchovies, capers and olive oil then truss it all up and roast it. I thought I would be clever and do it on the hooded bbq, to save room in my oven. Well, it cocked it up and I didnt get the hang of the temperature with the BBQ! I needed to get it served by a certain time as my brother is a shift worker and needed to leave at 8pm to get to work (poor bugger!!) so I was anxious to get it done and in my rush, it was completely raw in the middle!!!! As my mother carved it, I thought the best thing to do was to take the pieces and pop them on the bbq as all the other veges and potatoes were going cold!!!!! OH DEAR, luckily I had had enough to drink by then to not completely lose the plot!

It ended up tasting ok, but was nowhere near as impressive as I had hoped it would be!

One of the fun parts of hosting dinner was decorating the tables. We separated out the kids and the adults, so that I could theme the tables differently! The kids got paper plates and cups and Spongebob crackers, while the adults got something a little more restrained!

Dessert turned out really well, the adults had the tasting platters of pineapple sushi, rhubarb crumble icecream, strawberry sorbet and raspberry chardonnay jelly, while the kids had the jelly and icecream only.

To finish we had the chocolate fruit cake and some port, the cake was outstanding, moist and rich and yummy. That is a definite keeper recipe!!!!!
Finally, my mother felt it only fitting that after all this there should be a photo of me in the kitchen, so here I am! (surrounded by mess, how unusual!)