Christmas Meals

On Christmas eve the family came to me for dinner.  I've told you that because I thought it was quite amusing that a) I had used a prizewinning Chardonnay with the butter to cook the scallops (starter of green pea mash topped with black pudding and scallops), b) I then did a lamb curry (they eat curry in hot countries but we all tend to eat curry when it's winter), c) the children, who normally demolish pasta with prawns, all demolished the curry (as well as pasta and prawns).  The chardonnay was a gold medal winner at the NZ International Wine Festival and when I tasted it I had to agree that it was very very flavoursome.  I just didn't happen to like the flavour.  Neither did Wendy or Martin. It was good with scallops though!

Christmas breakfast was warm croissants with bacon and scrambled eggs and maple syrup all washed down with bucks fizz of course.  Dinner was a BBQ.  Wendy and Martin share some cattle with a friend.  They spend their lives on the paddocks here and are slaughtered on the paddock by a local licensed home-kill slaughterman.  So they are never stressed nor pumped full of anti-biotics.  The meat is therefore wonderfully tender.  Do you know I'm not even sure if you can but turkey in NZ.  I've never seen it in a butcher.  There are wild turkey but they can only be hunted and eaten at certain times of year because what they eat flavours the flesh and at certain times they eat things unpallatable to us.

Dinner was also eaten outside.  I bet no one in the UK ate outside.  And later we all had some bubbly in the spa.  It's a hard life but I'm not complaining because somebody's got to do it.