Christmas Day: Part 3

Christmas dinner with The Family this evening:

Only another 364 days and 36 minutes and it'll be Christmas.

Christmas Day

Well what a great day it was - in so many ways. Perfect weather, a typical Kiwi holiday day with the family with lots of food starting with almond croissants with farm-cured bacon and farm-made sausages with plenty of coffee and bucks fizz. Lunch was a BBQ of course. Supper was glazed ham with lots of left-over salads etc from lunch followed by pavlovas, brandy baskets and trifle home-made by Wendy's Mum. Of course there was present opening and games and the children had their inaugural swims in the swimming pool. The cares of the world seemed so very far away. 

The deck - the alterations are almost complete ready for Christmas and the new year

Ready for The Opening

A bemused Misty - her fourth Christmas!

After The Opening

Martin doing the Kiwi Man thing

One of the pavlovas!

A moment of quiet reflection after lunch

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.

Christmas Dinner: A Reflection

Christmas Dinner as seen through the reflections in Jamie's sunglasses.  It was a wonderful, warm, sunny day and we had Christmas Dinner outside. 

 

 

 

Christmas Dinner

Nothing UK traditional about the Christmas Dinner here.  The new BBQ was pressed into service and we had lovely steak, corn on the cob cooked in its leaves (corn is just coming into season here), asparagus (just on its way out of season), mushrooms and onions and salad (not done on the BBQ!).  Yumcious and no feeling of bloated fullness afterwards.  Although later after the coffee and cheesecake....