December 2005 . . .
Wombat News
Picking Apricots and the Trouble with Recipes
Awards
New books
Schedule for 2006
December in the Garden
Some Christmas Tucker
Someone has attacked my umbrella. I'm not mentioning any names, mind you, but suspect they were brown, furry and with long whiskers.
The umbrella has been living just outside the front door ready to be grabbed when anyone heads outside. This is because it's been raining ... and raining ... and raining. Which after four years of drought has been glorious. (Drought gets very boring after a while.)
The wombats have been too fat to worry about us lately. Mothball just rolls out of her hole about 1.00 a.m., munches for a couple of hours then goes back to bed. Wombats are energy conservative, mostly. If they don't need to eat they'll sleep instead.
But last night something about the umbrella must have tempted her, because this morning one side of it looked distinctly chewed. I'm trying to think of it as a birthday message of goodwill (it's my birthday as I write this.)
There was a pile of droppings on the doormat too.
Apricots and the trouble with recipes
I picked the first apricots today. Bryan had taken John Marlton's trestles back (we borrowed them for the Open Garden workshops on Sunday) and John had picked the first of his fruit and gave some to Bryan – not many, because the valley had a late frost this year which wiped out most of the apricots.
Which reminded me that our apricots might be ready too. The apricot trees are up by the front gate – great big old shaggy things, two early apricots right at the top of the orchard and a row of late apricots further down, that don't ripen till Christmas.
I walked up there to check if there was any ripe fruit early this morning. It's always hot up in that orchard, a stretch of valley that never gets a breeze, and it was breathless even at 8.00 a.m. Hundreds of tiny butterflies up there too, pale brown with bright blue splotches and that satin look as though they had just emerged from their cocoons.
And, yes, there were apricots, ready to pick, just a case or two, but quite enough as we still have apricot chutney from last year and at most we only need half a dozen small jars of apricot jam. There'll be plums, peaches and various berries soon, and it takes us a fortnight to get through a jar of jam these days.
Mostly we'll eat the apricots fresh, but every year I also make a sort of apricot tarte tatin. It's a recipe that my grandmother used to make - halved apricots fried in just a little butter, then a sheet of flaky pastry over them in the pan, the pan in the oven till the pastry browns, then the whole thing turned over, caramelised apricots, the pastry crisp on one side and just slightly juicy on the other. Pour over cream and eat.
And now I'm feeling guilty that I've given you a recipe that may not work for you all.
The trouble with giving recipes is that they give the impression that all you need to do is add say, half a kilo of apricots, some sugar, flour and butter and you'll have the apricot tart above, just like grandma used to make. And you will get something that looks like grandma's tart.
But it won't have the same texture, because Grandma had made it 6,000 times and knew exactly when to stop kneading the pastry (too much and it gets tough) and she only made it in the cool of the day (too hot and the pastry is tough too).
And it won't taste like Grandma's either. The butter won't be as fresh (we are so used to just ever so slightly rancid butter that we think that is the way butter should taste).
I remember my shock when I first ate home-churned butter. Well, actually it wasn't churned, strictly speaking, it was cream from Mrs Hobbins's cow Sally and she just bunged it in the mix master.
I'd gone down there with a teacake that I'd just brought back from town. Jean was in her seventies, recently widowed, and had been sick with pneumonia, and like many women who have cooked for families all their lives she just never got around to eating by herself. She got thinner and thinner (like a match with the wood shaved off, she said) till Keith next door and I realised what the trouble was.
After that we made sure that one of us was down there for at least one meal a day, as she'd cook for and eat with other people there, and once she started eating she'd keep going for the rest of the day. And she liked the teacakes from town, sweetened bread dough with very pink icing and sometimes apple in the middle. Jean was a fabulous cook - I have never tasted anything quite as perfect as her sponge cake with cream and passionfruit and strawberries, but again that may be because it was made with her own duck eggs and Sally's cream and strawberries still warm from the garden.
But like most of us, Jean preferred cakes she hadn't cooked herself ... so I arrived with the cake just as she was putting her gum boots on to do the milking. (Cows don't need to be milked in the early morning; that's a dairy farmer's routine to meet the milk truck, not a cow's. Jean milked Sally at lunchtime, and left the calf with her until the following breakfast time, so it had most of the milk. A morning's worth of milk, Jean said, was quite enough.
So I put the cake on the washing machine just inside the side door and tramped up the hill to Sally's byre. It had been years since I'd milked a cow (a family I'd babysat for kept a cow, years before, and let me have a turn a few times) but I soon got the hang of it again, press, don't pull, the warm smell of cow and the sweet scent of milk and the calf peering impatiently through the slats, waiting for mum to come out again with lunch ... or at least what was left of lunch after I'd half filled the bucket.
Then down to the house again, past the raspberry beds, where Jean stopped to strip a few from the canes – at that time of year raspberries need picking twice a day. The fruit ripens so fast and overripe fruit attracts harlequin beetles that suck the juice and leave the fruit hard and tasteless.
Jean left the bucket of milk in the laundry. Yesterday's bucket was still there, the cream risen to the top. Jean scooped off a bowlful, added the cream from the last few days, from the fridge, and poured it all into the mix master's bowl and turned it on, with a teaspoon full of salt.
And the machine whirred and then grew laboured and suddenly the thick cream was clumping into butter.
Jan gave it a few pats to squeeze out the last of the water. And that was it, and it was wonderful. It had sweetness, but more than that, a clarity of flavour.
So that's the butter, and you won't get pastry that tastes like Grandma's, or Jeans for that matter, without it. But then you won't get apricots like hers either.
Some fruit gets sweeter after it's picked. But apricots don't. If they're picked green they taste green, even though they turn from pale green to yellow or orange and get softer too. But they'll never have the rich fragrance of apricots that ripen on the tree.
Supermarket apricots don't have the same sugar content either ... and it's the sugar that makes the stickiness of semi-caramelised fruit in a good apricot tart. Green picked fruit are floury too, rather than juicy.
But back to the apricots. They're easy trees to grow - plant, feed, water, wait, don't prune or the cuts may let fungal disease into the heart of the tree. Choose a variety that will fruit when you're at home, not on your annual holidays at the coast – an early one is best in a fruit fly prone area, as long as you don't get late frosts. Be prepared to make jam and chutney, as you'll get masses of fruit. Or do what John does, and have an apricot picking lunch every yearŠ the visitors bring a plate to share and everyone eats at the trestles under the trees, then as a part of the digestion process picks however many cases they can use and carries them away.
Come to think of it, we must have a lime picking party next winter, and maybe a few apple and pear parties too.
Wombat news
Well, none really, apart from my chewed up umbrella. The wombats are too fat on good green grass. The last time I saw a wombat was three nights ago, when I got up to shut a window at 1.00 a.m. and there was Mothball, munching in the moonlight. She didn't even look up as I went back to bed.
There are wombat droppings, of course. But they just seem to be dropped anywhere, not placed carefully on logs and rocks as they would have been a few months ago. Maybe with all this lushness the wombats don't need to mark their territory as much.
It's a good thing wombats can't climb trees though. I'd hate to see the mess a hungry wombat might make of an apricot tree.
Awards
'Hitler's Daughter' has been nominated for the Yabba Award so many times it has now been placed in the Yabba Hall of Fame ... and many, many thanks to everyone who voted for it! And Pete the Sheep is in the Koala Awards Top Ten ... and thank you everyone for that too!
New Books
'Phredde and the Haunted Underpants' is out now. It's the last (and I think the funniest) in the Phredde series. (Phredde, Pru and Bruce though will make the odd appearance in the new series that will start next year. At the moment it's called 'Boojum Snark and the School for Heroes'. But that may change.)
Otherwise the latest books are 'They Came on Viking Ships' (historical fiction), 'My Uncle Wal the Werewolf' (one of the Wacky Families. - 'My Gran the Gorilla' will be out in January), 'The Secret World of Wombats', which tells you all you never knew you wanted to know about wombats, plus some wombat stories.
I'm just about to do the final changes for Macbeth and Son - a bit like 'Hitler's Daughter', with wide-ranging themes. It's partly based on the true story of Macbeth and his stepson Lulach, and partly on the story of a modern boy, Luke, who faces very different battles of his own.
And when I finish this newsletter I will get back to 'The Goat who Sailed the World', the true story of the goat who sailed with Captain Cook on his first voyage to Australia and New Zealand. It's meant an enormous amount of research and shows travel 200 years ago in a very different light. Historical TV dramas never show you the animals on board, not just cats or dogs to catch the rats but sheep, goats, cows. (Well, how else would you store enough food in the days before refrigeration?)
One letter I discovered from a hundred years ago recommends that if you are going to travel with children, make sure that your ship has enough cows to give them fresh milk for the whole voyage. Very sad letter, that one, as two of the writer's kids had died of malnutrition, and the third only survived because the Captain started giving them some of his own food stores. So hard even to imagine it today.
Timetable for 2006
I'm afraid there isn't much of a timetable this month. Since the heart attack this year I've realised I won't be able to do the amount of travelling and talking that I used to do (and have realised too why I found it so hard to speak without a microphone. I've just never had enough breath). But there'll probably be a week in W.A. mid-year and the Ourimbah Campus Festival of Literature in November.
Read Around Oz Internet Chats
These holidays I'm the featured author for the Read Around Oz Summer Reading Club, organised by your local library. Which means that every day in January I'll be doing internet chats with libraries in various States. So if you want to have a chat about just about anything, from wombats to books to, well, grasshoppers or gooseberries, pop into your local library and find out all about it! (Plus pick up some good reading too.)
Two Talks in Canberra
5 January – Gungahlin Library in Canberra to launch the Summer Reading Club and answer questions about wombats (of course). I'll also be reading from my latest Wacky Family, 'My Gran the Gorilla' (it will be out in January and is totally hilarious ... and the pics are just incredible!).
19 January – I'll be at the Botanic Gardens Bookshop in Canberra, also telling and reading stories plus there'll be a free afternoon tea for everyone who went on the Botanic Garden's reptile walk. (Well, I am sure you can have some even if you missed it.)
Both events are free.
December in the Garden
This is the month when you wished that you hadn't got carried away in spring. Large dug patches are full of weeds (well, I said you should try no-dig gardens); those six zucchini plants you put in are threatening to flood the neighbourhood and the air is full of the sound of bees sipping at ripe apricots or nuzzling into young zucchini flowers – making more zucchinis – help!.
This is a month for minimising work. There are too many other things happening in December to concentrate on the garden. Just make sure you keep up successive planting – beans, lettuce and corn in particular – and that the garden doesn't quite disappear in the undergrowth. Don't bother weeding – just cut the tips off, or bury them under mulch.
Planting
Keep up successions of corn, beans and lettuce – but otherwise wait till Christmas is over and you have a chance to breathe.
Harvests
Pick everything as soon as it's ripe – or a bit before – to keep down fruit fly. Never leave fallen fruit on the ground – and fruit fly or codling moth affected fruit often do fall earlier. Call in the geese or chooks or do it yourself. Many pests – not just fruit fly – are attracted by the scent of overripe fruit – so keep harvesting.
Other jobs
o The spring weeds you pulled up and flung in a bucket of water should be decomposing now – just tip the brown water onto celery, silverbeet and anything else that needs a nudge.
o Hurry tomatoes and corn along by mulching them heavily – both will form more roots on their stems under the mulch and bear earlier. Add some phosphorus-rich hen manure to encourage flowering – though compost-fed plants won't need it.
Watering
Gardens can bake if you go away even for a few days. Cover them up – they won't go yellow or die in a few days – and while they may go yellow in a week they'll soon green up again. Staple together newspaper and drape it over a few stakes in the centre of the garden. If it rains the paper will decay, but then the garden won't need shelter anyway – or use old sheets, blankets, whatever is to hand. The sheets shouldn't get dirty as long as they don't touch the ground.
The longest I've ever left a covered garden is two weeks. Be wary when you take the top off – the longer you've left it the weaker the plants will be – you'll probably have to water every day for a week till they toughen up again.
If you want to keep watering your plants fill up every bottle you can lay your hands on; place a little hole in the top – as small as you can – and thrust it neck downwards into the soil. The water will gradually seep into the garden, watering it.
If you go away often it may be worthwhile installing a drip system and leaving it on - or placing drums around your garden what you can easily fill with a hose - or that will fill in a rain storm and seep out slowly. One friend in a dry area connected such a drum system to the downpipe on the house – the buckets were filled even with a small shower of rain from the accumulation on the roof.
Pests
LotsŠ but with Christmas - and picking fruit and harvesting your garden - you probably won't have time to do much about them. Hopefully the birds will eat most of them for you. (Merry Christmas, birds).
Concentrate on growing things, and picking things - and enjoy the bounty of your garden.
Some Christmas Tucker
Stuffed eggs
I always make stuffed eggs for Christmas morning – good to munch while opening presents before breakfast and later in the day there is always someone who's driven a long way and stuffed eggs are good for immediate stomach gurgles when they arrive.
1 dozen eggs
half a cup mayonnaise – home-made mayonnaise makes superb stuffed eggs, but you can get away with the bought stuff if everyone has had a few drinks beforehand.
1 tsp each ground cumin, coriander seed, turmeric and cardarmon fried for three minutes in 1 tbsp oil OR half tbsp good curry paste or powder paprika
Simmer the eggs for 15 minutes, stirring now and then so the yolks set in the centre of the egg. Take off the stove, run cold water into the saucepan till the eggs feel cool. This helps stop the black ring around the yolks.
Peel the eggs (if they won't peel easily they may be too fresh – not a problem with supermarket eggs, but if you have your own chooks try to use week-old eggs).
Cut them in half longways, remove the yolks and throw away a third of them.
Mash yolks, mayonnaise and curry. Replace in the eggs using a teaspoon; sprinkle with paprika.
These eggs will keep for a few hours covered in the fridge, but eggs and mayonnaise make a lovely breeding ground for bacteria, so while a few left over from pre-dinner nibbles may be okay for breakfast, by and large you should eat them the same day.
Prawn Salad
This works with frozen prawns – about the only recipe I know that will turn them into something good. That's because they're marinated which gives the poor things flavour and texture again. But fresh is better.
1 cup chopped coriander, stems and all
1 cup chopped basil, ditto
1 - 2 kilos prawns, shelled
6 tbsps olive oil
3 tbsps sugar
6 tbsps fish sauce
3 tbsps sweet chilli sauce
1 cup lime juice, or lemon if you haven't a lime tree
Mix. Leave in a sealed container in the fridge for at least 6 hours. Serve chilled with lettuce or crusty bread.
Note: These can be made the day before and kept in a sealed container in the fridge. Cooked marinated prawns in a sealed container do not stink up the fridge the way a bag of uncooked ones can. But eat within 48 hours and of course avoid if it smells or looks weird in anyway.
Parson Woodforde's Very Traditional Christmas Mince Pies
(Not bad for snacking before the main meal, or afterwards if you're too stuffed for another guzzle in the evening.)
On the 25th of December, about 100 years ago, the Reverend James Woodforde ate a boiled rabbit and onion sauce, a sirloin of beef roasted, plum puddings... and mince pies. A few years before his Christmas dinner had been two fine cods with fried soles around them and oyster sauce, a fine sirloin of beef roasted, some pea soup and an orange pudding, wild ducks roasted, a salad and mince pies.
Until pretty recently Christmas dinner was basically just the richest most celebratory dinner you could afford. Plum puddings usually featured, but then they were eaten at any winter feast, as were roast goose, duck, hen, beef and the occasional swan if you happened to be royalty.
Mince pies however were definitely Christmas-only fare – as a matter of fact, mince pies are probably the only bit of Christmas food that is really Christian in origin.
Mince pies were originally made in the shape of a cradle, with a pastry image of the Christ child placed in the hollow and a blanket of minced mutton and lamb's tongues covering Him and then more pastry tucked over that.
After the Crusades the pies became more and more highly spiced, with dried fruit added too in the Middle Eastern tradition – till nowadays there's no meat in mince pies (other than suet) at all and they're round instead of oval.
If you want to make traditional mince pies - I mean a really traditional one - you first of all need to get oval moulds to put them in for which you will definitely need to go to a specialty kitchen shop.
You then take your shortcrust or puff pastry - either home made or bought - line the mould, reserve some for the top covering then make your small image of the Christ Child - an oblong and a round head are all you really need - after all, most of Him is tucked up in his blanket.
Now make the filling. A typical modern mix would be:
100 gms chopped apples
300 gms dried fruit
100 gms chopped or packaged suet
100 gms brown sugar
half a teaspoon mixed spice, cinnamon, a quarter teaspoon nutmeg,
1 tbsp marmalade
2 tbsp rum or brandy.
Just mix and put it over the pastry child, then tuck the pastry blanket up to His chin, and bake for about 25 minutes in a hot oven.
To be honest, I find modern mince pies too sweet and heavy. The traditional one, with a mix of meat and fruit, is much nicer - very pleasant indeed for lunch or dinner on a hot day.
Traditional recipes pack the raw ingredients into the pie shell, and cook them slowly for a long time. I prefer to pre-cook mine. This recipe is based on one from 1560.
Fry 500 gms of beef or mutton ... well, it should be in lard, but I prefer a good splash of olive oil, let's not be too traditional here. In fact I even go so far as to sometimes add garlic and an onion. When the meat is brown take off the heat and add half a teaspoon of ground black pepper, ground cloves, ground mace, one tbsp chopped seeded raisins, 2 tbsps currants and 2 tbsps chopped stoned prunes.
Mix well. The original recipe also had saffron in it, but with all that spice you can't taste the saffron and, anyway, the genuine stuff is expensive.
Once more, place a layer of meat mixture over the child in the cradle, tuck in the pastry blanket, glaze with melted butter, sugar and rosewater if you like or just beaten egg, bake 25 minutes in a medium oven, or till browned. Serve hot or cold, but definitely NOT with tomato sauce.
And forget about the shortbread, the Christmas cake, Chrissie pudding, roast turkey and the rest of it. The one really traditional bit of feasting this year will be your mince pies.
The Traditional Main Course
How to Cook a Turkey Without Disaster
Our family has a cold Christmas dinner - at least we do unless the Mist rolls in – it's called Araluen Billy and it's COLD – we've even had the fire on a couple of Christmases.
But hot or cold, we still eat turkey – I cook it the day before and we have it with yesterday's gravy heated up – hot gravy is very good with cold turkey, even if it's not a trendy thing to eat. Or you may prefer Christmas relish or cold cranberry sauce with your turkey instead.
When I was a kid we didn't eat turkey at Christmas. It was always chook, usually home killed. (one Christmas I tried to drown a chook in a bucket, thinking I was being helpful. Mum wasn't impressed. It was her best layer.)
If the chook wasn't home grown or passed over the fence from next door, Dad bought it 'from a man in a pub'. (The man in the pub did a great trade in chooks around Christmas time.)
This was in the days though before widespread refrigeration. (Yes, refrigeration did exist in those days, thank you, I'm not that ancient. But it was in short supply for a decade or more after the war.)
Then came frozen chooks – and battery chooks as refrigeration meant large numbers could be stored and transported safely.
I suspect the lack of refrigeration was why we didn't have turkey in those days – it was too hot to rear them easily in Queensland, and too difficult to transport them any distance.
For years I thought that eating turkey at Christmas was a recent US import – a bit like Mother's Day cards. Then I discovered that Anglo-Saxons have been eating turkey at Christmas at least since the reign of Elizabeth I.
In those days the best, grandest way to eat was to have a very large roast on your table. And the largest roast bird available was the swan. Sadly all swans belonged to the Queen (still do, but I don't suppose she's eating one this Christmas), so the next best thing was the turkey, recently introduced from the US via Spain.
Turkeys had been domesticated for at least a thousand years in the Americas – the daily pay for an Aztec porter was about 10 cocoa beans, the same price as a good fat turkey. But that was the South American turkey – the North American turkey is the one who's descendents we eat today.
The wild North American turkey was a dumb but friendly bird who roosted wherever possible in any human habitation and caused a lot of damage to crops. There's one theory that the bird was domesticated just to stop it being a nuisance. This was the bird sent to Spain and it was the North American turkey that was bred into the domestic turkey we know today – and was subsequently exported back to the Americas with the English settlers in Virginia.
The English kept eating turkeys; the Yanks kept eating turkey and Australians did too whenever they could get hold of them, which usually meant only if they lived near a turkey farm. (An elderly neighbour once told me how he and his family had reared turkeys one year, then tried to drive them 100 kms to the nearest large town. They'd been droving with sheep and been droving with cattle, but those turkeys... come dawn they were up and roaming all over the place. Never again, he said, which does explain why turkeys didn't really take off here until widespread refrigeration.)
How to buy a turkey
The easiest method is to buy a frozen one at the supermarket. These will have been raised in large sheds. They'll have had a sad boring life and an even worse death. They'll also have a tasteless oil pumped under their skins to give them a bit of taste and a golden colour when you cook them. If possible avoid these!
You can also order fresh turkeys from the butcher. These will also be shed birds (probably) but, as they won't have been frozen, their flesh won't be as dry and should be tastier and they won't have that horrible mulch pumped into them!
The best bet is to find somewhere that sells free range and organic meat and buy your bird from there – although for Christmas you do need to plan ahead – order your turkey now, specifying the size you need and what day you plan to collect it. A very big bird (looking more like a small emu than a large chook) defies the usual dictum about smaller being better – all of the best turkeys I have ever eaten have been free range and really large. They have been tasty and juicy and worthy of a feast.
A free range turkey will be more expensive but the birds will have led a much better life, and even if you don't care about that, it will be reflected in the taste – the taste of meat very much reflects the life animals have led. Organic, free range poultry tastes... well, when you taste it you'll realise why chicken used to be such a luxury!
Free-range meat however often has less fat - healthier, but drier. You need to be even more careful to make sure your organic turkey has a good moist stuffing, and cover it with buttered paper or alfoil during cooking. But if you are going to cook it and then allow it to cool overnight it will be juicier because it has been rested correctly.
How to cook a turkey
Stuff it gently (see below). Never overstuff a turkey – an elderly friend once told me you need to leave room for its soul.
Now tie its legs together. That's not for modesty - they spread during cooking and the wretched thing takes up too much room in the fridge later.
Place it in a baking dish, brush with oil or melted butter. I wrap the legs and cover the breast with buttered paper or alfoil. Most books tell you to do this after an hour's cooking; I prefer to do it first.
Bake at 200ºC for about two and a half hours for a four kilo turkey, plus an extra 20 minutes per kilo. Take off the alfoil for the last hour. You can tell if it's done by peering into the cavity - if the juices there are red, it's not done. You can also prod the flesh just under the wing - if the juice runs reddish, it's not cooked either.
Baste it with its juices every half an hour or so; add extra melted butter if the pan looks dry and there are no juices to spoon up.
I let the turkey cool on the bench, then cover it and place it in the fridge for next day. Cold meat – from a turkey or anything else - is much moister if the whole joint is left to cool uncut. Once it is cut, the meat dries out quite quickly.
Turkey Gravy
Cover the turkey with alfoil; place it on a tray to keep warm in the oven.
I leave the neck in the roasting pan because I like to gnaw it; some eager souls simmer it while the turkey cooks to make turkey stock.
I also like a thickened gravy; many people don't. If you do, add one level tbsp cornflour to the juices in the pan. (There is rarely enough fat from a roast turkey to need to pour it off, unless you have a bird that has had a lot of oil injected under the skin. If there's a lot of oily residue, do get rid of it!)
Once the flour has been stirred into the pan, or not as you prefer, add two cups of chicken stock or water or turkey stock or vegetable water. Simmer for twenty minutes, stirring and adding more water as necessary. This long cooking - plus the dark caramelised stuff in the pan - are what gives it a good colour. A few chunks of dark caramelised pumpkin in the pan while the turkey is cooking also give a great colour and good taste.
If your gravy isn't thickened, you may like to add two tbsps cranberry jelly to thicken and sweeten it, along with the stock. You can also replace a quarter of the stock with white wine.
Serve hot with the turkey.
Best-Ever Turkey Stuffing
This stuffing is as good cold as it is hot – and as our household almost always eats their turkey cold, this is important!
1 cup fresh bread, cut into small cubes
(or a third of a cup of fresh breadcrumbs, but this is by far second best, or a packet dry breadcrumbs, which is third best)
1 cup butter, melted
half a cup dried or fresh apple, chopped
1 large onion, chopped finely
6 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp fresh thyme leaves
1 tsp fresh sage leaves, chopped
1 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
dash of Tabasco sauce, optional
1 cup cooked cashews, pistachios or macadamias
juice of 1 large lemon
Place bread cubes on a greased tray in the oven, bake till pale but not dark gold. Remove from the oven.
These will give a crunch to the stuffing and ensure it isn't too heavy (not like that iron weight muck you often find in commercial cooked chooks, so heavy and closely packed it weights down your stomach for three hours!).
Sauté the onion and garlic in the butter till the onion is transparent. Mix everything else and stuff into the turkey.
How to stuff a turkey
Hoik out the neck and anything else that has been inserted into the cavity of the bird. Now press the stuffing in LIGHTLY - don't stuff too much or it will be heavy and may not cook right through, giving you an interesting case of food poisoning on Boxing Day.
I also stuff the neck cavity. This helps keep the dry breast meat moist and adds flavour to battery flesh, if a battery bird is all you can find. It also means more stuffing!
Wriggle your hand in the other end, gently so you don't tear it, and force a good opening under the skin over the top of the breast meat. Now stuff your stuffing in there too, till the loose skin where the neck once was is half full. Bend the rest of the loose neck skin under the bird so it doesn't all ooze out.
How to carve a turkey
Cut off the wing; cut off the legs and thighs; cut the wings and thighs at the joints and slice off any easily get-at-able meat - this will depend on how big your turkey is. Small birds aren't big enough to go hacking at their joints trying to get decent slices off.
Now slice at one side of the front breast, then the other, alternating. If you have stuffed the neck you'll also slice a nice bit of stuffing. Keep going till you reach bone.
Now turn the bird on its side and carve the side bit of breast from bum to neck. Try not to carve yourself too at this point - you'll spoil the Christmas dinner at the Emergency Ward if they have to stitch you up.
Don't carve more than you think everyone will eat at first go; it's best to cover the bird and have another go when everyone has guzzled down their first helping. Don't forget to hoik some of the stuffing out of the cavity too.
Baked Fish with Fruit Salsa
1 whole salmon or tuna or other firm fish
alfoil or grape leaves, free of beetles and dipped in boiling water for 10 seconds
lemon or lime juice
Salsa
half a cup chopped coriander (yes, parsley will do at a pinch but won't be nearly as fragrant )
half a cup fresh basil, chopped
1 avocado, peeled and chopped
half a cup paw paw or mango, peeled and chopped
2 tbsps Spanish or red onion, peeled and chopped
4 tbsps olive oil
10 tbsps lemon or lime juice
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tbsps chopped red chilli or red capsicum
2 tb fish sauce
1 tb sweet chilli nsauce
Day before:
Sprinkle fish with lemon or lime juice, wrap in alfoil or cover well with grape leaves (or both if the grape leaves refuse to stick around the fish) and bake for 30 minutes at 20ºC. Check it's cooked all the way through but don't overcook – it's a good idea to check half way through as the cooking time depends on the size of the fish – the bigger it is, the longer it will need. Remove from oven. Cool and place in fridge.
Unwrap fish carefully. Nibble any bits left clinging to the alfoil. Place fish on platter.
Mix all other ingredients. Pour over fish.
Christmas Relish
I love the word relish. It gets the taste buds going almost as much as the word 'chocolate'.
A relish is what you add to make boring things taste good i.e. cold spuds, cold meat and most aren't bad on cheese on toast, especially if you liven it up with half way decent bread and good cheese and call it foccacia instead.
Most relishes will last for months if not years in the back of the cupboard waiting to be hauled out in case the meteor falls and life on earth – or at least the supermarket part of it – is extinguished.
This relish needs to be kept in the fridge and eaten within a few weeks, as it contains less vinegar, less sugar and more fruit than the ordinary variety. This also means that this one tastes better.
Ingredients
3 cups fresh mango, paw paw, or pineapple, chopped
half a cup raw sugar
half a cup good white wine vinegar
2 large red onions, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tbsps olive oil
1 red chilli, chopped, optional
2 whole cloves
Sauté onion and garlic in the oil till the onion is soft and totally transparent. (If it isn't, the acid in the relish will make it go hard and rubbery.)
Add the rest of the ingredients; simmer till thick (about 10 - 15 minutes).
Place in a sealed container in the fridge. Keep for three days to mature before using. Good with turkey, ham, or fish.
A Vegetarian Feast
Christmas dinner should look spectacular, as well as taste good. A great dead bird in the middle of the table looks... well, like a great stuffed dead bird i.e. a feast. But if you want a spectacular vegetarian feast you'll have to work at it.
Spectacular Vegetarian Christmas Timbale
(serves 6)
1 very large or 2 or 3 small eggplants, sliced
3 large red capsicums, quartered and seeded
6 fresh largish bocconcini cheeses
6 small zucchini, thinly sliced
1 fat orange sweet potato, very thinly sliced
1 large bunch silver beet
1 large red onion, peeled and chopped
10 tbsps olive oil
1 tbsp pine nuts
4 cloves garlic, chopped finely
6 semi-dried tomatoes
1 tbsp finely chopped parsley or coriander leaves
juice of 1 lime or lemon
salt
Sprinkle the eggplant slices with salt; leave for two hours, then wash in cold water. This reduces bitterness and makes then more supple. Brush each slice with olive oil. Grill, chargrill or fry on each side till cooked - about 5 minutes.
Brush zucchini slices with olive oil; fry, grill or chargrill them.
Brush sweet potato slices with olive oil; fry, grill or chargrill them. (Make sure they are cooked – you might have to try a small sample as you go!)
Grill the capsicum till the skin is black and blistered. Place in a plastic bag till cool, then rub the skin off. Brush the capsicum with olive oil.
Leave everything to cool.
Sauté the onion and garlic in 4 tbsps of the olive oil till the onion is soft; add the silverbeet, chopped or torn into small pieces (the stems can also be added but must be very finely chopped). When the silverbeet is soft, take it all off the heat and add the pine nuts.
Slice the bocconcini thinly.
To assemble:
Place four slices of bocconcini side by side on a plate, so they form a largish sort of circle. Now add a layer of eggplant, capsicum, sweet potato, zucchini, then cheese, eggplant, capsicum, zucchini till it's all used up. Place the dried tomato on top. Surround the circle with the chopped silverbeet and pine nuts.
Combine the remaining olive oil and lemon or lime juice. Add a touch of salt or pepper if you like. Pour it over the mound, then sprinkle on the parsley.
Serve.
(This also makes delicious leftovers; it's worth making far more than you think everyone will eat).
Bung it on the Barbecue
There are two great advantages to barbecuing Christmas dinner – or any other meal for that matter.
Firstly it's done outside, so the house doesn't heat up. Secondly, mostly men do it, even if they've never thrown a lettuce and cucumber together and called it a salad before in their lives.
Men have a great affinity with barbecues. Probably goes back to some deep racial memory of roast mammoth after the hunt, but the end result is, if you're female and you don't want to cook, suggest a barbecue.
Barbecued Turkey Pieces or Barbecued Chicken Breasts
(serves 6)
6 chicken breasts or 6 -16 hunks of turkey
1 cup of natural yoghurt
1 cup mango chutney (from the supermarket)
Marinate chicken/turkey in yoghurt and chutney overnight. Grill/barbecue on both sides till well browned.
This does make a horrible mess of the barbecue, but it does scrub/scrape off. It is also delicious, fast and fairly healthy! (Unless you happen to be the chook or turkey.)
Salmon parcels
(Serves 6)
6 salmon cutlets
1 lemon
1 tsp dill leaves
6 cloves garlic
alfoil
Arrange cutlets on their own sheet of alfoil. Sprinkle with lemon juice, dill and squeeze a clove of garlic over each. Wrap. Cook five minutes per side on the barbecue or bake 15 minutes in a moderate oven. Unwrap one and check - it should still be deep pink (not red) in the centre, not whitish pink all the way through – over-cooked salmon is dry.
Serve with light sour cream, decanted into a bowl straight from its supermarket carton and, if you're feeling flash, decorate with red or black caviar. Also serve more lemon chunks.
Lemon and Garlic Butter Corn Cobs
Melt half a cup of butter with four crushed cloves of garlic. Take off the heat. Add a good grating of black pepper and the juice of a lemon. Soak eight cobs of corn, papery wrapping and all, in water for twenty minutes. Then unwrap them carefully - don't tear the wrapping. Pour a little of the slightly cooled and thickened melted butter mix onto each cob. Rub in well with your fingers or a pastry brush.
Grill until cooked through - at least twenty minutes or half an hour, turning several times.
You can also try this with alfoil instead of the natural corn packaging; but it's not nearly as good.
NB Don't buy corn wrapped in plastic. It tastes like plastic.
Veg Kebabs
Ingredients: 1 large sliced eggplant (salt and drain for half an hour to remove bitterness but see below)
2 red onions
25 button mushrooms
a red capsicum
half a cup of olive oil
3 cloves garlic
a dash of Tabasco sauce (optional)
artichoke hearts (optional)
hunks of red tomato (optional)
hunks of boiled but firm potato (optional)
thyme
juice of 1 lemon.
Cut the eggplant, red capsicum and the onions (peeled) into chunks about the size of the button mushrooms. Mix the other ingredients. Marinate for at least an hour or overnight.
Thread all the veg onto skewers. Grill till softish and slightly charred.
Grilled Mushrooms
Choose great big flattish ones, as dark and fragrant as possible.
Mix lots of garlic and black pepper and chopped parsley into melted butter or margarine (or even olive oil). Pour a generous amount into the cap of each mushroom. Grill the mushrooms top downwards until the stems look cooked or until the mushrooms look like they might soon collapse or burn. Eat hot.
Char grilling
You need a hot plate for this, though builder's mesh also works as long as the veg are sufficiently basted in oil.
Good foods to char include thin slices of eggplant (supposed to be salted for an hour first to let the acrid juices escape, but I don't bother - modern cultivars aren't as bitter as old-fashioned ones), capsicum (strip the blackened skin off before you serve it), shelled green prawns, fresh very ripe and fragrant pineapple, strips of zucchini brushed with olive oil and dusted with oregano and black pepper, small, sweet onions sliced in half, par-boiled potatoes, sweet potatoes and pumpkin, baby octopus marinated for a couple of hours beforehand.
Fruit Kebabs
Thread fresh pineapple, firm yellow peaches, bananas, apples, nectarines or apricots on skewers. Grill them as they are (fast before they turn brown – sprinkle with lemon juice if they are to be left more than twenty minutes) or brush with a mixture of half a cup of brown sugar melted with a quarter of a cup of butter; add a tablespoon of rum at the end.
Christmas Biscuits
(Crisp and very good)
125 gms margarine or butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 tsps rum, rum essence or vanilla
1 large egg
1 and three quarters of a cup of SR flour
half a cup chopped macadamias or pecans
half a cup chopped crystallised cherries
half a cup choc chips
I also add half a cup chopped crystallised pineapple, but that's because I'm stuck on preserved pineapple at the moment - it's good but you can leave it out!
Cream butter and sugar, mix in the egg and essence and fold in other ingredients. Bake at 200ºC for about 10 minutes or till pale gold.
Frozen Plum Pudding
This could be said to be a cheat's plum pudding - no cooking, no steam and it takes about ten minutes to make. 'Cheat's' however implies it doesn't taste as good as the real thing - well, it does. But don't try it with cheap ice cream made with artificial vanilla though - it's just a waste of the other decent ingredients.
1 litre good vanilla ice cream
6 tbsps rum
2 tbsps sultanas
2 tbsps glacé pineapple, chopped
2 tbsps glacé ginger, chopped (optional)
2 tbsps glacé cherries, chopped
4 tbsps macadamias, chopped
quarter tsp mixed spice
To decorate: fresh cherries, halved and stoned, or chopped glacé pineapple and chopped macadamias with a little grated dark chocolate.
Marinate the fruit, nuts and spice in the grog overnight; keep the bowl covered so the rum doesn't evaporate. A few hours before serving scoop out the centre of the ice cream, insert the fruit mix in the hole and plug the hole with the removed ice cream
To Serve: Turn it out pudding-like on a chilled plate, quickly scatter on the decoration. Serve in slices, so the filling oozes out at the end of each slice. Have a bowl extra whipped cream for those who haven't yet been overstuffed.
Christmas fruit jelly (looks stunning; wonderfully wobbly)
A light alternative to Christmas Pudding
1 packet frozen blueberries or raspberries, or 2 cups of each fresh
1 cup fresh strawberries, sliced
1 cup fresh peaches, sliced
1 cup white wine
1 cup caster sugar
juice of two lemons
half cup water
2 sachets gelatine
Use a no-stick cake tin or line a cake tin with plastic wrap. Place sliced strawberries in the bottom and empty in the blueberries.
Heat all other ingredients except the gelatine till nearly boiling, take off the heat and add gelatine. (Mix a little with some of the liquid first so you don't get lumps.) Pour liquid into the cake tin. Leave till set – it will take several hours.
Turn it out onto a plate. If it won't come out easily dip the base of the tin in hot water in the sink for about 30 seconds – make sure no liquid gets into the tin though! This will loosen the jelly enough for it to slide out.
Serve slices with cream or ice cream.
Note: if that amount of gelatine doesn't form a well-set jelly, the whole thing can be slightly warmed and more gelatine (mixed with a little of the warmed liquid first) can be added. For some reason sometimes more is needed - possibly this depends on the ripeness and juiciness of the berries.
Totally Secret Frozen Fruit Salad
This was possibly the first recipe I ever invented on my own; I was about seven, I think, and I'd been bunging mulberries and strawberries and bananas in the freezer for years.
In those days ice cream was a definite treat. The local shop didn't sell it, except in small cups. But the ice cream man used to drive round in his ute on Sunday afternoons, with great canvas bags of dry ice and in the centre were either Have-a-hearts – ice cream with a choc coating, or rectangular cardboard wrapped 'family blocks' – and that's what Mum bought. Towards the end of their life, before plastic tubs were introduced and suddenly supermarkets had swallowed corner shops and had great freezers full of them, the cardboard rectangles had zippers down the side; you pulled the zipper and, behold, your cardboard container was open. (The ice cream used to cling in a particularly delicious way to the waxed cardboard and Mum used to rip it into four pieces so each kid could get one to lick. I think Fred used to chew his too, but then he liked odd things like handfuls of butter and the suds off the washing up.)
Anyway, back to the ice cream ... to begin with it was vanilla or neapolitan - stripes of white, pink (I suppose it was supposed to be strawberry) and chocolate (which didn't much taste like chocolate either). But then came fruit salad ice cream, with little bits of fruit in it and it was this I tried to imitate.
Well, I didn't make it then – I did manage it about twenty years later. But I got this instead. I still love it.
2 cups fresh pineapple, chopped
2 cups fresh rockmelon, chopped
2 fresh mangoes, chopped (optional)
1 cup fresh paw paw, chopped (also optional)
1 banana, peeled and chopped (def not optional)
1 cup sugar
half a cup water
juice of 1 lemon
cream
You'll also need:
plastic cups or iceblock moulds
iceblock sticks (from newsagents - you don't need to hog a dozen paddle-pops to make these)
Boil the sugar, water and lemon juice for ten minutes, Cool.
Add to the fruit. Pour a little cream into the top of plastic cups or iceblock moulds – anything freezable. Top up with the fruit mixture. Poke in an iceblock stick. Freeze.
Leftovers
Leftover Turkey (or chook) and Tropical Salad
4 cups chopped cooked turkey
2 cups parsley, finely chopped
3 tbsps chives or garlic chives, finely chopped
1 cup paw paw, chopped and peeled
2 mangoes, peeled and cut into chunks or shreds, depending on how ripe they are
juice of 1 lemon
6 tbsps olive oil
half a teaspoon salt
3 tbsps chopped coriander leaves
Optional: Baked beetroot chunks, cherry or quartered tomatoes,
Mix. Serve with fresh bread.
Fish pie
2 cups leftover fish (or open a can of salmon; why wait till you have leftovers? But this is excellent with 'real ' fish. )
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 cup milk
1 tbsp cornflour
4 tbsps olive oil
black pepper
pinch nutmeg
1 tbsp parsley, chopped
1 tbsp chives, chopped
3 tbsps capsicum, chopped
3 tbsps celery, chopped
(But if you don't have any of these greens or any capsicum, you can still make an impoverished but still good version)
4 cups cooked potatoes, mashed with margarine and milk
Sauté onion, capsicum and garlic in oil till onion is transparent, add greens and stir for one minute more. Add cornflour, then slowly add milk stirring all the time till it begins to thicken.
Take off heat, stir in fish, pepper and nutmeg. Place in oven-proof dish and top with potato.
Bake at 200ºC till potato is brown and crisp at the edges – about half an hour. Eat hot; also good cold for breakfast.
*And Afterwards...
Six things to do with Reindeer Droppings
A few little mementos on the lawn?
o use reindeer droppings to fertilise your roses
o mix them with water, to lure the polar bears out of the freezer
o paste them in the photo album, for a genuine scratch and sniff Christmas memory
o bundle them into a pillow for the dog, so they can dream of big game hunting next year
o make GENUINE Christmas earrings – the dingle dangle sort ...
o place them on a flowered plate and tell Aunt Ethel they're date and walnut... no, sorry, kids. Forget I ever mentioned that one ...