Christmas.

Christmas is so busy.  I'm sure you know that!  So I've had a mini blogging holiday for a couple of weeks, and have come back refreshed.  Sadly, I was so busy and overwhelmed (in a good way) with food and cooking, that I didn't photograph most of the fantastic meals I've enjoyed.  Suffice to say, I am happy to go a few weeks without ham, stuffing, gravy and custard, no matter how good they are!

Here is a great big post of photos from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day...

My little sister and Tabitha in their 'Christmas costumes' on Christmas eve.  Q is a Christmas Fairy, Tabitha is a plum pudding fairy:

On Christmas eve, I bottled up around a dozen glass jars of homemade roasted almond praline powder.  It's so easy, delicious, and makes a nice gift.  I'll post instructions one day soon, but basically you just make a dark caramel (sugar and water), pour it over roasted almonds, then blitz the whole thing to a powder in the food processor.  It's delicious over ice cream, or sprinkled over the top of muffins, in cakes, added to ganache, with yoghurt and many other uses:

We had people over for dinner on Christmas eve - my parents, sister, and aunt and uncle (who are around my age).   I just did a nice basic meal - a couple of roast chickens with homemade stuffing (sage, onion, pine nut and bacon.  I'll post the recipe on the blog soon), gravy, roast potatoes and pumpkin, roast garlic and shallots, lovely sourdough bread and salted butter (for mopping up the gravy).  To finish, Christmas pudding with homemade custard and homemade ice cream.

You can get the pudding covered and ready in the morning, or even the day before.  Then you pop it onto steam an hour before the chooks go into the oven, and you don't need to think about it for a few hours, until serving (you might need to top the water up once or twice):

You can also get the potatoes ready - cut into small cubes, tossed in olive oil, lemon juice, salt and rosemary.  I never peel potatoes for roasting.  So much of the flavour (and almost all of the nutrients) are in the skin and just below.

Shallots and garlic ready for roasting.  For 8 people, I do around 30 shallots and a few heads of garlic.  People seem to eat loads, and they are delicious squished onto sandwiches, cold, if there are any leftovers.

2 large chooks (size 15 or so) with veggies and pudding is ample for 8 people.  I get gorgeous organic chooks from the market, and find they have so much flavour that you don't need to eat quite as much.

With piles of crispy roast potatoes, and plenty of sweet, soft roast pumpkin, everyone had third helpings.  This makes me happy.

This is a 4.5kg pudding.  Between the 8 of us, we ate well over half - with rivers of warm vanilla custard and homemade vanilla ice cream (I was generously gifted with an ice cream maker, from my Godfamily, for Christmas, which I have already put to good use a few times.  I'll post on it soon).

Last thing before bed on Christmas Eve, Tabitha's stocking was filled and hung on her door handle.  This is the same stocking I used as a child - it is quite small and simple compared to stockings sold nowadays, which I find pleasingly nostalgic:

In the morning, Tabitha was thrilled to find her stocking, and her new table and chairs!  What do you think her favourite present from her stocking was?  A toothbrush.  What can I say?  The kid loves to brush her teeth!  This one had pink and purple cats on it:

Once we were awake, the stocking was unpacked, and we were dressed, we drove straight to my parents' house, which is where most of Tabitha's gifts were.

You may recall, last Christmas (Tabitha's first) I decided to follow an American tradition, and choose four main gifts:  Something You Want, Something You Need, Something To Do and Something To Read.  Along with this, I fill a small stocking with a few little gifts.

I reasoned that this would prevent me from going overboard (I start Christmas shopping in October, and knew I'd keep getting 'just one more thing...' for Tabby unless I set a limit).  I also wanted to keep the gift-giving relatively modest, to allow her to appreciate her presents (and knowing that she would get lots, lots more from other people).  Finally, I liked the idea that, long term, this strategy allows you to remain relatively fair when shopping for more than one child - each child gets the same number of gifts (four plus some stocking treats).

This year, the Something You Want gift was a little pull-along wooden cat (Janod Crazy Cat) which Tabby has seen and clutched at our favourite toy store, Jasper Junior, many times in the past months.

The Something You Need gift was a wooden table and four chairs - she's at an age where she often prefers to eat her meals at a little table, and it's great for tea parties, colouring in etc.  We bought the set online from Nanny Annie - I looked at quite a few sets around the place, Ikea has some good ones as well, as does Windmill Educational Toys.

The Something To Do gift was from Windmill - a fantastic wooden toy

The Something To Read choice was a copy of the divine book Sally's Secret by Shirley Hughes (of the Naughty Little Sister books).  I love, love, love Shirley Hughes, and this is one of my favourites.  The illustrations are beautiful and detailed, and the story is sweet and inspires creative play.  I recommend this book as part of every picture book collection!

Here is a snap of some of Tabitha's presents - you can see the pull-along cat, the book, the table-and-chairs (they are sitting on the table), the hammer-ball activity.  You can also see the brilliant 'Wheely-Bug' leather pig ride-on from my parents, the beautiful tin tea set from my friend Amy, a pair of 101 Dalmatian PJs from Peter Alexander from my parents,  a colourful silk 'balloon ball', and at the bottom right, the items from her stocking...

Here is a closeup of her stocking contents (minus the toothbrush, which she clung to) - a t-shirt with milk and cookies, a little box of gingerbread baby cookies, a few little dog figurines, a harmonica, and a few hair clips:

Here are the presents for our family and my parents and sister, under the tree in their living room:

Tabitha and I wore white.  We even managed to stay clean all day - it's a Christmas Miracle!

Here is our little family:

Tabitha followed by little sister around like a shadow all morning - and my sister's tiny dog, Posie, in turn followed Tabitha around (she has learnt that Tabby often leaves a trail of delicious crumbs behind her).  Q was so excited to receive both a bicycle and a skateboard!

Tabby was thrilled to bits with her ride-on pig.  Mum and dad have plenty of roomy wooden floors for riding around on, so she had a ball:

Posie looked on with interest - she was a little alarmed by this sliding, gliding pig-person:

Her face is so excited here - she really loves tearing paper off and finding out what is underneath:

Taking her pull-along cat for a walk:

Doesn't she have the most beautiful hair?!  So soft, straight and shiny.  It doesn't need any brushing, and always smells delicious.

With grandpa Gra.  Loves him, she does!

Offering one of Posie's rawhide chews to her toy dog:

Q and T were both bursting with excitement all morning!

Concentrating hard on her hammer ball game:

It is tradition, for us, to all have a big breakfast of plenty of croissants, jam, juice and tea.

I love Tabitha's little white dress so much.  Would you believe it's Target?  Probably the cheapest dress she owns, but without a doubt one of the nicest:

We had Christmas Lunch at The Daddy's aunt's home.  Tabitha slept right through the whole thing!  In her porta-cot from 12 until just after 3.  This gave us a chance to enjoy a nice leisurely lunch.  I brought the pudding and also the ham (8kg free range, which I glazed with maple syrup, Dijon mustard, brown sugar, orange marmalade and studded with cloves, then glazed sitting in a tray with an inch of apple cider).

After Tabby woke up, we dressed her in the little Plum Pudding Fairy outfit.  She looked too cute for words.

We had a really brilliant Christmas - Tabitha was in fine form, dancing and laughing and singing and really loving all of her presents.  I think 18 months is a lovely age for Christmas!

In milestone news, I started keeping track of Tabitha's words last month, and was really shocked to learn that she had over 50 words at 18 months!  I don't know if this is average, above or below, but it seems like a lot to me!  Of course, most of them are pronounced very strangely (and some would only be understood by myself - I know that Bobble means Bottle, for her water bottle).  And now, only a few weeks later, I have had to stop keeping track - there would easily be over 80 words, I'd say.  Every day there seems to be a few new ones.  All sorts of funny things like 'rough' and 'smooth', and of course the standard toddler classics such as 'mine', 'more', 'cake' and 'poo!!!'

Dinner, Children's Literature and Doll Blankets

At this time of year, there are so many Christmas catch-ups, parties, dinners and the like, that on nights when we do not have some sort of eating occasion to attend or host, I try and cook something more snacky than substantial.  Tonight, I made oversized pumpkin scones (recipe HERE, I cut them into rounds about the size of an English muffin), split open, filled with Gruyere cheese, incredibly smokey Fernleigh Farms free range ham, and lots of my beloved Beerenberg green tomato pickles, then popped back into the oven to melt together:

Afterwards, we had more pumpkin scones with butter and plenty of golden syrup.  Pumpkin scones are good at any time of day.

My friend had a baby - I bought the baby a gorgeous little knitted sock monkey, but for her toddler girl (Tabitha's age), I crocheted a doll-sized blanket.  Everyone says you ought to take a small gift for the older sibling/s, so they don't feel left out, and I thought a special blankie for her baby dolls would be just about right:

Sock monkey on top, blanket on the bottom:

I mentioned months and months ago that I quite enjoy ironing Tabitha's little clothes - they are so cute, and don't take more than a minute per item, being so small.  It's like ironing dolls' clothes:

I've been re-reading many of my childhood favourite books lately - I don't know why, but it's suddenly all I feel like reading (children's fiction and books on backyard chook keeping, in preparation for getting some lovely Pekin Bantams next year).  In the past few weeks alone, I have re-read:

• The Railway Children
• Charlotte's Web (every time I read it, I enjoy it more)
• Stuart Little
• Famous Five books 1-4 (#3, Five Run Away Together, is one of my favourites, because of all the food)
• Little House in the Big Woods (my favourite of the Little House series)
• Mary Poppins (far better than the film, in my opinion)
• Malory Towers books 1-6
• Ballet Shoes (my sister's red toy Poodle, Posy, is named after one of the protagonists)
• Seven Little Australians
• What Katy Did

That is a lot of books to read in a few weeks, but that is part of the appeal - you can easily finish off a Famous Five book, or the like, in a day.  This can be very satisfying when your days are so fractured, chasing after a toddler - a couple of hours during nap, a few hours in the evening, and you have the satisfaction of having finished a whole book.

Chocolate Meringue Pie and Banana Pudding

Everyone is having babies!  And boy ones at that.  I've been wrapping gorgeous little knitted things and stuffed things all week.  I found some sheets of the most gorgeous 'little boy' wrapping paper - it is a warm ecru background, with a dark brown, 'pencil' type sketch of a little boy holding a ball.  I don't know why, but I fell in love with the design on the paper, and bought lots.  It looks pretty with chocolate and baby blue ribbon:

As the weather warms up, I sadly have to abandon a lot of my favourite cooking - thick stews, rich and creamy dishes and slow-roasted meats that heat the kitchen up too much.  Teriyaki salmon is always one of my favourite warm-weather meals.  You can make a large quantity of the teriyaki sauce, and keep it bottled in the fridge for a few weeks, easily.

To make the sauce, just combine 2 tablespoons sugar, 6 tablespoons mirin and 6 tablespoons of soy sauce in a saucepan.  Dissolve sugar, bring to boil, then add 1 teaspoon or so of cornflour (disolved to a paste with a smidge of the liquid), and boil, stirring, until thickened a little.  That's all.

Then you can pan-fry some pieces of chicken thigh or breast (1 inch pieces) and add the sauce, bubbling up around it for a minute, and serve with rice and greens.  Or, as I more often do, cook some lovely salmon fillets until barely cooked through, and serve them with rice, sauce and greens.  A sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds is always a good idea.  Teriyaki anything is always a winner with Tabitha, and most kids I know.

I baked a really rich chocolate meringue pie last week.  I can't tell you how good it was.  We had people over for dinner (paprika chicken with spaetzle - it was a chilly day), and between four of us, we mostly finished off the pie.  I had the rest on my own, in bed, the following evening!

To make this simple yet delicious chocolate pie, first blind-bake a shortcrust pastry shell:

By the way, if you normally throw out your shortcust pastry scraps, try making 'cinnamon scrap buddies' instead.  Roll out the scraps into a long rectangle, brush with a little melted butter, sprinkle over a nice layer of sugar and cinnamon, roll into a long sausage, chill in the freezer for a few minutes to harden up, then slice into 1cm 'snails'.  Bake at 180 degrees for around 10 minutes or so, or until lightly browned.

 

You then need to make a layer of chocolate pudding, and a topping of meringue.  Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos of the filling - I was cooking several things at once while I made it, and it disappeared very quickly once I served it - but here is how you make it:

In a medium-large saucepan, combine 1.5 cups sugar, 8 tablespoons excellent cocoa, 10 tablespoons cornflour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 3 cups whole milk and 4 egg yolks.  Whisk well to combine.  Over medium heat, whisking the whole time, slowly bring to a boil (around 7 minutes or so).  Once it's gently boiling, whisk quickly and boil steadily for about 1.5 - 2 minutes, until nicely thick.  Remove from heat, add 2 tablespoons butter and a tablespoon of vanilla.

If you think it's a little lumpy, press it through a mesh sieve.  Then, pour it into your pie shell and put in the fridge to set.

Once it's set (can leave it for several hours or overnight), take your 4 egg whites (bring to room temperature if you can) and beat them until soft peaks form.  Add 8 tablespoons of sugar (one at a time) and a good pinch of salt, and beat until stiff peaks form.  Spread over the chocolate pudding, being sure that the meringue touches the pastry at all edges to form a light seal.  Form peaks if you'd like.  Either blow-torch it a little, or set it a 180 degree oven for a few minutes until lightly browned.

Store in the fridge, and serve from the fridge - otherwise the chocolate pudding can get a bit melty in the hot weather!

Bananas are so cheap again!  $1.60 per kilo at the market yesterday, and they were beautiful ones too.  I've been buying kilos and kilos of bananas, and inevitably making lots of banana cake, banana yoghurt icy poles etc.

To make banana cake, I use the Stephanie Alexander recipe from her Cook's Companion book (if you don't have it, put it on your Christmas list).  Normally, I sprinkle a delicious nut-and-spice topping on the cake (also in the book) but on the weekend I added a good handful of chocolate chips instead.  Twas good.

While I had the oven on, I baked a dozen or so oversized date scones.  They freeze beautifully, and are a perfect snack for Tabitha, or morning tea for myself, heated in the oven and eaten with lots of butter and golden syrup.

Yesterday, banana pudding was on the menu.  It's in a pie dish, below, but it's not a pie, it's Southern-style banana pudding.  If you switch the elements around a little, you can make a banana cream pie, which is also excellent!  I'll tell you how to do both.  Next time I make it (in the next couple of weeks, I'm sure) I'll post step-by-step photos.

First, let me explain the difference between a classic banana pudding, my banana pudding, and a banana cream pie.

A very traditional banana pudding features homemade vanilla pudding (like a very thick custard or creme patisserie, a popular dessert in America), layered with slices of fresh banana and Nilla Wafers (a biscuit made by Nabisco, which are sadly not widely available in Australia, but which you can buy from USA foods HERE).

Basically this includes homemade vanilla pudding (a very thickened custard with egg yolks etc, see recipe below), whipped cream, sliced banana and Nilla Wafers (which are, sadly, not a biscuit we have here. Gotta pay $8 a box at USA Foods!  Or you can try using ladyfingers / Savoiardi).  A couple of layers of each (pudding, banana, wafers, pudding, banana, wafers, pudding, banana, wafers, pudding).  Then the whole lot is refrigerated for at least 12 hours (24-36 or so is better) and topped with whipped cream.

Now, that version is excellent.  It's the classic version that Elvis loved so dearly.  But when we were in New York, I tried the renowned Magnolia Bakery banana pudding.  It was incredibly light and ethereal and creamy, not at all stodgy.  I later learned this is because they fold whipped cream into the vanilla pudding!  

I didn't want to use the Magnolia recipe (they use instant pudding, and I prefer to make my own) so I tweaked a couple of recipes and came up with mine.  It's very simple and I really recommend making it - perfect over summer, a creamy, dreamy, banana custard type of dessert, perfect for BBQs.

My recipe is below...

Finally, I just wanted to add that, using the same elements as a banana pudding, you can very easily make a beautiful banana cream pie!  First, bake a shortcrust pastry shell (blind bake) or even use a crumb crust, e.g. crushed biscuits (Marie or Gingersnaps or even chocolate ripple would be divine) mixed with melted butter, pressed into the pie dish and baked until lightly browned.  Then, make your vanilla pudding (recipe below).  Layer sliced bananas into the pie shell, pour over half the pudding, layer more bananas, pour over the rest of the pudding, and leave to set in the fridge for several hours or overnight.  Before serving, top with a good amount of whipped cream OR meringue topping (using the egg whites left over from your pudding).  Serve chilled.  NOTE:  Folding the whipped cream through the pudding isn't a good idea for the pie, because you need the firm-set structure of the pudding for slicing).

Okay, so here is how you make the homemade vanilla pudding:

In a medium, heavy saucepan, combine 1 cup sugar, 1/4 cup cornflour and a large pinch of salt.  Whisk in 2 1/4 cups whole milk and 4 large egg yolks.  Over medium heat, cook, whisking non-stop, until the pudding starts to thicken and comes to a low boil, around 5-7 minutes.  Continue to whisk while it boils, until quite thick (around 90 seconds).  Remove from the heat and whisk in 1.5 teaspoons of vanilla extract, and 40g unsalted butter, a small piece at a time.  Pour into a jug or bowl and set in the fridge.  NOTE: if you are not making my version, but rather the very traditional one, you need to layer the pudding with the bananas and Nillas while it is still warm, before it has set.

If you are making my banana pudding, you will need 600ml of thickened cream, whipped with a few teaspoons of caster sugar.  Once the pudding is cold and set, add it to the whipped cream and whip them together (a minute or less in a standing mixer with the whisk). 

You can sprinkle crumbled Nilla wafers over the top of the pudding just before serving.  You will use nearly a whole box for the pudding, so save a few if you wish.  Actually, do you know what else would be awesome sprinkled on top of the pudding, instead?  Crumbled up meringues!  Either shop-bought or homemade.  Nice bit of crunch.

No pictures can convey how awesomely delicious this is.

Our lovely dinner guest last night got to take home a large serving:

Do you have any questions?  I'm sure I have made the pudding, classic pudding and pie sound more complicated than they are!  It's so easy, and any of the recipes would be perfect for casual summer entertaining.