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Christmas Dinner

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Christmas-dinner

Christmas dinner is something of a gastronomic event in our house.

thai-prawn-saladWe decided to have the entree as lunch instead of with the evening meal. BBQ prawns marinated overnight in lemon and lime juice, garlic, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, chilli, black pepper and prawn oil. Served with a salad of cos lettuce, charred baby capsicum, cherry tomatoes, sliced zucchini and avocado and a dressing of palm sugar, fish sauce, lemon juice and diced chilli.

Here’s the dinner menu, served with Bird in Hand Sparkling Pinot Noir.

Spiced Duck Breast with Cherry Sauce
This started with an Ottolenghi recipe (from his book “Ottolenghi“), with the duck marinated overnight in a spice mix of crushed fennel and cumin seeds, pepper and salt. I made a duck with red wine sauce base from a Masterchef recipe (vol 2. p144). Then giving Ottolenghi a twist I added a few star anise and about 15 cherries and cooked it down. This worked really well…. 

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Duck with Blood Orange and Star Anise

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spiced-duck-pan

Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi are my favourite chefs at the moment. Not only are Ottolenghi’s restaurants famous, the cookbooks are sensational. Here’s our second experiment with blood orange.

One my aims on this blog is to share my own inventions, but also to share one great recipe from one of the cookbooks on my shelves and encourage you to go an buy it!

Here’s the recipe on his website. It’s the kind of thing that you’d expect from Kylie Kwong, except that she uses blood plums.

The website has lots of sensational recipes here.

I served it on top of a carrot and sweet potato mash, with asparagus and Jerusalem artichokes, and a chilli as garnish. Very, very yummy.

spiced-cooked-duck

Duck Prosciutto

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duck_prosciutto

I’ve just made by first batch of duck prosciutto, thanks to a simple recipe in Feast Magazine (Issue 36, October 2014). Tastes excellent.

Duck Prosciutto
 
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Author:
Recipe type: --
Cuisine: European
Ingredients
  • Two 40cm muslin squares
  • Kitchen string
  • Wire rack
  • 2 Duck breasts
  • 750 g Coarse sea salt
  • 1 tbsp Fennel seeds (crushed)
  • 1 tbsp Coriander seeds (crushed)
  • 1 tbps White sugar
  • 1 tsp Black peppercorns
  • 5 x 5 cm Orange peel strips
  • 8 Thyme sprigs
  • 8 Sage leaves
Instructions
  1. Rinse duck under cold water and dry with paper towels. Combine salt, fennel seeds, coriander seeds, sugar, black peppercorns and orange peel in a bowl. Find a container that will fit the mixture and the duck snugly. Put halt of salt mixture in container, add duck breasts, then the other half of the mixture, Make sure that all of the duck is well covered, and ad more salt if necessary. Cover and refrigerate for 48 hours.
  2. Rinse duck well under cold running water and dry with paper towel. Place half of the thyme and sage leaves on each piece of muslin. Place each piece of duck skin side down of a piece of muslin. Wrap duck in cloth and tie with kitchen string.
  3. Place duck on a wire rack in the middle of your refrigerator for at least 2 weeks. Ensure that there is good airflow around the duck and turn it every couple of days. Once opened, it will keep for up to 2 weeks.

muslin-duck

BBQ Chicken Heart Skewers

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BBQ-chicken-hearts

 

Yes, you read it correctly. When I was in Brazil in 2008 I ate some charcoal cooked chicken hearts and they were fantastic! No, really! So, when I saw chicken hearts at the supermarket this week…

The first few I simply cooked quickly on high heat in a pan with smoked paprika and pepper and then glazed them with brandy. Excellent.

Tonight’s batch were BBQed on the Weber with hickory wood for smoking. The recipe comes from Stephane Reynaud’s Barbecue. Reynaud is a French chef who has some excellent and left-field BBQ ideas.

The chicken hearts were marinated in the following

1 tbsp smoked paprika
1 tbsp ground turmeric
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/3 cup olive oil
50 ml brandy (recipe said rum)
2 tbsp sweet soy sauce (keycap manis)

The hearts were put onto rosemary sprigs (courtesy of our local library’s rosemary hedge).

Cook over charcoal for about 10 minutes. Mine took longer, so they needed higher heat. They were a little rubbery. They ought to be crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.

But I have to say that I loved them.