Christmas Special! (by G)

As it is Christmas and we had a wide variety and vast quantity of food this is a special edition showcasing what we ate on Christmas day.

To start the day Aaron cooked us (Biggs and me) bacon and scramby eggs... and Biggs made us a Bloody Mary.  This was a perfect combination - the saltiness of the bacon combining with the fruitiness of the tomatoes, the Vodka cutting through richness of the eggs, the fresh after-bite of the celery... and Aaron used parsley in the eggs and as a garnish. He put in a lot more care than I would have under the same circumstances.

At some point (and I'm not being dismissive here - the day is just a bit of a blur) Fi and Dan turned up with a late morning snack of -tomato-boccancini-basil- skewers and mini koftas with sour cream and also punch.  I'm fairly certain the tomato etc skewers had a balsamic dressing. 

The koftas were Moroccan flavoured - tasted like lamb but were actually beef - and were most excellent.  The punch was a bit non-traditional as it had fresh fruit and mint as well as tinned fruit - that added a certain amount of freshness to the day.

For Christmas lunch I made a turducken. That's a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken.  I spent a lot of time researching this particular delicacy - the best method I could find was on a site called The Food Lab. 

It involved getting a vacuum food saving machine, deboning the chicken a couple of days prior to cooking, stuffing with sausage (I chose a herb pork sausage) then rolling and vacuum packing it. Then the day before I deboned the duck and just left him unrolled.

Christmas morning I woke up at 5am, poached the chicken roll until the internal temperature was correct, then added some chorizo and herb pork sausage stuffing to the inside of the duck and rolled it around the chicken. After that I vacuum sealed it in a bag and poached it until the duck was up to temperature.  Poor Aaron was sleeping on the living-room floor and had to put up with my three noisy attempts to get the vacuum sealer to seal.  Anyway, after the duck had been poached I debagged it and fried it off until brown then stuffed it inside the turkey, which I had deboned (all except the legs and wings) the night before.  After that it was a simple matter of putting the whole thing in the oven at a low temperature and baste every hour.

I was expecting it to take a lot longer to cook the turducken but it was all brown and up to temperature in a matter of about 4 hours so I turned the oven right down until it was time to eat.

In a separate pot I had simmered the roasted, mixed poultry bones. I thickened this up to make a gravy but it turned out not to be too flavourful.

For sides there were some roasted vegetables - potatoes and such.

I must say, after deboning and handling so much raw poultry I was a bit unkeen to actually eat the turducken but it was excellent. Probably about the proudest moment of my life - the only slight mis-step in preparing the bird-inside-a-bird-inside-a-bird was not cutting the cooking twine off the ducken before stuffing it into the turkey. No matter.  The real joy of turducken is carving it up with one hand while holding a beer in the other - awesome!

Some time later prawns Aaron served up some prawns from Mooloolaba with a lovely seafood cocktail sauce from a jar. Most excellent.

Latter still Joss and Annetta turned up from Vietnam. Annetta constructed a Mexican Layered Dip - topped off with a jalepeno she found lurking somewhere in our kitchen. It went like hotcakes.

Apparently the layer dip (theoretically) has infinite layers - limited only by your imagination or pantry. 

We also, unnecessarily,  had cheese. 

Then we all had a little lie down.  A lot of food and a multitude of various alcoholic beverages saps ones strength.