Very successful New Year’s Dinner, here’s the menu:

Pims number one cocktail with cucumber and strawberries	Oysters with lemon and grilled with garlic, a drop of white wine, breadcrumbs and parsley
Home-made foie gras mi-cuit with pain d’épices and fresh pear chutney
Pork fillet stuffed with apples and black horn of plenty mushrooms served with a sweet potato and broccoli flan, roast potatoes and cranberry/madeira sauce	Trilogy of Desserts: chocolate mousse, lime sorbet and meringue nests with raspberries and cream

I’m surprised I haven’t already posted this recipe, it’s one of my favorite left over Christmas turkey dishes.

– Fry some chopped almonds in some butter and oil until they start to brown
– Add some flour and cook for a few minutes stirring all the time
– Add some milk and water and cook until the sauce starts to thicken
– Add some grated cheese and keep stirring until it has melted
– Pour the almond cheese sauce over the turkey and cook in the oven until brown

I’ve been cooking brussel sprouts like this for years and I was shocked to see Jamie Oliver cooking them in a similar way, as shown on his recent Christmas Special on British television. I wonder now where this recipe actually came from.

To be fair to Jamie, our recipes do differ slightly – he adds an enormous amount of Worcestershire sauce at the end, where I added Chili and Mango hot sauce from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (or cream for a milder dish – see 3rd November 2011 post). Otherwise the recipes are identical and it is an ideal way to cook sprouts without going to the bother of trimming them and making a cross in the stem so they cook through properly when boiled or steamed in the traditional way.

– Clean the sprouts and take off the dirty outer leaves
– Shred in a kitchen robot machine or slice very finely
– Fry some chopped smoky bacon in a little olive oil and butter until crispy
– Add chopped sprouts and a little water and cover for 5 minutes
– Add some hot sauce (or in Jamie’s version a lot of Worcestershire sauce and some chopped herbs, especially sage if available). No need for salt as the seasoning comes from the bacon.

This worked out as a very light starter for our Christmas lunch

From left to right clockwise:

– Pea soup
you can see the recipe here on 27th November post. Add a few cooked peas for decoration
– Prawns in satay sauce
make a “quick” satay sauce in the blender with crunchy peanut butter, soy sauce, a crushed chilli pepper (or two), lemon juice and honey, pour over some cooked prawns and heat in hot oven for a few minutes until bubbling
– Smoked salmon verrine
Grate some cucumber, add salt and dry with kitchen roll to extract as much of their water as possible. Grate some radishes. Mix smoked salmon, fromage blanc and a little horseradish in the blender. Put a layer of each in a small glass, decorate with a ribbon of salmon.
– Foie Gras
– Pear chutney
Cook some chopped pear with sugar, vinegar and spices (star aniseed, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg). Boil on a high heat until thick and syrupy like jam. Allow to cool. Serve with Foie Gras
– Tomato and mozzarella sticks
There are endless combinations of little cocktail stick brochettes like this. I used cherry tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and a dried apricots. Drizzle with a little balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

A marriage made in heaven, these delicious little sweet and savory pies from Pézenas and Orto di Venezia. Look here on the Orto Facebook page to see why there is a connection.

Meanwhile Bruno, the local pizza guy, has invented a special Christmas pizza. Leeks, asparagus, scallops, shrimps, foie gras with fresh mozzarella and oyster leaves (a little leaf like sage except when you eat it there is the most incredible flavor of oysters). Simply amazing.

This is a variation on my 11th November recipe

You can use almost any fish fillets for this recipe. Make sure there are no fishbones. If the fillets are too thick, you can cover them with with cling film and bash them with a rolling pin to make them thin.

– steam some carrots, cut lengthwise
– chop together some dates and a preserved lemon (citron confit)
– place two or three cooked carrots onto the fish fillets and a spoonful of date/lemon mixture
– roll up fillets and fix in place with a cocktail stick
– place the fish rolls on a bed of cooked carrots, sprinkle with olive oil and cumin seeds and bake in the oven for 25 mins.

There is a plan to build 5 chicken factory farms within 15kms around where I live.
There are 24 chickens per square metre, they only live for 37 days and are mostly fed on genetically modified soya imported from Brazil. They don’t even get a chance to walk!
A multinational chicken company, selling mainly to fast food chains and the like, forces farmers to take out loans to pay for these concentration chicken camps and in return they promise to purchase a huge amount of chickens every month.
If ever there is a problem and minimum delivery amount (720,000 chickens per year!) are not respected, the farmer gets dumped and loses everything.
As the multinational food company transforms the genetically modified fed chickens into bits, they actually sell the meat from these poor animals for more per chicken than quality tasty free-range chickens that the farmers could be rearing, thereby making huge profits for zero risk.
Furthermore, 350 trucks per year are required PER FACTORY to come and pick up these poor chickens and drive them across the country (and Europe in some cases) to the factory where they are processed.
Go here for more details: http://www.bienvivredanslegers.org/

As regular readers of this blog will know, I don’t really do desserts so in actual fact I have practically no idea how this was done, but it was bloody wonderful.
It’s something like this, I think, if you try it out and it’s no good I hold no responsibility.
– Whisk egg whites to stiff peaks
– Sprinkle icing sugar on greaseproof paper, spread egg whites in a layer about 2cms thick and cook in cool oven. Don’t overcook the meringue, it needs to be soft.
– Whisk together cream, sugar and fromage blanc until stiff. Add some raspberries and crushed white chocolate.
– Spread this mixture onto the meringue and roll it together like what we used to call a roly-poly cake.
– Leave to set in the fridge for a while.
– Pour over melted chocolate sauce to serve

– Mix two garlic cloves, a handful of fresh rosemary, some good Balsamic vinegar and olive oil in the blender
– Marinate some good quality steaks in the mixture for at least one hour, longer is better
– Dry the steaks with kitchen roll, sprinkle on a pinch of rock salt and fry in a little olive oil for two minutes each side (longer if they are very thick)

– Leave the steaks to rest for five minutes, keep warm
– Cut each steak into thin slices and serve of a bed of roquette salad with a little balsamic/olive oil dressing and parmesan cheese slices or with broccoli baked in cheese sauce (see photo).