Scenes from a Christmas gone but not forgotten
Christmas was especially good this year. We were gifted with the return of relatives who had been away for a long time. After the obligatory group cracker pull, we settled down to a meal of cold seafood, crisp salads, and ham. The best thing about Christmas ham is that even while I’m rolled and stuffed like a turkey from all that eating, I can still be thinking about what to do with the ham leftovers. Hamwiches, ham salads, ham omelette, endless endless possibilities..
For dessert, I sauted off some cherries, allowed them to cool to room temperature, and piled them into a glass along with quarters of fresh lychee, young coconut flesh and coconut and moscato jelly. Young coconuts are fabulous because they taste so refreshing and don’t have too strong a flavour like the old coconuts (from which you get coconut cream and milk). The flesh of the young coconut is almost like a jelly itself; slippery, translucent and melt-in-your-mouth. After all that, would you believe, we also managed to have Christmas pudding with calvados custard.
And as it turns out, the “some computer thing” my mom got my brother for Christmas, was a Nintendo Wii. So that was our entertainment organised for the rest of the day!
On Boxing Day, we joined other family for a picnic at Lavender Bay. The weather was so beautiful that some chose later to adjourn to nearby Luna Park for a scream or two, while the rest of us lazed about on picnic rugs and later took a walk to have a peek at Wendy Whiteley’s secret garden.
