miyagi.sg | My Very Own Glob {Curiosa Felicitas}

There’s noth­ing like home-cooked Christ­mas meals, which usu­ally (for us, lah) com­prise of one or two things we’ve never cooked before, which causes great con­cern among the family-folk, who know that I don’t exactly eat healthily.

But, thanks to one of the many cook­books we have on our shelves, we made a great gratin, whose recipe (when exe­cuted prop­erly) is such that some­one inevitably asks, “how much cheese you put inside?”, to which we inevitably answer, “no cheese”, to which they say, “really? it tastes like there’s cheese”, to which we respond with a smug flour­ish, “nope, no cheese at all, good huh?”

Hav­ing a four-course meal increases the chances of your guests lik­ing at least one of the courses, and because there were guests at this year’s fam­ily Christ­mas Eve din­ner who didn’t eat beef, didn’t like milk, didn’t take cream, afraid of car­rots, pet­ri­fied of bread rolls and had a pho­bia of fish, we were very pleased that the reac­tion to dessert was unan­i­mously positive.

But because this is not a food blog, and I am not a chef, and because we sorta made it up our­selves, we don’t have the exact recipe for the dessert here. All I can say is that we sorta adapted it from what we had a week ago at a friend’s wedding:

Fuzzy recipe for Straw­berry, water­melon and pomelo fruit salad with white wine, straw­berry and mint granita:

Ingre­di­ents:

A few pun­nets of straw­ber­ries, sorta diced
Some water­melon, sorta diced too
Some pomelo, sorta bro­ken apart with your hands
Some caster sugar
Some white wine from the bot­tle after you’ve had a cou­ple of glasses
A few sprigs of mint

Method:

First, you pour some wine and some sugar and some water into a large saucepan, fire up the stove and cook some straw­ber­ries in it, until it’s sorta pulpy, then you take the straw­ber­ries out. Then you put some mint into the thing and boil it some more. Then let the thing cool. Then put it in a bowl and put it in the freezer, check­ing and stir­ring the thing every half an hour or so until it turns into a sorbet-like thing. This thing is the granita.

Then you boil some more straw­ber­ries in a saucepan with some more caster sugar, but not as pulpy as you’ve made the other thing ear­lier. Then you put it aside in the fridge when it cools, to cool some more. This straw­berry jam-like thing is the, um, straw­berry jam-like thing.

When it’s time for dessert to be served, make your guests wait a bit as you go into the kitchen to fix it up. Get your mum’s serv­ing glasses and fill about a third of each glass with the straw­berry jam-like thing, then another third with the uncooked straw­ber­ries, pomelo and water­melon pieces, and the last third with the granita, after you’ve scraped it out of the bowl, because you for­got to stir the thing every thirty minutes.

Serve, sit back, and wait for your guests to ask for some more. Then go make some more.

What we usu­ally do on Box­ing Day is rue the fact that it’s not a pub­lic hol­i­day in this coun­try, plus the fact that it’s been rain­ing cats, dogs and every other house­hold pet.

Then we cook some­thing hearty, like oxtail stew:

Any­howly Sorta Ital­ian Oxtail Stew

Ingre­di­ents:

Sev­eral pieces of oxtail
Cou­pla cans of whole toma­toes
Some Worces­ter­shire sauce
A dash of mus­tard
Many car­rots
One onion
Some gar­lic
Some olive oil
Some parsley

Method:

Put some olive oil into a large pot, slice one onion, some gar­lic. Throw oxtail, gar­lic, onion into large pot and fry till oxtail pieces are brown. Then open two cans of whole toma­toes and put them in. Add mus­tard, worces­ter­shire sauce, car­rots and bring to boil.

Then leave to sim­mer, stir­ring a few times every now and then. Then go out and pick up the wife from work, agree to go for an hour’s foot reflex­ol­ogy and mas­sage, and then fight traf­fic all the way home.

Remove burnt bits from large pot and trans­fer edi­ble bits into a smaller pot. Cook some rice, watch a bit of telly, then serve with some parsley.

Enjoy.

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