Christmas Lunch

The Regan family dining room

Ah Christmas. Family, holidays, good weather (sometimes!), presents and, of course, copious amounts of food. A time for indulgence in some of the very best of cold and cooked dishes to grace a dining table. At Chez Regán this year we all pitched in, and here is a sample of the results:The requisite ham is yet to be brought to the table (I'm not someone who progresses from ham lover to groaning 'no more' a couple of days after Christmas - I love the stuff and miss it throughout the year!). Foregrounded is a surprisingly successful stuffed turkey breast. The plan was to butterfly it, stuff it, then roll up it up in a roulade, courtesy of a Terry Durack recipe. The carving didn't go to plan, however, so instead I made the ultimate club sandwich, sans bread. The stuffing was a milieu of what took my fancy: breadcrumbs, an egg, grilled apple, apricots, parsley, rosemary, oregano and onion. Roasted for an hour it came up an absolute treat.

Immediately behind is the pasta salad, based on last year's recipe: penne, avocado, sundried toms, rocket, red caps and lashings of basil pesto. To the left, superb homemade (from scratch) bread courtesy of my sister. She also did wonderful things for dessert, with her signature lemon meringue pie. Behind the carafe of de Bortoli red are roasted spuds and pumpkins and the roast pork with excellent crackling, impressively prepared by my brother-in-law. There's also tabouleh, carrots marinated with lemon and cumin, and beans with almonds, lemon and fetta. For condiments, homemade apple sauce and gravy. Here's my first course:

As with all good celebratory meals it didn't stop there. SG's contribution came with dessert. He's a dab hand with meringues and this year branched out to go the full pavlova.

Merry Christmas! How good does that look? And it tasted as divine, with wonderful meringue crispiness surrounding a gooey interior. To end the day, there was happily some port to hand, as well as the port glasses gifted to my parents at their wedding, and which once held my first ever approved alcoholic drink.
Afterwards, as tradition dictates, it was time to turn in, contentedly stuffed, at an unreasonably early hour and get up on Boxing Day to do it all again.