Weekend Cooking: A Tale of Two Christmases

 This year, like others, we had two Christmases. One is with our pretty much grown up kids in the week leading up to Christmas and the other with my extended family on the big day. There are sometimes exceptions, like the year that we went to The Netherlands. This year, my brother announced that he wanted to host Christmas so we all trekked over to Adelaide a couple of days before Christmas.

So this week I am going to share the two different Christmases.

Let's start with the stars of the show - Max and Nala - dressed up in their Christmas finery

One of the advantages of having Christmas in summer is the weather, so we needed to make sure that we used that, so we started our day with breakfast on our deck! Pancakes, fruit, cream and every variation of topping you could possible want!

Moving on to the main meal, we did take a few shortcuts this time.  It's not Christmas without a prawn cocktail, but this year Robert wanted to serve it with avocado, which is a bit different to the normal lettuce! It worked!

We also bought a pre-prepared porchetta from the supermarket, and then added roasted potatoes with a soy sauce and parmesan sauce (which comes from the Rice Table cookbook), cauliflower cheese, a medley of carrots cooked in our new airfryer

For dessert we had the cake which I shared about last week, and we had promised that we would make a South African dessert called Peppermint Twist Tart. 

This year will likely be the last year that we will be doing Christmas this way. Robert's oldest daughter has just moved away to Brisbane (and taken Nala with her!) and so now all three of them live away from us in Melbourne. Two are in Brisbane and the other one is in London.

And so then the festivities moved to Adelaide. Now if you don't hear anything else from this post, hear this. It was HOT! On Christmas Day in Adelaide it was 39C (which is just over 100F). 

We started with ham and cheese toasties with mimosas, sitting wherever we could find relief in any shade from the caravan. 

This year, for the first year, most of us did the whole matching shirt thing! Here is the big guy formerly known as the little chef in his, looking very impressed at me taking his picture!

For lunch, my brother actually did things a little differently, and did a buffet style serving. Normally we always have turkey and ham, but he added in roast beef, including yorkshire pudding

After sharing gifts, where my 5 year old (soon to be 6!) made out like a bandit when it comes to gifts it was time for dessert.  There was a selection of mango cheesecake, make your own pavlova, my mother's trifle and fruit salad

And that's it! Well, in terms of food anyway.  We stayed as long as we could before going back to the cabin at the caravan park and melting off all the food that we ate. Did I mention it was hot! It really, really was!

I hope that you all had a fab Christmas and wish you all a very happy and safe New Year!

See you next year for more Weekend Cooking!

<

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page