Esther Food Adventure: Merry Christmas 2010!

A Merry Christmas and a joyous festive season to everyone! This is the season to be jolly and be blessed as we celebrate the arrival of Jesus to this world we live in 2010 years ago.

This year, the UK has been covered in white by massive amount of snow, with temperature dipping way below 0 degree Celcisus! However, the food must go on!

Family and friends gather during Christmas to fellowship, and of course, there always is food involved in my household.

Christmas eve, nice to have steaming hot steamboat with lots of ingredients on a cold winter night. Steamboat, something I have introduced in a previous post, is basically a pot of soup (comes in different flavours) where you put any raw food in to cook. It is amazing as we can put ANY ingredients to our liking. Seafood, poultry, vegetable, noodles, whatever you fancy boiling in nice soup, you can put it in the pot! The best thing is that it can be used as an activity where everyone joins in and have fun!

Because we are having steamboat at home, we used our rice cooker as the pot as we need the soup to be constantly boiling. This time, we used chicken stock to make the soup and soya sauce and oyster sauce to go with the cooked food.

Sauce and soup base

Hotdogs, mushrooms and bacon

Marinated diced pork and chicken

The ingredients and the makeshift steamboat pot

Chinese leaves

Egg noodles

Food cooking!

Homemade steamboat

Christmas day. As the roads were treacherous for driving and my car was stuck in inches thick snow, we couldn't do much food shopping. Hence we got what we could to make a nice christmas meal.

We managed to get roast pork with sausage and sage stuffings from Tesco. Surprisingly it tasted quite good and was well balanced with flavours. I have used some chopped carrots, roast potatoes and some yorkshire puddings to serve with the roast pork.

The skin of the pork was supposed to have become nice crispy crackling after many hours of roasting, but ours didn't turn out crispy and stayed soft. So we left the skin out and made it a healthier version of roast pork. The pork meat was juicy and succulent and cooked sage leaves made the stuffings really delicious.

I have to say that my roast potatoes turned out alright. Crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, just as it should be! I learnt this little trick of roasting potatoes from a show I recently discovered - Jimmy's Food Factory. The potatoes were peeled and then chopped into equally sized cubes then boiled in hot water for about 6 minutes. Then the potatoes were drained and tossed in the corlander to roughen up the edges. Boiling the potatoes leaves a starchy outer layer and by tossing them we create rough edges which will give the potatoes a nice crisp when roasted.