tis' the season of eating

the past couple of weeks i have been too busy to take care of the veggie patches and consequently, some lives have been lost to an army of caterpillars and pests... lucky the season has been abit wet of late and not many have succumbed to the biggest drought of the century...

the caterpillars have been quick on the tomatoes, so i am forced to pick them early and let them blush under the warm sunrays on the window seal

the potato patch have nearly died down too... so i started digging and surprisingly found quite a few earthy knobs...

after vigourous scrubbing, they too gleam in the sunlight... although they look like new potatoes, in definition they are not quite (only the other day i found out that new potatoes are the ones that are dugged up before the potatoe plants have withered away - and the skin are much thinner)

the x mas eve meal preperation started with prawn peeling...

and why waste the prawn shells?! (in true bargain hunter spirit... i recycled the prawn shells)

i boiled the shells in alittle water... blended them and then squeezed the juices out in my trusty muslin bag...

then i boiled to reduce the liquid, before that i poured on it a good several hundred mLs of olive oil... as it reduces, the essence of the prawns are trapped beneath the oily surface... towards the end, there would be little hissing, crackling noises from the oil... and then one would know the liquid has been all but gone and the flavoursome prawn oil ready to be harvested...

liquid gold!

yum! dripped on soups or alittle on salads or bread and of course on fragrant rice!... and the bottom heavy sediment is the gold - when mixed with rice and abit of soy and sugar... yum! it's like shrimp paste but without the smell...

so i served melon (rockmelon) soup with prawns, prawn oil and a sprinkle of sea salt as our x'mas eve dinner starter

onto the next course... it was time to chop some onions and have a good cry... i tried the lighting a match and candle trick, but my tears were still streaming... i saw on tele the other day that chewing gum is as good as wearing goggles in onion tears prevention - yet to give that a try...

a kilo of chicken livers (even the butcher was surprised)... it was for the pate coating our xmas beef wellington...

after snipping off the sinew, i browned the onions and garlic and sauteed the livers and added the cream... then used my foodprocessor again...

pate! and lots of it...

the piece of steak was warming up on the bench

after coating it with the pate and mushroom mix i covered it with puffed pastry and a good eggwash...

35min in an 210 degrees celcius oven (according to various books) was not enough - it was quite rare in the middle... if i could do it again it would be 45 min...

and next time instead of a 1kg slab, i'll be getting a slender roll ( but this time around the butcher ran out of tenderloin fillet, so i had to get scotch fillet instead)...

by the time we consumed a piece of the BW, our stomachs were exploding - must be the filling pate layer... must make it thinner next time...

and look at our "tree" and abundance of pressies on x'mas day!