So the plan was to go to Annie's for Christmas Day lunch.. which left me with a dilema of what to do with our Turducken. So decided to have a Christmas Eve feast with the sweetie.
I found this turducken (aka "three bird roast") in Coles a couple of weeks ago. It takes two and a quarter hours to cook (plus resting time) from thawed. I hadn't thawed it. Ok I did, but only from a day and a bit before, not the 48 hours in the fridge as suggested, so had to do some of it out of the fridge. This is the simplest thing out of the whole menu - just chuck it in the oven with some foil for a while, then take the foil off part way through.
Next up is a blue cheese potato bake. Potatoes, red onion, bacon, cream, some lamb jelly I found in the freezer, thyme and blue cheese. Slice up the potatoes (I used a mandolin on the thicker setting), mix with some of that bacon, most of that cream, the onion sliced and a handful of thyme. Near the end add all the blue cheese and some more thyme.
Our classic Brussels sprouts and bacon, with the rest of the bacon from above, and a handful of hazelnuts thrown in near the end.
While everything is roasting you can cook the onion and sage stuffing on the stove. A chunk of sourdough (I was too lazy to run it through the food processor - more washing up! so just broke it up in my fingers), onion, brandy, cream, garlic, sage (about half that punnet), butter, oil, salt pepper.
Gently fry the onion until it's golden in butter/oil.
Add in some garlic and sage
Add the brandy and cream. I'd used a bit too much in the potato bake, so fleshed it out with some milk.
Oil up the crusts you cut off the sourdough, and roast them for like 15 minutes, enjoy as afternoon tea since dinner won't be til 19:00.
Sweet potato and half the sage from above.
The rest of the garlic we didn't use in the stuffing.
So pretty much an exact copy of our Christmas lunch from last year, just the night before instead of Christmas Day. It was epic! Although the turducken didn't carve very well - it kinda disintegrated once it wasn't being held together, so had to find bits of turkey and duck among the chicken :) It may have worked better if I'd taken the bacon topping off it first. Next time!
After dinner we watched the carols and played the carols bingo, which of course included Marina Prior singing Angels We Have Heard on High!
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