Christmas Eats

Christmas lunch is always held at my mum's house & whilst she is fearless with veganising desserts she sometimes gets a bit confused about what vegan main meals to make us so I like to take something along.  It is especially important to make it incredibly delicious so that my omni family realise how delicious vegan eating can be.  After reading a thread on PPK about what people were making for Christmas I read about a Jamie Oliver recipe in the December/January issue of Delicious magazine for Pumpkin & Mushroom Wellington & knew immediately that this was going to be what I brought to lunch.
This recipe incorporates lots of ingredients that I love - pumpkin, mushrooms, chestnuts, sage, pine nuts, lemon, rosemary...  This is not a difficult recipe, but there are a lot of steps so it does take awhile.  I am not going to type out the recipe because it is loooong, but someone has done it here with beautiful photos to boot.  I did really enjoy this, as did my family bit I found the cinnamon flavour a bit overpowering so would reduce that by half if I were to make it again.
I hope everyone has had as wonderful and delicious Christmases as I was lucky enough to.

Christmas Eve Eats

This year since it was Holly's first Christmas and we would be spending all of Christmas Day with my family I decided that it would be good to have a nice meal for just the three of us on Christmas Eve.  I ended up spending a lot of time on Christmas Eve preparing my lunch for the next day so decided to go the easiest option & get a Sanitarium vegie roast.  It was my first time eating this & I actually didn't mind it except the glaze on it was waaaaay too sweet so I would definitely leave it off next time.  To go with this I made Vegan Dad's scalloped potatoes & butternut pumpkin with roasted chestnuts.  This is ugly but it is so, so good!!!!  I followed the recipe exactly except that I added in a bit of nooch to the sauce & I used canned chestnuts since fresh aren't in season.  I will definitely make this again. I also just steamed since green beans as Holly loves them so we have them with most meals & served them with this mushroom gravy but I found it to be way to strong in molasses flavour.

I made an easy dessert from ice cream which I softened & then mixed in chopped dark chocolate & dried fruit which I macerated in Grand Marnier overnight - very easy & very tasty. 

Christmas Baking

I love mince pies & since I missed out last year I decided to make my own this year & they were yum. I based them on a recipe for orange mince pies from All Recipes.

The recipe is this, it did call for an egg wash before baking but I have left that out:

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 cups (255g) plain flour
• 1/4 cup icing sugar
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 150g butter, softened
• 2 tablespoons grated orange rind
• 1/4 cup iced water
• 3/4 cup bottled fruit mince
• icing sugar for dusting

Preparation method

1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees C.
2. Sift together the flour, sugar and cinnamon into a large bowl. Rub in the butter until mixture resembles fine bread crumbs. Stir in the orange rind. Stir in enough iced water to make a soft dough. Knead dough on a flour surface for 1 minute or until smooth.
3. Roll out to 5mm thick. Cut out approximately 18 x 7cm diameter circles, and 18 x 5cm circles, rerolling dough as needed.
4. Line patty pan holes using the larger pastry circles. Fill each pastry cup with about 1 tablespoon of fruit mince. Top with smaller pastry circles, pinching circles together to seal the edges.
   
5. Bake pies about 15 to 20 minutes or until golden. Cool slightly on wire racks. Dust with icing sugar just before serving.

Easy & delicious.




I also decided to make the cookies & cream truffles from Fat Feminist Foodie to go in with a friends christmas present. I dipped mine in Sweet William white chocolate which worked really well. These are crazy easy & delicious, I gave my friend a bag of about 10 & she ate them all straight away!