Christmas our way: it's about food, drink and family

Christmas presents against
the backdrop of the lake

When I was younger Christmas would come once a year. It took a long time to come around. But these days it seems to come much more frequently. The Christmases I remember when I was young were, of course, in another place where it was cold, or if not cold then damp and windy. It would start getting dark at about half past three in the afternoon. Fires burnt. You dressed up to go outside if indeed you ventured outside at all.

Christmas in this place is different. For one thing it has turned into a festival of frenzy. Perhaps it is also a festival of frenzy in the other place as well but it does seem to me that by Christmas Eve the entire world is convinced that Armageddon is nigh and that the shops will never open again. More specific to where I am, is that Christmas here comes when it is hot, or at least when it is summer. This is something that The G is completely content with and used to but for me the sight of Father Christmas in shorts is as counter-intuitive as it is possible to be.

Oly is a touch older than that
memorable Christmas of 1981

Notwithstanding all this Christmas is still, for me (and I hope for The G) a time for the family. I will steadfastly refuse to be anywhere other than my own home for Christmas. I made the mistake once when Oly was about 15 months of going to spend Christmas with my folks. I still recall the continual watch that had to be kept on anything that might be eaten or broken by a 15 month-old toddler. My Mother, who had had four children of her own, had moved (as she thought) stuff out of reach but she had forgotten how persistent a 15 month-old can be when he has decided he wants to eat or break something!!

Oly and Meghan enjoy opening
their presents

Well, Oly is now 35 and he is determined still to eat things and the only thing he really breaks is the record for drinking bottles of beer in a single sitting. He flew in this Christmas on 20 December so we had a couple of quiet days with him. His partner Meghan, a lovely Irish colleen from Limerick or somewhere nearby (Ireland is a big green field to me where it always rains) and his brother Sammy arrived by fast car on 23 December. The car, which is a rogue-software-affected VW, is called Bowser. They did explain to me why she is so called but I cannot remember.

Many of my mythical readers will know that it is impossible to live in this house and not to be swept up in a whirlwind of preparation for a veritable litany of culinary delights. Each occasion seems to deliver some delectable offering that surpasses the one before, though at the time each delight seems to be unsurpassable. It would not surprise me if this year’s delight is unsurpassable but I will be happy to be surprised.

Sammy prepares a mean breakfast

Christmas Day arrived and it was fine and sunny day. Not the hottest day, thankfully, but warm enough. The sea beckoned and so we went off for a swim. This at least is one way in which an antipodean Christmas is better than a Northern hemisphere Christmas. You can swim comfortably in the sea. The purpose of the swim is, I believe, to enable the boys to justify the breakfast that they will eat. Sammy is a master of the breakfast and arranges his plates in a way that would do credit to the most fastidious of chefs in the most refined of restaurants (well perhaps not refined as the quantities consumed by the boys is not consistent with the delicacy of approach one would equate to refinement).

No sooner have we washed up the breakfast things than we start on the luncheon arrangements. We like a long slow lunch. This year we decided that we would have a tapas-style lunch of about eight small courses. You will see from the pictures that small is a relative term but although the courses were reasonably substantial we made lunch last for about 7 hours.

Robbo looking surprised and with
very good reason

Our friend Robbo appeared late. He was due at 1300 but turned up at 1320. This is most unusual as Robbo is known throughout the civilised as being one who arrives early. We know this now and plan accordingly but when he is late The G becomes concerned that he has driven off the road. This is not an unrealistic concern as we learned that our friend Moya had done just this on Christmas Eve while driving back from Canberra to Moruya to open and supervise retail operations at her exclusive Moruya-based emporium “To Di For”.

While travelling between Bungendore and Braidwood she decided that she would fall asleep at the wheel. This is not a good idea. The consequence was that she tried to do a bit of off-roading. Being asleep at the wheel and embarking on a bit of off-roading is not a good combination. Trees were felled, the entire landscape quaked at the onslaught that was a blue Toyota Camry. The trees won in the end and Moya enjoyed Christmas in Canberra hospital with two broken arms, three broken ribs and a broken toe. Fortunately, apart from these injuries, she is relatively OK. The car is not OK, the fire people had to cut her out of it.

The wines…

The Dal Zotto sparkling

But enough of that. Robbo did finally appear and he at least had not decided to play with the trees. We rewarded him for his epic and trouble-free 12 minute drive with a glass of a Dal Zotto sparkling white. We had visited Dal Zotto during our Victoria trip in November and we have enjoyed since a couple of very satisfactory bottles of theirs.

The Scion Fleur

Before we got to the Durif, we enjoyed with our whiskey-cured salmon (see below) a bottle of Scion’s 2014 Fleur. This is a very good wine – beautiful and crisp and just right to start with. We had liked Scion winery because the young (to us) vigneron named Roly talked about “constructing” wines to go with food. He was a nice guy as well and that counts.

All the wines we drank for our Christmas lunch were the result of the Victoria trip. All were very good but the centrepiece was the massive magnum of Warrabilla 2006 Durif. When I was younger and spritelier I used to raise a quizzical eyebrow when someone referred to a wine as “big”. The bottle is pictured with the Pork Pie below. When you drink this it is like being transported to another world. The nose is so full of blackberries and plums and other stuff you could believe you had fallen into an orchard or wandered unexpectedly into a fruit farm. The palate is soft and long (that is the taste hangs around for a long while). It was truly a magnificent wine. We have, I am delighted to say, another magnum (we bought two) and I will be looking forward to the second though we will need to find another suitably qualified couple to share it with.

The Dal Zotto Sangiovese: a very
good wine but we did not do it any
favours by preceding it with the Durif

The Durif ran out and we turned briefly to another Dal Zotto, this time a Sangiovese. We did not do this justice though it was a lovely drop and I will look forward to another bottle. But after the Durif it would have been difficult to imagine any wine that was man enough to compete.

We also enjoyed a Scion light Muscat with our Christmas pudding. This was also very nice. The G felt that the Christmas pudding was too heavy after the earlier courses but she was alone in this view. She is not often wrong but in this case there is no doubt that she was mistaken!

But to the food. I cannot do much more than reproduce the pictures of the dishes we savoured.

To the food…

Whiskey-cured salmon gravlax

After we had refreshed ourselves with the Dall Zotto sparkling we started with a whiskey-cured salmon gravlax. The G has made this before and this year’s was even better than the previous versions.

We had found a bottle of Australian whisky at the Berry bottle shop made by James Bentley (I cannot find a website) and we used this for the curing of the salmon. It is not what one would call a fine drinking whiskey but it performed a useful service in assisting with this dish. 

The G served this with some pickled cucumbers which she had, of course, pickled herself.

Peach soup

The G is well-known for her Peach Soup. It is, as you would expect for a summer soup, served cold. It requires a bottle of reasonable desert wine. 

This year she used a Mount Majura 2008 sticky wine made from pinot gris, riesling and chardonnay grape varieties.

The soup is served with frothed cream on the top and a sprinkling of nutmeg.

We washed this down with the Scion 2014 Fleur (which is pictured above). The Fleur was about as perfect a match for this soup as you can imagine.

The Pork Pie and
the fabled Durif

But it was not long ere we were into the Warrabilla Durif. The nose was discernible from 100 yards and we had a magnum. You may not have quite understood just what a fine wine this was: it was a very fine wine.

We’ve been perfecting our pork pie over the last two or three years. The boys joke that they killed wildlife with the first (rather solid) version. But we have carefully researched the pork pie and its manufacture and all I can say is “watch out Melton Mowbray”.

We had significantly improved the jelly in the pie and its distribution. We have a couple more improvements for next year but this pie is now well-established in the Moore family culinary lexicon.

Prawn cocktail - G style

It may seem odd to follow the pork pie with a prawn cocktail but The G felt that something lighter was needed after the pork pie and she was right.

We had bought the prawns from (as The G calls her) The Prawn Lady who is at Bodalla about 10km away. These prawns were sweet and succulent and about as fresh you can get. The weather was right for a swift prawn cocktail and The G had called this one absolutely right especially with the mayonnaise she makes which never anything short of spectacular.

The G has various Men and Ladies: these include The Peach Lady, The Garlic Lady and The Olive Oil Man. I suppose these people must have names but why spoil a good thing?

Ham. Enough said

I think we rested a while before the next course but we may not have rested long.

The Christmas ham is a great thing. We have acquired ours from the IGA supermarket for the last couple of years and we have always been every pleased.

The boys fry slices up for breakfast with eggs.

This year I caramelised some onions (with sugar and red wine) and we just served the ham simply with a potato salad garnished with a cherry (which comes from The Cherry Man who comes every year coincidentally to Bodalla).

Cheese from Bruny Island

Cheese is an important food in the annals of human food production and so it is to the Moore Christmas.

These cheeses come from The Bruny Island Cheese Company. We are members of the Bruny Island Cheese Club which means we order, and get some sort of discount on, quantities of cheese a couple of times a year. Bruny Island is in Tasmania and its owner is a passionate cheese maker.

We decided that we needed something a little fortified to accompany the cheese so we opted for the Scion Muscat which worked extremely well.

A mince pie

You cannot generally enjoy a long lunch that has been planned by The G without having a pre-desert. Robbo had brought some mince pies so we had one of them.

These mince pies are made by, wait for it, The Cake Lady. Her name is Chris and she runs a business with her husband called Eat More Cake. Her basic philosophy runs along the lines that eating more cake may make you put on weight but that has the advantage of making you harder to kidnap. So every cloud has a silver lining.

Even my sister has eaten an Eat More Cake cake.

Gerry's Christmas Pudding

Lesser mortals would have been flagging by now. But we are not lesser mortals. 

The G’s friend Gerry (who is moving to Tuross in early 2016) makes us a Christmas pudding each year and The G serves it with cherries and custard (which you can call crème anglais if you want). I have finally persuaded her that custard is served hot and not, as the Australians might have it, cold.

No doubt Gerry will be joining us on Christmas Day next year.

We had found a bottle of Moor Beer Company’s stout whose name is a play on the boys’ surname so we though this would be amusing. It was also really, really good!

You may think that by this time we were replete. And we were, though not replete enough not finish with a Terry’s Chocolate Orange just, you understand, to settle our tummies!

Next year

And now all that remains is to start planning for next year.

Normal service may be resumed

My mythical and imaginary readers will have noticed a gap between the last Lustrous post and this one. They will be asking themselves "whatever happened?" And in a subsequent post I will tell but for the meantime I am back in action with a Christmas message. Well, it's not a Christmas message so much as a record of Christmas Day with me and numbers of those that I love and hold dear.

The very next post you see will be the Christmas record.

Read it and weep.

English weather (4 November 2015)

I started the day by packing the car. The TVR has a truly prodigious boot, though by the time you have four cases of wine packed in the weight distribution gives rise to some interesting handling. The Maser, known affectionately as Sykes, has a smaller boot probably because anyone who could have afforded the car new would have sent their luggage in advance! The G is not known for travelling light but on this occasion she outdid herself. As I was packing bags into the boot I noticed one seemed to be full of shoes.

We are away for 6 days – so for me that means that I need 6 t-shirts. Pretty simple mathematics. Add to the 6 t-shirts a set of proper clothes for the Beechworth Celtic Dinner (yes, Imaginary Reader, I can hardly wait) and enough underwear and there you have it. I decided that I needed to check the bag with the shoes in. There were eight pairs; you read it right, there were eight pairs of shoes. Now given that The G was also wearing a pair that make a pair and half a day. Now that is a lot of shoes by any stretch of the imagination. I did challenge The G on this but the response was “I need then for my back”. This made so little sense to me that I decided that pursuing my line of enquiry was doomed!!

After much assessment, consideration and general application of skill I managed to fit it all in the boot. It helps that I was, in a former life a geometer, so I am not bad with shapes so long as they are in three or more dimensions. I am all good with the Leech lattice which some readers will know exists in 24 dimensional Euclidean space. I first heard of the Leech lattice in 1972 when I was doing a PhD in Pure Mathematics. Now, if you are in 2 dimensions and you have a few pennies then the greatest number of pennies that can touch a single penny is six. This is the called the kissing number. The exciting thing about 24 dimensional space is that a central 24-diensional ball can have 196,560 neighbours. That is really cool stuff and it blows my mind. And, of course, it helped me pack the car boot because I have a 24-dimensional car.

The weather was dismal. I can to Australia because I knew that in this country there was sunshine to order. Someone had forgotten to put the order in today as it rained continuously for the first 100 miles (160km in new money) or more of our journey. I grew more and more fed up with the noise of the windscreen wipers flopping back and forth. At least we weren’t in Ronnie the Rover since he lost a windscreen wiper a few months ago and I have still not replaced it. We were heading for Lakes Entrance where we are to stay in a place where I am promised a banquet or a feast. I am not sure what is the difference between a banquet and a feast is; both sound like a surfeit of food.

I cannot say why I bothered to wash Sykes before we left

We stopped at Eden which is where the whales came from, or perhaps they still do. They don’t kill them anymore like they used to (only the Japanese do that) but Eden was a whaling town. Today it isn’t really an anything town although they are building a wharf for passenger liners to tie up to. Eden had better sharopen up because all those passengers are going to want to do something and to find somewhere to spend their money. We had an early lunch and paid a visit to the Eden Smokehouse where Terry bought something but I do not know what.

I was pleased to leave Eden where there is, perhaps predictably. A garden centre called The Garden of Eden. Please make it go away.

By the time we crossed the border the rain had stopped and it was even getting warm when we made the mistake of stopping at a place called Cann River. Perhaps it wasn’t really a mistake because I was able to answer the call of nature. But I also visited the Cann River Bakery which was staffed by two women who seemed to be completely oblivious of the fact that (a) I wanted to buy something and that (b) once I had that I might want some change before the end of the century. There was (I assume there still is – I doubt it has fallen down in the last few hours) a rather imposing hotel called, somewhat imaginatively, the Cann River Hotel. About the only interesting facts I can glean about Cann River are that the Post Office opened in 1890 and that the town is named after the Cann river itself. The East Gippsland Catchment Management Authority promises a paper on the Cann River at an address that says “Sorry, we couldn't find that page. We'd still love to help though. Please try one of our menu items above”. I think that probably says everything.

The imaginatively named Cann River Hotel

From Cann River we drove along the so-called A1 (aka, I think, the Princes Highway – the same road that passes the end of our street (or pretty close to it)). We skirted the Lind National Park and saw a promising sign to Club Terrace. We resisted the temptation to see what cocktails were available, which was just as well as later I looked it up and found that the name Club Terrace must be some sort of joke.

By now the sun was shining and the road had dried and we began to make satisfactory progress. We passed Bellbird Creek and Cabbage Tree Creek. There must be hundreds of Cabbage Tree Creeks in Australia; they appear every couple of kilometres so far as I can tell. But I see from the omniscient annals of Wikipedia that “cabbage tree” can refer to an almost uncountable number of plant species so maybe people see a plant and think “that must be a cabbage tree, I will name this creek after it.”

We passed the Murrungowar Picnic Ground. This hallowed place is notable for the having the second most unpronounceable name on our trip so far. The most unpronounceable place name award goes to a place close to Genoa (which I have to say I thought was in Italy so I was surprised when it popped up in Victoria). We saw signs announcing the Croajingolong National Park. Now, when you see this written down you can build it up like you were taught at school. But when you are hooning down the highway at 100kph it’s really hard to work out what this word is and how you would say it. So Croajingolong has it over Murrungowar by a short head. Of course neither of these place names comes close to the New Zealand town of Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokai-whenuakitanatahu.

We flew through Orbost (originally a gold town) and then through or across a heap of other creeks (Simpsons, Wombat) and onto Nowa Nowa. Again I turn to the great god Wikipedia and I find an entry called “List of reduplicated Australian place names”. I didn’t know that Wagga Wagga, Bong Bong and Mooney Mooney were examples of “reduplicated” Australian place names. I would have thought “duplicated” would be enough: reduplicated would be like Wagga Wagga Wagga Wagga. Wikipedia lists 141 (I counted them) “reduplicated” place names. Nowa Nowa is not among them. I cannot say why but I have no doubt that its omission from the great Wik does Nowa Nowa a great disservice. Indeed my faith in the Wik has taken a great knock.

A short way out of Nowa Nowa Terry took us down Old Nowa Nowa Road to look at the Stony Creek Trestle Bridge. This marvel of Edwardian engineering has to be seen to be believed. This is a timber bridge 276m long and 19m high. The 19m uprights are not driven into the ground. Terry noticed that they are bolted to stumps that are set into the ground. I assume this must be to help with vibration. The whole edifice must have vibrated with almost infinite degrees of freedom. There’s no way it would pass any sort of engineering test today but it bore trains from 1904 until it closed in 1988. Apparently only one train ever fell off it.

The Stony Creek Trestle Bridge (L); what's left of the track (C); The G, Terry and Enid show the scale

The machines at rest

The bush at Goldsmith's

We made Lakes entrance by about 4 o’clock and being the technocrat I volunteered to crank up the map machine to find Harrison's Track which is where Goldsmith’s is situated. Goldsmith’s is where we are staying and it is here that we are promised a feast or a banquet (which ever comes soonest). I could not find Harrison's Track on Waze (my preferred navigatory app) but I did find it on Google Maps. We set off. The G excelled herself by doubting the map which led to a heated exchange but I may say (I have no trepidation in saying this) that I was right (or I should say Google Maps was right) as we turned up at Goldsmith’s safe and sound.

The couple who run Goldsmith’s bought the 60 acre block in 1980 and have been doing the accommodation thing for 17 years. Goldsmith homme has a brilliant job of looking after the bush and we took a walk with him. He pointed out no end of flora and fauna. He gave us leaves to smell and pointed out the calls of birds. My favourite bird has to be the Powerful Owl not only because it eats Sugar Gliders but also because it is referred to as “a powerful”.

An old gate

Goldsmith’s femme taught the culinary arts at the local TAFE before retiring so it was not likely that we would disappointed in the gastronomic line. Indeed we were not. The G has excelled herself, as ever, with her meticulous research and found us a place that is good. 

Our dinner (at least two courses - I forgot to photograph the desert)

And tomorrow I expect breakfast!!