As the title suggests, the silly season is nearly upon us. My office closes for 3 weeks; my mom's coming to visit for 2 weeks; Christmas Eve at our house; Christmas lunch at the mother-in-law's; New Years Eve at the beach house; friends; family; merrimaking (with anticipated hangovers); Grand Bay fireworks on New Years; and other general fun in the sun.
All of which will give me plenty of opportunities to force my cooking onto unsuspecting others.
The plan:
Christmas eve is the first big one - pity I only finish work the day before.
Guest list is probably fairly limited - Myself, Vix, Jazz, Dylan, my Mom, Vicki's mom, Martin, Stuart, Vicki's gran - I think that's all. Discounting Jazz and Dylan, it leaves 7 people to feed.
I cobbled the following menu together from http://www.taste.com.au/, which has got to be my new favourite cooking website, mostly because it's Australian, so its got the same climate and seasons as I do in Mauritius.
Granadilla ice cream for desert. (My mom's secret recipe)
So cooking 8 different things is clearly going to be a fairly interesting challenge (ok, exclude the cocktails, and Vicki or my mom will make the ice cream, that leaves 6 things). In addition, this all needs to be done while there's guests to chat to, children running around, and beer to be drunk. Hence this blog post as a planning exercise. Kingmuzza keeps his cool, calm head about him at all times. (Oh, and I'm still likely to be severely sleep deprived from Dylan, who'll be 2 months old by Christmas).
And I'm including the Malibu with watermelon ice again, because it'll be a nice start to my holidays.
Timing:
The day before (or more) - shop (might have to order the pork loin - Sean from the Patch and Parrot has a secret supplier from somewhere near Baie de Tombeau)
The night before - make watermelon ice and freeze; make salad dressing for pumpkin salad; make garlic and herb butter.
The morning of the event - marinade the chicken; prepare the pork (make stuffing, tie the thing together); make bean salad; prepare veggies for roasting (peel and chop)
Stop for lunch.
Expect 2 hours to cook roast; an hour for the veggies (pumpkin, onion, baby potatoes)
I'm going to need 3 braai's - 1 for veggies, 1 for roast, 1 for asparagus and capsicum starter, and chicken skewers. I only have 2 available, so I reckon I roast the veggies first, then the roast pork on 1 weber, and the starters on the other one.
Also, the asparagus seems to require a fair bit of on the spot preparation (I hate asparagus, but Vicki's family think its tradition, so I really do think I should give this a shot.)
So lets assume a 8pm dinner time - that means the roast pork goes in at 6pm (make it 5:30), so the roast veggies must go in at 4 or 4:30.
Start both fires at 3:30. Assemble chicken skewers, and place veggies in roasting pans.
At 4:00, the chicken skewers can go on, beers can be cracked, they should only take about half an hour to cook. Also put the veggies on to cook.
4:30 - remove skewers and serve, prepare and serve watermelon cocktails.
5:00 - remove veggies and keep warm.
5:00 - add extra coals to roast pork fire (old roast veggie fire)
5:30 - insert roast pork.
6:00 - add extra coals to asparagus fire (old chicken skewer fire)
6:30is - cook asparagus (see recipe, capsicums get cooked first, then peeled, chopped and salsa made, then asparagus cooked, and all served immediately). So lets say we should serve that around 7:30, that means start cooking at 6:30. Also, I'm going to need to do all the kitchen work for this (chopping and such) outside on the pool table in order to be sociable.
Remember to keep beer and wine flowing, but also slowly enough so people don't start getting into family fights before dinner is over.
Return roast potatoes onto asparagus fire to heat before serving.
7:30 - retreat to the kitchen for some much needed anti-social time - prepare salads.
8pm Pass out, while everyone else eats.
I think I'm getting too ambitious. And I also think that eating can take a long time at Christmas, so maybe the whole lot should be moved an hour earlier - but the French might complain about this. Also, the salads should be made before the asparagus, so that once I serve the starter, we can all be sitting around the table (myself included).
Okay, the end. I'll come back to this.
Then there's Christmas morning breakfast, New Years eve party (not necessarily my responsibility, but surely something must be done) and lazy holiday lunches to deal with.
This is quite exciting.
Its been over a month since I wrote here last - holiday season madness - family visiting - massive christmas eve dinner experiment - family fueds and christmas anger - lazy days by the pool - new years eve with much needed friends - new years day hangover, with long drawn out lunch at the pub - no maid or nanny here for the last two weeks - work project in the background - its been busy, but its been fun.
I fully intend to tell you the story of my Christmas eve dinner, but not today. However, considering how I'll probably never get around to telling the christmas story otherwise, here's the short version. 
Food-wise it actually went quite well. Company-wise it was a fairly spectacular disaster.
Chicken skewers as pre-food snacks were changed at the last minute to my standard honey-mustard chicken skewers, which were great, but finished before the guests got here. Then I chickened out of the asparagus starter because I didn't think I'd find any fresh asparagus at the shops (although when I got to the shops, there was fresh asparagus, but no shrimp). 
Starter was changed to a prawn cocktail, also standard issue, and also nice to eat. The roast (the coup-de-grace), was huge, it started off cooking too quickly, and so was a little blackened in some places, and it fell to pieces rather than being carved nicely because there was too much stuffing. It was, nevertheless, delicious (IMHO, the guests had excused themselves half-way through dessert, so maybe they didn't feel the same). 
Vicki's side dish bean salad was great - my side dish pumpkin and spinach salad was fine, but there was no spinach and just a tiny bit of rocket instead. And desert by the ladies (Vix and my mom), was delicious granadilla ice-cream and christmas cake. 
Except for the disaster with the guests, we had a great day setting up, cooking, opening some presents, drinking a little too much, and generally spending time together as a family. Maybe I can find some pictures ... 
