A Few of My Favourite Things !

Just a quick photo-less update on our New Year’s Eve celebrations for today. We invited some close friends around for dinner and drinks to usher in 2007.

To start with, we dipped into smoky babaganoush flavoured with lemon juice, salt and pepper then lightened with a dollop or two of sheep’s yoghurt. This was accompanied by homemade pinenut and parmesan wafers that tasted actually better on their own than with the dip.

Unsure of how many would turn up early for dniner, I prepared the ever delicious chicken, olive and preserved lemon tagine using our own preserved lemons, a lamb, nut and rice dish, stewed chickepeas, duck bisteeya and basmati rice scattered with jewel-like dried cherries, apricots, pistachios and slivered almonds.

I chose to replace pigeon with duck in the bisteeya so that I could purchase an already roasted duck from Chinatown instead of cooking the fowl from scratch - a useful time-saving measure. The chickpeas were stewed for over an hour with onions, garlic and cumin, rendering them exquisitely and meltingly tender.

For dessert, we enjoyed baclava, bought from our usual place on Sydney Road, and cheese from Simon Johnson, including a Roquefort, a pungent ewe’s milk blue cheese, Livarot, a soft washed-rind cheese made of cow’s milk, and my favourite, a Beaufort. The latter is a Gruyere-style, hard cheese made from cow’s milk and this one had a streak of blue mould running through.

We almost managed to see the fireworks from the living room but our plans were thwarted by the presence of a single tall building that managed to block most of the action. At least we had the television though…

Hope that you have all enjoyed the festive season and are looking forward to a blessed New Year!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 5th, 2007 at 3:56 pm and is filed under cheese, other events, appetisers, savouries, dessert. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.