A Few of My Favourite Things !

My three year old son called a ‘deer‘ a ‘quesadilla‘ by mistake the other day.

As you can tell we’ve been talking Mexican food of late (well, this post is late but seeing as Melbourne is treating us to some lovely sunshine this week, you can let it slide can’t you?). Maybe it’s the plethora of tortilla and burrito wraps that are cropping up all over the place that’s inspiring us, or maybe it’s the cool freshness of the salsas that we look forward to on hot summer days. Either way, this food is right down my alley. I love foods that you have to use your hands to eat with and even more so when you have to assemble it yourself. I think eating with your fingers makes food taste different though I do try to avoid picking off food straight off shared plates when we have company.

And so it was that A & I cooked turkey tacos for my family using leftover turkey from our Christmas Feast (yes this post is late, isn’t it?). The turkey was diced and cooked with some onions, garlic, diced tomatoes, ground cumin, salt & pepper then sprinkled with coriander at the end.

This was accompanied by three types of salsas:

1. Tomato, red onion, mint
2. Lychee and avocado
3. Peach, capsicum, cucumber, red onion

The dressings were loosely based on some recipes I pulled out of a magazine, but for the life of me I can’t find the sheet right now. Well, there are loads of recipes you can trawl the internet for or just experiment with vinegar (sherry, cider), garlic, coriander leaves, lime/lemon juice, salt & pepper. It was just lovely to be able to use some summer stone fruits to make the salsas colourful and appetising. Mum used to tell me that you should try to have a bit of red, a bit of green and a bit of yellow in the dish. That way you won’t end up with a brown dish, and these dishes are anything but.

This post is a wee bit belated, but…

With our son now crawling around and very ably pulling himself up on all the furniture around the house we decided not to put up a Christmas tree, mainly for the tree’s sake. I found a solution around the problem of wanting but not being able to have a tree though, and I have to admit that I LOVE our ‘tree’ of wild hypercium berries and pine tree cuttings. After collecting our decorations from storage one morning, I happily spent some time trimming the tree before continuing with my Christmas baking.

Santa should come see me when he is need of someone to guide his sleigh. All my reindeers seem to be named Rudolph.

A. thought that these reindeers were far to merry looking to be eaten. The hardest part about making these were getting the pretzels to break in the right spots. Between A & I, we managed to waste more than half a pack of pretzels that didn’t look right for the antlers!