No. 5: Happy New Year!

After much feasting and socialising over the Christmas break, the obvious thing to do on New Year's Day 2010 was to continue along the same lines - but perhaps to go a bit lighter on the volumes of both food and people! So I invited Mike (friend), Amy (my younger daughter) and Kent (Amy's boyfriend) over to celebrate the New Year with a small seafood BBQ at my place.

For entree I made prawns with fennel slaw (page 38). I haven't used fennel as a salad vegie before but it worked very well, giving an aromatic aniseed-like flavour to the slaw. It was in danger of being overpowered though by the red onion in the recipe, so I'd recommend using less onion, or even none (I'm not a big fan of raw onion). The amount of dressing in the recipe seemed like too little, but because it's strongly flavoured, it turned out to be quite enough. The prawns were delicious - the chilli, lime, and mint flavours were really good and this was probably everyone's favourite part of the menu. The pic above shows Kent (flying the Queensland flag) and Amy with the entrees.

For main course, we continued along the spicy seafood theme with flathead with avocado lime salsa (page 46), and spicy cucumber salad and peanuts (page 36). Flathead's one of my favourite fish, and we grilled it on my little electric BBQ plate. A friend had told me that a good way to prevent fish sticking on your barbeque is to line the plate with baking paper and cook it on that. We tried that, but it didn't look like it was browning up very well, and it started sticking to the paper! So we gave away that idea and just grilled it in the usual manner, and it was very nice indeed, and well set off with the ginger and lime avocado salsa. The cucumber salad with peanuts was also very good - crunchy and tasty. Amy mentioned that she makes a similar Asian cucumber salad, but blanches the cucumbers, and her recipe includes fish sauce and fresh chillies. I do think fresh rather than dried chillies - and probably also coriander instead of parsley leaves - would work well for this salad, and will try that variation next time I make it.

Dessert was a delicious pannetone, decorated to a Stefano de Piero recipe, and definitely not from the Heart Foundation cookbook! Never mind, the festive season comes but once a year...