Recipes that will leave you hungry for more

Who could forget traditional Christmas dinners – the ones where your grandmother and mother began the day before to prepare for this special meal?

The Christmas table topped with red, green and gold.

At each person’s place there was a Christmas hat and a cracker to pop, but despite all the décor, the food usually was the highlight. A honey-glazed gammon, along with pumpkin, potatoes, salad and the star – malva pudding.

We give you three iconic, traditional South African Christmas recipes with a twist here and there.

For a side dish: South African roast potatoes with biltong

A traditional South African dinner would not be complete without roast potatoes. What makes this recipe different is that it has biltong for a truly South African Christmas side dish.

Source: Getaway (2012)

Serves four

Ingredients:

• 10 medium sized potatoes
• 150ml cooking oil
• 100g butter
• 100g grated or powdered biltong
• 1 x 55 g brown onion soup packet

Process:

• Preheat oven to 180 °C. Peel potatoes and boil for 20 minutes or until half cooked. While they are boiling, melt butter and mix with oil and brown onion soup powder. Mix in half the grated biltong and set the other half aside.
• Grease a 15 x 30cm glass or Pyrex baking dish. Place par-boiled potatoes inside. Score whole par-boiled potato with a sharp blade to 2/3rds deep, 1cm apart. Baste generously with biltong and oil mixture and place in the oven for one hour or until outsides are golden brown.
• Serve with remaining grated biltong sprinkled over.

Main course: Kettle braai turkey with cashew nut stuffing

Serves 12

Ingredients

• 5 kg turkey
• Liver and heart of a turkey
• 500 g pork sausage meat
• 4 slices of bacon
• 1 small tub of chicken livers
• 2 onions
• 2 eggs
• 2 to 4 thick slices of brown bread for crumbs
• Butter and olive oil
• 600 g cashew nuts
• 1 sweet potato
• Salt and black pepper, lemon juice, chopped parsley
• Brandy (optional)

Process

• Crumb the bread and place in a mixing bowl. Fry onions, bacon, liver, turkey heart, 400 g of cashews and sausage meat in butter and a dash of olive oil. Bake sweet potatoes and remove skin. Add the sweet potatoes to the mix, mince and add the juices from the frying pan. Keep some of the cashews for later.
• Combine the mixture and bread crumbs and add two dessertspoons of parsley, salt and pepper to taste, a few drops of fresh lemon juice and the whole cashews. Add two glugs of brandy. Bind the mixture with two eggs and stuff the neck-end of the turkey. Sew the neck skin closed (use cotton or unwaxed dental floss or skewers). Stuff the rest of the mixture into the abdominal cavity.
• Rub the turkey with olive oil and place four to six slices of bacon on the breast side. Wrap in tinfoil. Make an indirect fire in your kettle braai and place the turkey breast-side up over a drip tray. Cooking time varies with the size of the bird – roast for 20 minutes per half a kilo.
• Open foil for the last 30 minutes so that the bird browns nicely. When the bird’s juices run clear (stick a fork into the thigh to test), it’s done.

Source: Getaway

For dessert: Amarula Malva pudding

Serves 12

Ingredients

• Pudding
• 500 ml cake flour
• 250 ml sugar
• 45 ml apricot jam
• 10 ml baking powder
• 15 ml white grape vinegar
• 5 ml bicarbonate soda
• 80 g butter, room temperature
• 2 eggs
• pinch of salt
• 1 can ideal low fat evaporated milk

Sauce:

• 250 ml sugar
• 500 ml water
• 160 ml fresh cream
• 100 ml Amarula Liqueur
• 10 ml vanilla essence
• 60 g butter

Process

Pudding:

• Preheat the oven to 180°C and grease a large ovenproof dish or 12 ramekins. Sift the cake flour, salt and baking powder together. Cream the butter and sugar together and add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the jam and vinegar and stir well.
• Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in the evaporated milk. Add the flour and milk mixtures to the creamed sugar mixture and mix well. Pour the mixtures into the greased oven dish or into the ramekins and bake for about 30 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.

Sauce:

• Bring all the sauce ingredients to the boil stirring continuously. Pour over the pudding as soon as it comes out the oven. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

Source: Wayne Meyer (2011)