No one can argue that a Christmas celebration would be nothing without the copious amounts of food and dessert on the day.

Review compiled a range of South African recipes to make this Christmas lunch a treat no one will forget!

Butterflied leg of lamb:

This recipe serves six to eight people.

Ingredients:

• 2 kg leg of lamb, butterflied (ask your butcher)
• 200 ml buttermilk
• oil
• 2 portions of Worldly rub

To make the Wordly rub, you will need:

• 1 tbs ground cumin
• 1 tbs paprika
• 1 tsp onion flakes (you can use fresh onions too)
• 2 tbs dry rose petals (not essential)
• 1 tbs salt
• 1 tbs turmeric
• 2 tbs chilli flakes (leave out if you don’t like hot spicy food)
• 1 tbs tamarind paste (often difficult to find and not essential)
• 3 tbs fresh parsley, fi nely chopped
• 2 tbs pine-nuts, toasted and ground
• ½ teaspoon pepper

Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl. You can refrigerate the rub in an airtight container for up to two weeks.

Now to make the lamb:

Mix the buttermilk and Worldly rub to form a marinade for the lamb (for best results, rub directly into the meat before marinating). Ideally leave overnight, otherwise leave for at least three to four hours. Brush kettle grill with oil. Cook lamb over medium coals for 30 to 40 minutes depending on your preference. Remove and set aside for five to 10 minutes. Slice and serve.

Kettle braai turkey with cashew nut stuffing:

This recipe serves 12 people.

Ingredients

• 5 kg turkey
• liver and heart of 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, crumbed
• Butter and olive oil
• 600 g cashew nuts
• 1 sweet potato
• Salt and black pepper, lemon juice, chopped parsley
• Brandy (optional)

Place bread crumbs in 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 dessert spoons 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-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.

Crayfish and beef fillet:

Ingredients

• 1kg thick beef fillet
• 2 small crayfish tails
• 5  garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 teaspoons lemon and black pepper seasoning
• 100 ml olive oil
• 100 g butter
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• toothpicks

Steam or parboil crayfish tails for three minutes, until half cooked. De-shell them by cracking hard carapace down the middle with a heavy knife. Cut tails in half and de-vein (remove black ‘worm’ in centre). Butterfly (slice through the middle) fillet.

Melt butter and mix with olive oil and seasoning. Mix in crushed garlic. Add tablespoon lemon juice, or to taste.

Place crayfish halves along centre of butterflied fillet, and baste generously with butter and olive oil mixture. Fold fillet over crayfish, and seal with toothpicks.

Put fillet on braai over high heat to seal outside. Turn frequently. Stoke coals and cook over slightly lower heat for a further 20 minutes or so, until medium rare.

For extra opulence, serve with carpetbagger sauce, which is made with oysters.

This recipe serves four.

Mango and Macadamia Turkey Stuffing with Sage and Sausage Meat:

Enough to stuff a 3.5 kg turkey

• a little sunflower oil
• 1 large onion, peeled and very finely chopped
• 4 pork sausages
• 2 cloves garlic, very finely chopped
• 3/4 cup macadamia nuts
• 1/3 cup chopped, dried mango slices
• 10 slices day-old white or brown bread, torn
• 6 large sage leaves
• 1 large (thumb-length) sprig of thyme, leaves stripped
• the finely grated zest of a small lemon
• 1 extra-large egg, or two small ones, lightly beaten
• salt and milled black pepper

Heat the sunflower oil in a frying pan and add the onion.  Cook over a medium heat until just softened. Squeeze the sausage meat out of the sausages and add to the pan. Turn up the heat and cook briskly, using a fork to crumble the sausage meat.  When the meat begins to brown, add the garlic and cook for another two minutes. Remove from the heat.

Place the macadamia nuts and mango in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade and pulse until roughly chopped.   Remove and set aside.  Add the bread, sage, thyme and lemon zest to the food processor bowl and process until fine.  Tip into a large bowl, add the egg and season with salt and pepper. Add the chopped mango and nuts. Using your fingers, combine the mixture well.  It should have a loose open texture and just hold together when you squeeze a little into a ball.

Now test the seasoning: heat some sunflower oil in the same pan in which you cooked the onions, and add a little piece of stuffing. Fry on both sides until lightly browned. Taste the mixture and add more salt and pepper if necessary.

Stuff the mixture into the cavity and the neck area of your turkey, tie up the legs and cook the turkey according the instructions on the packet.

Rosemary-and-garlic roast lamb:

• 1.2 – 1.5 kg leg of lamb on the bone
• 15 cloves of garlic
• 5 sprigs of rosemary
• 60ml olive oil
• salt & pepper
• 2-3 medium sized onions
• 150ml red wine

Preheat oven to 200 C. Using a very sharp knife score 15 small cross cuts all over leg of lamb about 1.5cm deep. Pop peeled garlic cloves into cuts ensuring they are lodged properly. Place the rosemary sprigs into some of the garlic cross cuts. Rub olive oil all over leg of lamb and season well with Maldon (coarse) salt & black pepper. Place in a roasting dish along with peeled and quartered onions (lid off) and roast for about 30 minutes. Turn down heat to 180C, add wine to the roasting dish and cover the meat, slow cooking for another 2-3 hours or until lamb is very tender. Constantly baste the meat with the pan juices and turn every half an hour to ensure even cooking.

Once ready, remove from the pan and set aside. Use pan juices to create a gravy by adding either a crushed potato or 10ml of corn starch mixed with a bit of cold water to thicken sauce into a gravy. Serve with roast potatoes, green beans and all the Christmas trimmings.

South African roast potatoes with biltong:

Serves four

Ingredients

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

Preheat oven to 180C. Peel potatoes and par boil for 20 minutes, or until half cooked. While they’re 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 15×30 cm 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 1 hour, or until outsides are golden brown and crispy. Take out half way through and re-baste, if desired.

Serve with remaining grated biltong sprinkled over. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever want to do them another way again.

Make all or any of these recipes and you’ll be everyone’s favourite around the lunch/ dinner table.