christmas day!

We had our early family Christmas but on the actual day, the family (less two) got together again for another celebration. This time round, there wasn't quite so much food but a few of us did get round to trying some new recipes. 

This was one I cooked up -Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Salad (recipe from Good Taste). Loved all the fresh flavours in this although one thing to improve on is the noodles. Possibly cause I soaked them for a bit too long, the noodles didn't maintain their shape and were all broken by the time the salad was tossed - still tasted good though.

My aunt had a go at making Pad Thai. I had my fair share of this one and gobbled up all the leftovers the next day.

Smoked Ocean Trout - this was store bought and tasted fab!

My uncle had a go at making steamed scallops with vermicelli (top left hand corner of the below pic). This is definitely on par with what you get at restaurants - I would even add a bit of fresh cut chilli to give this one more bite. Below are sushi platters bought from our local sushi place.

This has become one of my dad's specialities which we all look forward to - lightly battered, fried oysters. I have yet to find a place that makes this better than my dad.

J bought my mum an Iced Tea set from T2. We had a go at making the Turkish Apple Tea - to which we added fresh cut apple slices to give it more flavour.

As for dessert (there's always dessert if you have dinner at my place), mum bought a Mango Mousse Log Cake from Bread Top. Look how cute the decorations are! Liked the mousse cake also but wasn't a big fan of the white chocolate covering on the outside of the cake.

We also went and tried the Ice Cream Puffs from Puffy. To our surprise, they do takeaway - every 3 puffs are packaged in a polystyrene box with a handful of ice packs to keep them cold (ingenious!) We bought a dozen - out of the flavours I tried, I'd say that Taro was my favourite.

That morning I also baked Choc Chip cookies (recipe from The Rose Bakery). They're not quite the texture that I'd like them to be but were still tasty.

My coz baked Shortbread and these were dipped in chocolate and decorated with Christmas sprinkles. I'd say that this coz of mine is going to be a chef one day.

Dad also bought another leg of ham (a different brand) but unfortunately no photos - meaning that my family alone consumed about 10kg of ham this Christmas. hmm....

Hope everyone had a wonderful and food-filled Christmas!