This year, due to plenty of things going on, I will not be seeing my bestie over the Christmas break. Doubly sad is that he is the kiddoes godfather, and they love him to bits. So they have been pretty sad (and very vocal about it to him). In fact so vocal, that when his weekend plans got cancelled, he promptly phoned up at 7am and told me he was coming up from London to surprise the kiddoes in 2.5 hours. Oh and can we do Christmas pressies and Christmas brunch during his flying visit.
Now the Christmas pressies I was happy with as I normally buy most of my presents in the January sales (yeah I am a planner like that). The Christmas brunch idea got me rather in a panic. Erm, 2.5 hours to think of and whip up something befitting Christmas. Erm gulp. Plus of course he doesn’t eat turkey. Or chicken. And is trying out a gluten-free diet. Which means that instead of doing a conventional Christmas dinner with a chicken instead of turkey I had to be a bit more unconventional.
Tip here peeps, don’t take everything out of the freezer at once, you might find it rather interesting . Is it me or is there some freezer dynamics going on that means when you empty the entire freezer, you can never fit everything back in. So I found some sweetcorn, meatballs, onions, garlic, chilli, herbs and ready-cooked rice. The pantry yielded some chopped tomatoes, almonds and harissa paste.
You know when people say “I just chucked a few ingredients together.” Well, in this case I actually did. I decided on a harissa meatball curry, almond saffron rice and harissa butter corn on the cob. Sweet corn would be a desert island take for the bestie so no contest 🙂 . So less than 1 hr later I had a Christmas brunch on the table. It went down a treat guys, So much so that there was not a single bit left over. Phew, job done.
Basically my obsessive need to have conveniently frozen food, always to hand, saved the day. I can take some of the credit but certainly not all. I remember an aunt of mine saying “everyone says she’s a good cook, but really all she does is put together high quality ingredients”. And that’s what I did. I got some tasty, good quality ingredients and chucked them together, and produced a lovely, unconventional Christmas meal. Hey saffron lovers. Why not check out this very easy saffron sauce figs and pasta recipe.
More Meatballs recipes
Easy Swedish Meatballs. Please pin me:
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