Happy New Year 2025 to you all. It has really felt like the Summer holidays here at home since Christmas, which I think we all needed. Christmas was wonderful, we survived it, thanks to the air-conditioning. Hope you had a fabulous Christmas with some of your favourite people wherever you were.
It's salad and holiday season here in tropical Australia, when a delicious salad is the perfect meal at the end of a long Summer's day. I am always excited when I come up with a new salad recipe, which also just happens to be healthy and very tasty. A grain salad makes perfect sense, as it keeps so much longer when refrigerated than a green leafy one, as much as I enjoy those as well.
This chocolatey, crunchy biscuit slice with a rich chocolate icing will hold it's own and steal the show on any coffee table. It is like a little slice of Aussie history on a plate, but the Air Fryer has brought it back on board to now. This is the first sweet confection I have made in my new Russell Hobbs air-fryer (no promo intended) and I'm thrilled with the result.
You can call this Christmas shortbread, Scottish shortbread, plain shortbread, magical shortbread, delicious shortbread, Granny's shortbread, or Vintage shortbread. What's in a name anyway, because the main thing is that this is a delicious biscuit recipe and a cinch to make in time for Christmas. Only 3 simple main ingredients are needed. Just what you need at Christmas time.
We have 4 kg of green King Prawns sitting in our freezer, waiting to be cooked up for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Our prawns are from the famous Karumba, in the Gulf Country region of Queensland, Australia, which by the way we happened to visit a few years ago on a camping trip. Karumba is a beautiful spot to visit in Winter, too hot in Summer for us to enjoy, and well known for it's prawn industry.
It's the countdown to Christmas, and I really hope that Christmas still brings lots of excitement and love to most families on Christmas Day. We generally try to keep it simple with the catering, leaving the traditional Christmas favourites to make yet another appearance, such as my Mum's Brandy Plum Pudding with homemade Vanilla Custard or ice-cream for dessert, and the traditional Christmas Cake.
This is one of those recipes which makes me wonder how can anything so simple taste so good. We were gifted a few Globe or American eggplants, and we also harvested a few Japanese eggplants from our garden. The numbers exceeded even my ability to make meals out of them, so of course that inspired me to do some pickling. Let's pickle!
