Merry Christmas!

Our first real Fir Christmas Tree!!  

This is the very first Christmas that I have ever spent away from my family!  But also, this is the very first Christmas I spent as a married woman with my husband. :)  We decided to have a small little dinner party, and the guests of honour was Jannine, Dave, Aunty Barbara, Mikey, and James.  It was a challenge trying to fit everyone into our living area, but we managed with 4 people happily sitting on the floor and the remaining 3 in our sofa.  With drinks in hand, it was definitely a perfect night.

Turkey marinated and stuffed and ready for the oven!

This is my very first time cooking a turkey!  Usually I tell everyone every year that I played an integral role in being Lisa's helper when we cooked the turkey but honestly, I don't.  So this year, after begging Lisa for her recipe, she emailed me an extremely detailed recipe with step by step guide on how to cook the turkey.  In this recipe, it called for the turkey to be cooked breast side down as that's the secret to having moist, juicy and tender white meat.  Makes sense really... 

After being in the oven for roughly 2 hours, I was suddenly hit with a revelation!  This turkey came equipped with a red tab that was embedded in the breast meat which pops up and indicates that the turkey is perfectly cooked.  So how was I going to know when the tab has popped???  A few desperate messages to Lisa asking her how she did her turkey and this was her answer : "Oh, ignore that part of the recipe.  Cook it breast side up so it will also brown!".  Great!!!  So how was I going to turn a 13 pound turkey?  With a lot of sweat and muscles and teamwork.  :)

Perfectly cooked turkey!!  I know because the red tab popped and told me so. 

Being chinese, I always have the tendency to over feed people.  I absolutely have no concept of the right proportion of food per person which is why our fridge is filled with leftovers right now.  Which is why for Christmas, I prepared a 13 pound turkey, a leg of ham, roast potatoes and grilled asparagus with freshly made cranberry sauce and gravy for a total of 7 people who unbelievably are all extremely small eaters!  Not to mention Mikey brought along homemade stuffing and James baked awesome cookies.  

It was a great night of eating, drinking and plenty of laughter and to round up dinner, Dave and Jannine provided dessert which was an awesomely moist coconut rum cake with whip cream from a can!

Dessert took a while to be served as someone was having too much fun with the canned whip cream! :)

Dave got aggressive when Jannine hid the whip cream.. :)  such a cute couple!

I am ordinarily not a dessert person and I usually shy away from any coconut flavour products other than the real fruit.  But this is potentially one of the BEST cake I have ever eaten!  But then again it might be due to the amount of rum they put in the cake. :)

The damage done at the end of the night?  2 bottles of Mumm Napa Champagne and 6 bottles of red wine!  Cheers!