For some of us this was the very first Christmas away from home, including for me, and celebrating it without our families could have been a bit sour. On the contrary, it happened to be really sweet! I guess it´s quite easy to feel at home when you find good friends and you´re able to recreate what´s traditional and familiar at Christmas time. Thanks to that, last night definitely tasted like home!
In total, we were 8 couples plus 3 kids. Two couples were in charge of the drinks and cheese and the other two were the chefs - me and other good Portuguese friend who recently moved to Singapore.
I think we both wanted to do even more than we did - for God sake, we could not waste the Christmas opportunity to cook 20 dishes if we wanted!! But then we came to the good sense of choosing only one starter, besides the cheese, 2 main courses and 3 desserts. And trust me, this was plenty of food!
Shall we take a look at the menu?
To start with, along with some very nice drinks, we had several types of cheese, not Portuguese, but all very yummy! If there is one thing I had to live with for the rest of my life I think that would be cheese! In terms of food, I mean.
After the cheese we had other starter, this one very traditional at any time of the year in Portugal - eggs with farinheira.
Farinheira is a specific type of choriço, but a lot softer, made with pork meat, flour and fat. It´s pure sin on a plate... out of this world! I think the farinheira is only made in Portugal and it was sent to me by my family. I was saving it for Christmas!
These eggs are extremely easy to prepare! You just need to cut the farinheira in pieces, let it fry on a pan (no need to had oil, the farinheira has enough grease) until it gets crispy, add the eggs and the coriander and five minutes later should be ready. The coriander is a personal touch, I put it in every dish I can!
You can try to do this with normal choriço, also good, but not as good...
For main course we had none other than Mr. Codfish. For a Portuguese family, Christmas is not Christmas without a codfish dish. And we had 2...
I´ve prepared codfish with cream, whose the recipe I´ll share on another post. It´s something I do quite often, pretty much every time I have guests over. Only the best for them :)
And my friend prepared other dish that I can´t translate, called Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá. I have never cooked this one before, although it seems pretty simple. I´ll let you know the recipe when I try it out. What I love about this dish are the liters of olive oil in it!
After all this, time for dessert! A belly is never too full when there´s dessert, right?
And to begin with, chocolate mousse! It´s my husband´s specialty and one of my favorite desserts. On another post I´ll be glad to share the recipe.
500 grams of carrots, 200 grams of sugar, 600 grams of flour, 8 eggs, 1 tablespoon of baking powder, juice of 2 oranges and a pinch of salt.
After boiling and mashing the carrots, add all the ingredients and mix it until you get an homogeneous batter. Using a spoon, fry small balls of that batter in a very hot oil. In the end, roll the dreams on sugar mixed with cinnamon. By the way, cinnamon is a major ingredient in many of the Portuguese desserts.
Besides these 2 desserts, there´s was another one very popular in Portugal, named Farófias, but I don´t have a photo of it. It´s a very light dessert made with egg whites. We ate all of it!
On the 25th, today, it would be usual for me to have a roasted meat and a bunch of more sweets. Instead, we didn´t cook (too tiered for that!) and went out for Dim Sum... Once in Asia, why not starting a new tradition?
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