New Year's Day, 2023

I did, accidentally, unintentionally, inadvertently, in the end, see in 2023. 

It was not my plan! I had in fact retired to bed around 9:30. I was woken at midnight by loud bangs, flashing lights and one Whiskey Kat running into the bedroom and hiding under the bed.

Brandy, who is not really a brave cat, doesn't worry all that much about loud noises and other alarms that occur outside the house if he happens to be inside it. He was sitting on the couch in the lounge room just watching, when I went to see where he was.

I wasn't expecting fireworks quite so close to the house. I wasn't really expecting fireworks at all. The Ballarat Council tends to have a firework display on Australia Day, not New Year's Eve, and that's at the lake so not right by me - and not at midnight. It is highly unusual for individuals to have firework displays. This one only lasted for a for a few minutes, but it was enough to wake me up and it took ages to get back to sleep.

Even so, I was awake to welcome the new year at dawn, which is a little before six at the moment. It gets light at around 5:30. It was a beautiful morning and I did get to hear the magpies. Alas, no kookaburras. But I'll take a beautiful morning and the melodious song of the Australian magpies (which are not the same as European magpies; they were named because they are the same colour and similar in look to their European counterparts). If I have to 🙃

New Year's Day lunch was at my place this year. I had cut the crown from a whole turkey which had been snuggled and snoozing in my freezer from last year and slow cooked it for about 6 hours. Then I put it in the fridge to go cold. I sliced it up this morning to serve for lunch.

I prepared salads and dippy things and little bowl of tasty things.

Freyja had provided truffle mash and cauliflower "cheese" from her vegan Christmas order from Smith and Deli.

I have long been a bit scared of jackfruit. Don't know why, but it seemed slightly alarming. As far as I am aware, you can only buy tinned jackfruit in Australia. In Singapore, Freyja had bought some unlabelled portions of fruit for us to try. We identified the papaya quite quickly but didn't know what the yellow fruit with the flat, white stone was, even after we had eaten some. We asked Google, who helpfully suggested it was mango. We are familiar with mango. It wasn't mango. So we asked again, and Google suggested jackfruit. We looked at some pictures and indeed, it was jackfruit. And very tasty it was too.

Then I ran across a Jack Monroe recipe for pulled "pork" made with jackfruit. Jack does suggest quite clearly that people shouldn't mess with the recipe because it took a long time to perfect the pork belly quality of the dish. I, however, did not want to emulate pork belly but more shoulder of lamb. So I took Jack's cooking method and used sumac and baharat instead of fennel and cumin. I put in some pomegranate molasses and some preserved lemon. I did make the garlic jelly that Jack suggested to add a degree of fattiness to the dish and topped it with breadcrumbs and za'atar and served it with pomegranate seeds and optional yoghurt.

The Middle Eastern style baked jackfruit was DELICIOUS and appeared to go down very well. As did the turkey, among the omnivores.

It was an excellent start to 2023.

Freyja's photos:

(Memo: if using agar powder instead of agar flakes, a teaspoon will do, rather than a tablespoon. When I went to clean up this morning, the left over garlic jelly, had it been moulded around my feet when warm, would have made excellent waterproof boots 😜 I did amend the jelly before I served it, but even so ...)