Stuffing

Christmas has come and gone but a good old Sunday roast can be eaten all year round. I thought I'd tell you what I discovered about stuffing. 

 Yes, good old sage and onion stuffing.

For years we ate pork (at the Greek end of the table) and stuffed turkey (down the other end) for Xmas lunch. Alongside a table-full of other edible goodies. .

The turkey was a french one, deep frozen with a pop-up thermometer. Cheap and cheery. All the big supermarkets sold them at that time of the year. 3 euros a kilo. And the turkey was around 3 kilos.  K tried to persuade us to buy a local one, sold with head and feet, nasty black feathers under the wings. No way!!

Seeing them hanging by the neck in the butcher's shop, with drooping naked bodies and horrid yellow thorny toes was enough to put me off turkey for life.

Our french turkey, like an  oversized chook, was stuffed with traditional stuffing, breadcrumbs, lots of onion, a pinch of sage and a little oregano and mint, and maybe an egg. Very nice. And I always made an egg and lemon soup with the carcass.

 But really we all preferred chicken. So chicken it was for a few years . Stuffed the same way. Carcass made into soup.

Once the kids grew up we ventured into new realms. The 'foreign' side of the Greek family did anyway.

Stuffed chicken roll. Deboned chicken stuffed with ham, cheese and peppers. Since then we have stuck with this. Everyone, even a few Greeks, love it. We order it by the kilo ready rolled and stuffed. No fuss, cooks quickly. 

One problem. You can't stuff a chicken roll. 

I discovered Americans made pan stuffing, for some strange reason called dressing. Everyone loves stuffing so I made a large dish full. The first year it was ok, but it got better with every try. Plenty to eat and take home.

This year I discovered the Brits make things called stuffing balls.  I made a few of these to go with the dish of sage and onion dressing. 

They were a huge hit! Next year I'll double the recipe.

The Brits do a roast dinner best. Spuds, crisp on the outside, soft inside. Yorkshire puds.  A good gravy to bind it all together and a few brussel sprouts to give a bit of colour.

We also roast large pieces of orange sweet potato . In our house it's called 'kumara'.  Kumara is the name of the sweet potato brought to NZ by the Maori  a thousand years ago from the Pacific Islands. 

I could buy fresh parsnips from the British shop in Athens but my friend Jan and I are the only ones who have ever eaten a parsnip, and know the taste, so I don't bother. 

Do pigs in blankets go with a traditional roast dinner?  Small sausages wrapped in bacon for the uninitiated.  They appeal to me as an accompaniment but they might be too fussy to put together. 

What else does everyone eat with roast meat?