Strawberries, Skin, and Seabream

Merry Lockdown Christmas 2020! Hope you managed to find some joy in a more intimate fête this year.

I decided to up my breakfast waffle game, by preparing them Bobby Flay style, with strawberries in the butter (!) as well as the waffles. Didn’t think strawberry, butter, and black pepper would marry well, but eureka it creates a friction that ignites the brain.

Did not have lemon curd, so added some strained strawberry jam to the whipped cream instead. This was la pièce de résistance ― I’m putting in on everything from now on. Love the colour.

I must say the end result was phenom, and my past waffles have been truly incomplete until now.

For Christmas dinner, decided to have goose, Peking duck style, in three courses, with:

• soup from bones, with marrow squash, spinach, and Napa cabbage
• skin wrapped in pancakes, with green onion and hoisin sauce – we couldn’t find the pancakes in the stores so we made them ourselves using this recipe
• meat and veg (three mushroom types and a bell pepper) in lettuce wraps

For simplicity, we just bought half a barbequed goose from a local store and sliced it up ourselves. The meal was a refreshing change from our usual Christmas fare: not fussy at all, but satisfying to the soul.

One of my secret Santas gifted me a Taiyaki waffle iron, which is in the shape of seabream fish, considered a lucky charm to the Japanese.

Tried the Just One Cookbook recipe. Did not have red bean paste for the filling, so used chocolate instead. The waffle was a bit dense. I might add fruit next time.

Here’s hoping the seabream brings us all luck in 2021!