Just Add Yoghurt

When I think about Christmas growing up I think about waking up early, opening presents, rushing to church and then coming home to a stomach-stretching lunch shared with family, whereby every belt buckle and pants button would fly open as soon as that final bite was taken. That is why I wear dresses on Christmas day. Our lunch table was a mix of traditional Australian-Christmas BBQ and prawns and Greek-Christmas inspired Pastitsio (like Greek lasagne), tiropita, Greek salad and roasted vegetables. For dessert icing-sugar coated Greek almond shortbread, kourabiethes, would almost always make an appearance. You won’t find many Greek houses not serving kourabiethes at Christmas time. Truth be told, I never liked them because they are lathered in icing-sugar and could often be really dry. However when combined with a semi-sweet yoghurt and honey custard and only lightly dusted with icing-sugar, I’m all over them! Yoghurt and honey custard ingredients: Ingredients:

As Christmas draws near I wanted to use my next few blog post recipes to explore what other culture’s Christmas table looks like. In Australia, prawns, ham, BBQ and the humble Pavlova commonly fill people’s Christmas table. However for other countries, traditions differ. The Japanese celebrate Christmas with KFC and the Dutch make a biscuit called banketletter (meaning letter cake), which is made from marzipan or pastry and made in the shape of the first letter of people’s name that attend a family’s Christmas party. I was intrigued by the Italian tradition of eating fish on Christmas Eve. Drawing on the  Roman Catholic  tradition of abstinence, which in this case refers to not eating meat or milk products, the Italian-American community took this tradition one step further with the Feast of the Seven Fishes.  This feast involves families coming together and sharing seven fish and seafood based dishes. The first course is often something snack-like, since there are six mor