While today was not a day filled with going to heaps of places, it ended up being quite a busy day once it got off the ground.
When I can sleep in, I take the opportunity, today was one of those such days. I woke up at 9am, and as usual hardly said a word until my stomach was full with breakfast.
After breakfast, I realised that I had quite a bit to do today. I had to finish wrapping Christmas presents for tomorrow, which meant heading out to get some present labels, make a pavlova, including buying the ingredients, and most important of all filling myself with christmas spirit by means of Christmas songs. The songs started early. After breakfast, the computer was plugged into the speaker system, and the music started to play, and really it didn't stop until the end of the day. I shocked everyone with my knowledge of Christmas songs and I think I even shocked myself. The morning was spent just bouncing around the house to the jolly tunes of Christmas while Jose cleaned the fronts of the kitchen cabinets. I offered to help, but as usual the response was 'tranquilo' which is used to mean 'relax'.
Just before we set out, I got Jose to come into my room to try to help me sort out who I was giving what presents to. In preparation for coming here, we had bought specific presents for the main family members, and then other things for other family members, who I would be giving them to was the task that was at hand. It was very difficult as hind sight is a wonderful thing and I wished I had known more of who was in Jose's family before I arrived so I could have been slightly better prepared with what sort of presents to bring with me. After a long while I managed to assign most of the gifts to a family member bar a few which I thought I could decide on later.
It was about midday when Jose and I braved the heat and set out walking to grab some present labels and the ingredients for the pavlova. There had been a debate between Jose and Guisella as to what type of cream I was needing, Jose was saying evaporated milk and Guisella was saying sweet cream... I was just standing there thinking, I just want cream, normal cream that comes in a bottle :) Sometimes specific food items are very hard to explain. Also, both sugar and cornflour encountered problems with translation... we seemed to get there in the end.
The shop where we bought the present labels was just around the corner, right beside the oh so tempting bread shop. I bought 10 labels which I thought was going to be enough. We then walked to Wal-Mart which was insanely busy, just like all the supermarkets are in New Zealand on the 24th. It is as though the world cannot cope with having supermarkets closed for one day and everyone has to buy twice as much as what they need for Christmas day and take ages to do so.
It took a while to get through Wal-Mart and they had everything I needed except for kiwifruit. Jose told me that we would be able to get it at a fresh food place just around the corner from their house.
So we walked home dropped off the stuff before grabbing the kiwifruit from the local shops. It is funny, because even though this group of shops is just around the corner, and almost everyday I have been driven past it, I had never visited it until today. There are some quite good shops. I think I will be venturing to Cosechas (The fruit drink place) sometime in the not so distant future.
We got home, and Jose went off with Melania, and I started to do some wrapping.
A little while later, Guisella told me that she had received the cornflour and electric mixer from Rebe and I could start on the pavlova. Now, I have only ever made pavlova once before, and I mean that was in no means a disaster, but neither did I do it all by myself. But, I thought, hey, I'm a kiwi, this should be in my blood.
I was using a recipe from Annabel Langbein and after wasting one egg, getting the mixture all over my hands and not being able to locate a bowl scraper, I spooned the mixture out onto the baking tray and it looked great.
The next hurdle was the oven. The oven in our house has two elements and therefore 3 different settings, just the top, just the bottom, or both. Guisella thought just the bottom, but I thought the one at home in New Zealand has just the top, so I told her to put it just for the top one. Also, the recipe called for the temperature to be at 180 degrees celsius for the first 5 minutes before dropping it down to 130 degrees for another 60 minutes. I set it going, and started on the dishes (scrapping out the left over mixture from the bowls and eating it).
I had set a timer, and I looked in to the oven after 4 minutes, and to my horror, the top was completely brown already. It had 61 more minutes in the oven and the top was already brown.
I quickly opened the oven and grabbed it out just as Guisella walked into the kitchen. I half explained to her what the problem was, and then we rushed off to the grandma's house to use her oven. The recipe said it was important not to open the oven while it was cooking, so yes, by now I did not have high hopes for the pavlova.
We put the pavlova in the grandma's oven, but this oven was in Fahrenheit. So Guisella put it at 300 degrees, but I thought that might be too high; I was becoming over protective of the pavlova and didn't want it to burn. This time only the bottom element was on, and I decided that it should be turned down to 200 degrees because there was confusion as to whether the oven was actually in Fahrenheit or not.
I did not leave that kitchen for the whole time it was cooking. After 40 minutes, I decided to actually check to see whether 200 degrees Fahrenheit was the correct temperature. Turns out it should have been at 270 degrees Fahrenheit for the whole hour. We decided that we would increase it to 270 for the last 20 minutes and leave it on for another 10 minutes after that. Who says you can't play around with pavlova, we even opened the oven lots to check to see how it was going.
Once all the time was up, we left it is the oven to cool, but it was looking swell.
While I was waiting I had a quick Skype with the family in New Zealand, since it was Christmas day there already, and Jose arrived back a little later.
Just as we were finishing up the Skype call, when the family was just about to press hang up, Guisella ran into the room to say 'Feliz Navidad' and made it to the computer just as they hung up :(
Later I grabbed the pavlova out of the oven since it was only very slightly warm, and left it on the bench in our kitchen. My worry now was that the centre wasn't cooked enough and the pavlova was going to cave in.
At 8pm we were set to go to mass at the church just around the corner.
Before we went, we had a quick dinner, and I made the cream for the pavlova, with a whisk, with the extra weight, I was certain that it was going to cave.
Nevertheless, we got dressed up for church and headed there for the Christmas eve service.
It was a different church to last time, and was a nice little ceremony that lasted an hour. I understood nothing really though, and only went by cues from those around me.
After church on the way home, we saw two car accidents, a common sight here, a sad occurrence the day before Christmas though.
Then at home, all of us, us four, plus Melania and her boyfriend Francisco, sat down for tamales, and pavlova while listening to all the Christmas songs I could find. The pavlova turned out to be amazing!
A little later Melania and Francisco left leaving just the four of us and the music.
It was a nice quiet evening ahead of the huge festivities tomorrow with a whopping 36 people set to attend the Christmas day lunch.
 |
| The final product |
No comments:
Post a Comment