Christmas Eve

Yesterday was Christmas Eve. I made some pear danish in the morning (see photo below). I took some canned pears and sliced them into fans, and place them on the croissant dough that I had prepared and frozen last week. Personally, I think this canned-pear version was better than the peach version I made last week, simply because I liked the flavour of the pears better. (Aside: In production kitchen, they use canned pears and apricots, but not canned peaches.)



After breakfast, a housemate and I mopped and cleaned the dining room and kitchen from wall to wall. We just wanted to have a nice and clean place to enjoy the festivities.

Then, around lunchtime, I prepared my mushroom strudel for dinner. I basically sauteed some mixed mushrooms (button, cremini, shiitake, chanterelles, porcini) in butter and rolled that inside some filo/phyllo pastry. I left the strudel in the fridge until closer to dinner time before baking it till golden brown.

(Aside: I prepared my mushroom strudel around lunchtime because there is only one kitchen in Wilbrod House and it was too crowded for all of us to do our cooking around dinnertime, so we worked out a system to get around this problem.)

Here you see all the dishes prepared by us:

Starting from the foreground: Seafood paella, Greek lamb stew, Goulash, Mushroom strudel, Sushi, Pizza. It was quite a feast. We still have some leftovers for today. :)


Yakisoba


Sushi


Mushroom Strudel


Goulash


Greek Lamb Stew


Seafood Paella

After dinner, we walked to the Notre-Dame Cathedral (not far from Rideau Centre) and enjoyed a lovely concert and midnight service. Not all of us are catholic, but we went along anyway, because the service was open to all and sundry. I really liked the Christmas carols presented in the concert. Beautiful voices in a magnificent setting...

This is the nativity scene inside the cathedral:


Here are some of the ornate structures inside the cathedral:




All in all, it was an interesting day for me.