Happy New Year!

It has been a very long time between blog entries, so long in fact that it's a whole new year! I apologise to all my many thousands of readers, your suffering is over. I hope you all had great Christmas breaks and are ready to keep all those new year's resolutions (at least for a couple of weeks).
This is New Year's Eve dinner. The weather has been absolutely scorchio for the past week and today is another beauty. It's definitely bbq weather so I whipped out the Weber and cooked two of the biggest steaks I have ever seen along with some fantastic salads (courtesy of Julia).

Potato salad is just potato salad but this is a new take on the dressing and is a huge improvement over just dumping half a cup of mayonaise in to a bowl of spuds and serving.



Potato Salad
1kg of small new potatoes, boiled until just cooked and then drained and left to cool
2/3 of a cup of unsweetened Greek yoghurt
1/3 of a cup of lite mayonaise (we used ETA 98% fat free)
Chopped parsley
6 finely chopped garlic chives (available at most asian vegetable shops)
The juice of 1 lemon
Salt & freshly ground black pepper

Mix all the ingredients, coat the potatoes thickly with the dressing and serve cold.

Green Salad
1/2 an iceberg lettuce, broken up
3-4 inches of cucumber, sliced thickly
18 snow peas (or sugar snaps) trimmed and cut in half
1 or 2 avocados
The juice of 1 lemon
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Prepare the vegetables and squeeze lemon juice over the avocado. Carefully mix all the salad vegetables together in a large bowl, season with salt and pepper and dress with lemon juice.



We had a lovely Christms Eve dinnner at a friend's house and this is our take on something similar that we were served that night.



Kate's Salad
1 red onion , finely sliced thickly
The juice of 1 lemon
20 kalamata olives, stoned
2-3 large ripe tomatoes
1/2 a large red or yellow capsicum, sliced
100g of mild feta (try to find a cow's milk feta for this salad)
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
A handful of flat leafed Italian parsley, chopped

Keep all of the ingredients seperate until just before serving. Finely slice the onion and place in a bowl with the lemon juice, leave for at least 30 minutes.
To assemble combine onion, capsicum, tomatoes and olives in a bowl. Season with salt & pepper, add parsley and the lemon juice that the onions were marinating in. Mix ingredients gently, serve on to plates and then sprinkle feta on top or combine the feta with the other ingredients and serve immediately.

Find the biggest T-bone steak you can and char grill it on your Weber, serve with lot's of ice cold Steinlager or maybe with my L.A. friend Brian's favourite beer, Corona.