Christmas down under is always surrounded by a sun, beach and food
and today we're out in port Phillip bay with Melbourne in our wake and we're off to cook for you guys
I'm on the seas with my good friend Matt Skinner,
we both worked at the original Fifteen and Matt was head of wine
We're going to do an amazing Christmas vegetarian dish
for all of you guys out there. It's called grilled halloumi, hazlenut and cranberry salad
So halloumi is a wonderful cheese that cooks up really, really well
if you do it properly it gets beautiful and crusty on the outside and all gooey on the inside
that's going to be kind of the hero of this dish
and then we're going to do some little accompaniments to go with that
with Christmas tones including cranberrires, what do you reckon? Yum.
Here I've got some beautiful broad beans here and these are pretty large, I've podded them
and blanched them for just about 6 or seconds in boiling salted water
Strain them out and refresh them in cold water to stop that cooking process right away
What I want you to do is start by sort of picking those throngs off
and those fennel throngs are awesome, we're going to use that as a beautiful, I guess,
extension of flavour from the fennel to go through this dish
Woah, there's a spider
Came off the fennel. No it was just a little mozzie
Seriously that's what happens in Australia we have, we have large deadly...
I thought I was going to die
It was a mosquito like that big
Right let's make sure there's no more creepies in there
I'm going to chop that in half
and then just chop these as fine as you can
You can also do this with a potato peeler
break them up into the bowl with your fingers a little bit
So here I've got some hazlenuts and I'm using hazlenuts cause they kind of remind me of Christmas
They go straight in
and do you want to put those in, the cranberries?
Halloumi cheese you guys can get this kind of sliced. This is sliced.
We're going to make a little bit of a dressing Matty. Yep.
So we're going to start with some whole grain, Matty can you grab some of that extra virgin olive oil? Yep.
and pour it into there.
A little bit more, yeah that'll do it, argh
Argh, so give that a little bit of a mix around
and then we'll put the juice of about half a lemon into there as well
To make a perfect salad it's all about getting everything ready sort of at the same time
So to grill the halloumi I'm using a flat pan.
I'm putting a bit of baking paper in there just as an absolute insurance
that I'm going to be able to get this cheese off
These will take about kind of a couple of minutes on each side
and then we can flip it over
and then once you've got all of these cooked, we can start putting the rest of this salad together
So using my hands just kind of toss all these ingredients together a little bit
Next I'm going to go in with some salt and pepper
Once you've tossed all those together we can put the dressing in.
Just tear the basil and the parsley and the mint
straight into there and I'm doing this as the very, very last thing
So we don't kind of wilt and water log all those beautiful herbs
And that's all there is to this dish, the hero's halloumi, if you guys haven't tried it, it's a really awesome cheese
Cook it, let me know what you think, I'd love to hear if you cook it and what you think on the comments section
You know when it came to wine there's, as soon as I saw this dish it screamed sauvignon blanc
So sauvignon blanc, herbacious, light clean, really fruity, fresh and I think you know
this is an Australian example, most of them come from New Zealand
This is battle of bosworth 2014 out of Mclaren Vale, great wine, great food combination
Ladies and gents, have an awesome Christmas, it's been a pleasure for you, doing this clip
even more fun than normal with the wonderful Matt Skinner, put your hands together for him, woo.
We're going to see you in 2015
2015. 2015. 2015. Merry Christmas. Eat, drink and be merry.
And if you guys love healthy cooking with maximum flavour, I've got loads more recipes
just like this one, live on my channel right now
including this amazing anytime mega salad, made with kale and loads of goodness
Click the link below or go to the description box, I'd love to have you guys come over and check it out.