What Melbourne chefs are cooking at home for Christmas Day

After a year in which his restaurant closed permanently and plans to work overseas were stymied, former Rice Paper Sister chef Ross Magnaye is relishing the idea of Christmas.

Magnaye will be at his parents' house in Melbourne's northern suburbs on Thursday and Friday, cooking with his mother, Riza, and celebrating with friends and family.

"Filipinos love Christmas," he says. "It's definitely a big deal."

Noche Buena – Christmas Eve – is as important as Christmas Day in Filipino culture. On December 24, Magnaye will stuff pork belly with crab, prawn and aromats before rolling it up to roast. "I brush it with soy and it becomes super red and crispy," he says.

The next day, leftover pork will be used in lechon paksiw, a stew with chicken liver sauce and vinegar. The Christmas lunch centrepiece will be Magnaye's marron thermidor, a Euro-Filo fusion featuring Australian shellfish, lime-and-lemongrass coconut bechamel sauce and Yarra Valley salmon caviar.

"It's a bit luxe, a bit retro and so good for a celebration," he says. The chef is also looking forward to his mothers' cassava cake. "She makes it with coconut cream, coconut jelly, butter and cheese and we eat it with coconut ice-cream."

Above all, Christmas 2020 will be about togetherness, he says. "It's extra sweet this year because everyone has gone through a rough patch. It's a good way to celebrate life and food, family and friends and be thankful."

Elizabeth Kairouz, chef at Brunswick's Mama Manoush Lebanese restaurant, will also be celebrating Christmas Day with family, but catering for fewer relatives than usual due to coronavirus restrictions limiting household gatherings to 30 people.

"Normally I have 80," says the mother of six and grandmother of five. "Thirty people is just a normal Monday night barbecue."

One advantage of a smaller gathering is that Kairouz can be a bit more lavish.

"My table is going to look amazing with plenty of food from the wood-oven – pizza, chicken, lobster and prawns – plus dips, fruit, cheese and desserts," she says.

"My food is very simple but tasty. I can't explain how I do it but I can look at a plate of tabbouleh or a falafel mix and know if it's missing salt without tasting it. My chefs are scared of me because I don't have to taste to know."

Kairouz is especially looking forward to being with the grandchildren she hasn't been able to see as often this year. "I missed them so much," she says.

"I want to make Christmas beautiful and enjoy it with them, lots of presents, lots of activities. They are my world right now. When they tell me they love my food, I feel like a queen. I cry."

Neil Perry is taking a more casual approach to this Christmas, keeping it relaxed with prawns and oysters to kick off proceedings. "I've been doing it long enough that I've learned to keep it relatively simple," says the former Rockpool chef, who spent most of 2020 cooking meals for his charity, Hope Delivery.

"Bread, butter and anchovies on the table to start and then, when we've knocked all that off, ham, porchetta and a couple of chooks. A salad, maybe some caponata because eggplants are great right now, and then we'll roll into a tiramisu. There's such great produce around at the moment it's crazy not to utilise it all."

Meanwhile, cookbook author Shellie Froidevaux's family Christmas will pluck elements from her mother's Malaysian-Chinese heritage and her father's Swiss-French recipes.

"We do roast duck, Asian bao with prawns and my aunty always brings a side of smoked salmon and twists it up into little roses," she says. "I love to create a Pinterest-worthy table setting with modern table decorations and my mum will make gingerbread."

Froidevaux also uses the Arctic Circle for inspiration where, pre-pandemic, she hosted food and photography tours with husband Ewen Bell. Catering for groups of 12 on treks deep into Santaland led to the duo's Cabin Fever Cookbook as well as helping Froidevaux with Christmas menu strategy.

"Rather than having 100 things on the table, my philosophy is to have a generous quantity of the good things," she says. "Don't allow just one or two prawns for each person, have a big bucket of them."

Froidevaux looks forward to ham, too. "I really love it, as much for the leftovers as anything," she says. "I've made ham wontons, ham jaffles, ham on waffles, ham fried rice. It's a hamfest as much as it is Christmas for me."

With Myffy Rigby.

Filipino-style crayfish thermidor with coconut bechamel and Yarra Valley caviar

Ross Magnaye's Filipino version of French lobster thermidor is just the recipe to make the most of all those low-priced Australian crays this Christmas.

Ingredients

Crayfish

1 or 2 whole lobsters, marron or crayfish (around 600 grams each), cooked or raw

Yarra Valley salmon caviar, to garnish

Coconut bechamel

4 shallots, very finely diced

2 sticks lemongrass, white part only, very finely diced

1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, very finely diced or grated

2 tbsp vegetable oil

100ml Shaoxing wine

300ml fish or seafood stock

1 litre coconut cream

¼ cup corn flour or tapioca flour, as needed

fish sauce, to taste

Method

Crayfish

Preheat oven to 200C.

If crayfish are raw, bring a pot of water to the boil and add salt.

Half-fill another large pot or tub with ice and water to stop the cooking process.

Boil crayfish 8-10 minutes.

Submerge in ice-cold water until cooled down.

Once cool (or if using pre-cooked crayfish), halve the crayfish lengthwise, and pull the meat from the shell. Roughly chop the meat and set aside.

Coconut bechamel

Add shallots, lemongrass and ginger to a large frypan with the oil and saute over medium heat until ingredients are soft and translucent.

Add Shaoxing wine and stock and cook over medium-high heat until reduced by about half, stirring frequently.

Mix flour with a dash of hot water and stir to create a smooth slurry with the consistency of pouring cream. Add the slurry and coconut cream to the sauce, stirring and cooking until sauce has thickened.

Season the sauce with fish sauce to taste.

Strain mixture to make it smooth.

Assembly

Mix coconut bechamel sauce with crayfish meat and then replace in shell. Make sure you add a generous amount of sauce.

Arrange nicely in a baking tray and bake for around 15 minutes until caramelised.

Garnish with Yarra Valley caviar to serve.