This is our last Yes, Chef! newsletter, a Christmas special featuring a few of our favourites and their favourite things to make and eat at Christmas food.
What do our regional chefs love to cook and eat at Christmas? When they wipe down the benches for the last time this year and give themselves a break, what will they be making and sharing with their people?
We asked around, and there's a common theme. Christmas food is all about memory and tradition. And usually seafood.
In today's Yes, Chef! we ask some of the chefs we've featured in the past couple of years what will be on their Christmas tables.
And after almost two years, it's also my last Yes, Chef! newsletter.
Before signing off, I want to thank all our regional chefs for all you do. We know hospitality isn’t an easy path, but we’re so grateful you took it. When you step into a really good regional restaurant – where the kitchen is excited by and directly linked to the produce being prepared – you really can taste it. There's a brightness on the plate and an excitement in the room. And the ripple effect of having somewhere special to gather and eat in a country town is so important. Good regional eateries give local producers a direct line to the plate, they draw food and wine lovers from afar, and they create good, sustainable jobs
So, thank you to our chefs, and thanks to you for reading. Have a very happy and tasty Christmas. I’m off to grab some cherries and pickle them as per Cathy Armstrong’s recipe below.
Sophie x
“A Christmas ritual I love is visiting our local orchard to buy cherries. Cherries are like edible Christmas baubles, and are always on the table during the holiday season. I pickle them to go with ham, or on grazing platters, and I’m always making extra jars to give as gifts. I love to poach them in an intense vanilla syrup to have with toasted panettone or pandoro, mascarpone and toasted hazelnuts on Christmas morning.”
Cathy is regional food royalty. In a 35-year cooking career, she has catered black-tie dinners in woolsheds, countless weddings, and everything in between. She has run restaurants, cafes and written one of my all-time favourite cookbooks and is always so generous with her time, recipes and love of good, seasonal food. Here’s her recipe for pickled cherries. (And here is our Yes, Chef! feature on her.)
“I love making gingerbread at Christmas time. It can be in the form of a gingerbread house or iced biscuits – it's something I love to do every year. The smells, the time set aside, the joy it brings to me and whoever gets to eat it have made it one of my favourite things about Christmas time. I always have a massive bowl of fresh cherries on the table, too.”
Jo has an incredible CV. She has won awards, run her own restaurants, represented Australia in the World Championship of Pastry, written a cookbook and is currently in the Victorian High Country running a business turning Australian wild game and invasive species into handcrafted wild pies. Read her story in our September 2025 Yes, Chef!
“So the one thing I always make sure is on the Christmas table is a glorious glazed ham. It's a relatively new family tradition for us; it's definitely not something I grew up eating, but something I became interested in doing for the family once I became a chef. I tend to change up the glaze every year and just use whatever I have on hand. The other dish always on our table is my mum's Ensalada Rusa (Russian salad). It's basically a potato salad with beetroot and peas, great with some ham.”
Hugh Cube-Piper is the chef at newly hatted Hey Rosey in Orange. We met him for one of our first Yes, Chef! stories.
“My forever favourite dish that always brings me back to Christmas time, especially because I eat it only at Christmas, is brodo di cardone con stracciatella. Let me explain: it's the most delicious, tasty, rich broth made with beef and chicken stock. We add little beef and pork meatballs and diced cardone and, at the end, you beat some eggs and pour them straight into the hot broth. We call these eggs cooked in the broth stracciatella.”
Daniella Maiorano is a fourth-generation chef from Abruzzo, Italy. She spends about half the year in Byron Bay doing private catering and pop-ups; the rest of the time, she runs food tours in Italy. We interviewed her for Yes, Chef! in May 2024.
“A summer Christmas for me means lighter food, bold flavours and textures with minimal slaving in the kitchen. Apart from the abundant fruit choices at this time of year, which make dessert a no-brainer, my steadfast go-to, no-cooking-required option would have to be a side of Mount Cook cold-smoked salmon from New Zealand, easily purchased online. The flesh is succulent and packed with flavour, and I usually serve it with two or three condiments for flavour diversity, such as horseradish and mustard dressing, yoghurt dill raita, and a Trapani-style red pesto. I also save some to add to a next-day salad of radishes, tomato, cucumber, and loads of aromatic herbs, tossed with yuzu chilli dressing.”
Christine is a giant in Australia’s fine-dining world. These days she lives and cooks in Casuarina, a coastal town in the Tweed region of northern NSW. She told us all about the move in this Yes, Chef! piece.
“This year I’m thinking of making a fancy gingerbread-house cake. Every year, I’m transfixed by them on Pinterest. I had a little go last year and failed epically, but this year I’m going to be patient, disciplined and NAIL it (I hope).”
Annie is a good friend of Galah Press. We featured Annie, her Trentham restaurant Du Fermier, and her home, Babbington Park, in issue 07 of the magazine. Her books Recipes for a Kinder Life and Kitchen Sentimental are among our favourites, and she featured in Yes, Chef! in August 2024.
“Our newest tradition is a quandong pie made by Mallee, our five-year-old son. He makes the entire pie from scratch by himself. Amazing.”
Rebecca is a cook, author, academic, regenerative farmer and social entrepreneur. You might know her from Granny Skills, or from our feature in February’s Yes, Chef!
“Iced eggnog. I make this every year, and we drink it while getting ready for Christmas lunch. I first had it during a snowy Christmas while living in Norway, and it made perfect sense there. Now, in an Aussie summer, I chill it right down. I serve it over ice, add lots of fresh nutmeg and, of course, rum.”
Lily is a roving chef running pop-up restaurants in Hobart, cooking on wild beaches and slinging her famous katsu sandos every year at Dark Mofo’s Winter Feast.
“Prawns and Christmas go hand in hand like Christmas presents and Bing Crosby. Cooked prawns are always great. (Prawn rolls, anyone? Prawns, mayo, celery salt, bread, bliss). I love a generous king prawn fresh from the barbecue, swimming in cafe de Paris butter, with a glass of champagne. Merry Christmas!”
Ryan leads the kitchen at Moonacres’ Hearth in the NSW Southern Highlands. He says Christmas is his favourite time for cooking. “I go big on the feast for December 25,” he says, “and it’s all about the prawns.” We featured Ryan in March 2025’s Yes, Chef!
“Growing up on the far south coast in Merimbula, we can't go past a big seafood spread. There’s always an abundance of oysters, prawns and my personal favourite, raw tuna. Sometimes we keep it easy with a simple sesame, soy and chilli oil, other years it's a crudo with a fresh lime and Aleppo pepper dressing, stonefruit and whatever pickles or ferments I have in the fridge. Christmas is a time for morning beach swims, long sun-drenched lunches with family and friends, free-flowing wine and no doubt the odd game or two.”
Tess is the chef and owner of Sunny’s Kiosk, located in an old boat-hire shed on a pier at Top Lake, on the NSW south coast. We met her for Yes, Chef! in October 2024.
“I always get really excited to do a rolled and stuffed turkey breast. I love eating turkey. I'm forever eating chicken in all the ways, so turkey is a nice festive approach to poultry for me.
“Fifteen years ago, before I cooked for a living, my mum and I were preparing our annual stuffed turkey breast, and we had way too much stuffing left over. And I was like ‘let's make something with this. It's so yum we shouldn't waste it’.
“Out of the freezer, I pulled puff pastry sheets and created our family's infamous ‘Santa sacks’. Essentially, I turned the leftover stuffing into baked stuffing treats. Folded them up into a barbecue-pork-bun shape, and baked them till golden and puffy. Ever since, we've made extra stuffing to make sure we make these, doused in turkey gravy, obviously. I guess I was always destined to cook for a living.”
When we met Jamie for Yes, Chef in June 2024, she was cooking on board a floating pop-up on Hobart’s River Derwent. As of two weeks ago, she’s the new head chef at Hope Street Radio in Melbourne.
“For our Christmas lunch, we always have two dishes that are a must for our family. One is mango-glazed ham, and the other is butterflied scampi cooked simply on the grill with salt and finished with lemon.”
Francesco is the chef and owner of Lucetta in Orange. He featured in Yes, Chef! in June 2025.
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Makes: 2 x 500ml jars
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 10 minutes
Pickling liquid
Cherries
