Entrepreneur, wildly popular Instagrammer and food writer, Kelsi Boocock (aka Healthy Kelsi) has just this week released her second cookbook, which is based on her travels over the past three years and features various locations including London where she studied at Le Cordon Bleu. The 26-year-old, who lives in Auckland with her fiancé Andrew and two labradoodles, tells Sharon Stephenson about her Christmas Day.
Christmas has always been a big deal in my family. There are lots of us, including cousins and second cousins, so we usually have a couple of massive gatherings before Christmas Day so that we can catch up with each other.
The actual Christmas Day is usually just me and Andrew, my parents and my two brothers and their partners. We traditionally head up to our bach at Mangawhai and it’s pretty chilled. We exchange presents in the morning before breakfast. I love a sweet breakfast such as pancakes but we also mix it up with shakshuka or home-made baked beans.
After breakfast we always get out on the water. We grew up diving, surfing and water skiing so we’re all a bit obsessed with the water.
Lunch is the star of our Christmas. I’ve been vegetarian for five years ever since I did Camp America and the food was so gross I decided to stop eating meat. I was leaning that way anyway because I love animals and only ever ate chicken, so it wasn’t such a major transition.
Dad still does a ham for the others while I’ll do a vegetarian-style 'Beef' Wellington. Everyone is into healthy salads which I love making. A favourite is the cauliflower, tahini and chickpea salad that made it into my cookbook but my Mexican miso corn salad also goes down a treat.
We have a lot of sides, including potatoes. As Mum always says, there’s a potato for every occasion.
I love a good cocktail at Christmas. Mum usually makes one with gin, cranberry juice and soda water which is really refreshing. If I’m going alcohol free, I’ll drink an Elta Ego cocktail because they’re amazing, especially the passionfruit one. My love for hot chocolate is well known but in summer I make an iced version which people seem to love.
This year I’m going to Andrew’s family in Christchurch for Christmas. He’s close to his family too and we usually alternate each year. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing this year but am hoping it will involve making crumpets for breakfast and probably a dessert of some kind.
I usually go OTT with decorations. But I’m always on the fence about real vs fake Christmas trees. I adore the smell of real trees but it’s so much easier, and less messy, to have a fake tree. We had a very cool ceramic black dog decoration for the tree which I loved and then I saw a gold version in David Jones in Australia which I had to buy.
Hands down, Fairytale of New York is my favourite Christmas song. I put it on yesterday at a family pre Christmas gathering while we were doing the dishes and it turned into a bit of a dance party it the kitchen. I also love a lot of old school tunes such as Elvis’ Blue Christmas. I started my own Spotify festive playlist and every year I add to it. It’s a mix of old school but also included is more modern stuff such as Meghan Trainor’s Christmas songs.
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