Kirsteen Ure

Like a Christmas jumper in summer, Merksworth Castle is something of a curiosity. A 1920s basalt castle sitting alongside other lux Takapuna beachfront properties, it’s home to chef Mark Gregory and is the titular castle in his festive cookbook Christmas at the Castle.

Inspired by the cooking and family traditions Mark hosts at home, the book has traditional Christmas fare (glazed hams and a glossy, gorgeous black cherry trifle), summery party food (soba noodle salad, dukkah donuts) and even treats for doggos (doggylicious bacon treats).

For our second venture into the Kete kitchen (my kitchen minus the usual bench detritus) Erica and I decided to try our hands at Mark’s sesame and miso prawns. Christmas prawns: 🎄🍤 the fact they’re able to be represented in two emoji somehow makes it feel even more festive.

‘We could wear Christmas jumpers,’ I said, thinking of the snowmen and candy cane shirt Mark wears in a photo in the endpapers of the book. Erica said she’d bring a Grinch hat, but arrived with a festive red shirt. I mentioned I could borrow my daughter’s Ho-Ho-Homer Simpson jumper. Neither made it to the kitchen.

The recipe calls for raw, frozen prawns deveined. Additional ingredients are yellow miso (we went off script with red), sesame dressing, togarashi seasoning, sesame oil, black sesame seeds, lemon juice and spring onions. It also calls for cocktail sticks, and we found some with Santas. Better, perhaps, than the jumpers.

It’s a fairly simple recipe; the kind you could make easily while chatting with guests. Into a big pot goes the sesame oil (overheated slightly by these chefs while one read the recipe and the other measured miso) followed by the prawns, the miso, the dressing and lemon.

The recipe is silent as the notorious night on whether to use spring onion greens in addition to the white stem, so we made an executive decision to stir in the whites and garnish on the top with the greens. The plate I’d set aside for its festive colour didn’t cut it for the large quantity of sauce so to serve we moved to a large bowl. On looks alone: pretty good. Blue bowl, pink prawns, greens and black sesame – colourful and appealing.

On flavour: a tasty party snack (or in our case lunch – we polished off the bowl). The sesame dressing and miso add the umami, and served with a lime wedge to squeeze across the top, the prawns are definite summer party fare. Note: the recipe uses king prawns and while we used a smaller size the result was still delicious, if potentially less impressive.

And festivity? Christmas cocktail sticks, plus a last-minute specs-tacular pair of antlers and a bottle of pink bubbles delivered the Christmas spirit to our party.