Christmas day begian for us in Highgate - Al had got me a bueatiful black highheel stocking with feathers and pearls all over it and purple glittery highheel shoe christmas decorations. Then to ungirlyfy things abit I recieved loads of dinosuar themed stuff which made me really happy - of course I'd managed to leave most of his presants in Gloucester so he only got a few old techniqual books and a cat money box!
We then packed the pie and christmas cake up and headed for Essex.
There we found what is possibly the most scariest santa clues ever!
For the meal itself I had made six glittery napkin rings - one for each of us - Jeans was the christmas tree, Davids the bualbal, mums the bell, mine the star, Alarics the holly and dads the santa hat (well he is the Hat Man after all!). Mum had made some snowmen christmas napkins for said rings to go onto.
The p0ie was baked and did Alaric proud - it contians fennel, quill pasta, spinache, pin nuts, red pepper, feta cheese, cream and marmite.
Probably Jeans favourite presant of the day was this puppet theatre that David had picked up in a charity shop - I got into trouble for playing with it too much though, apparently the wizard isn't dumbledore its merlin and apperantly Hermine is sleeping buety and Luna is goldelocks etc... I think they were all being very mean especial as I was singing the sing and every thing - snape snape severus snape - Dumbledore etc... (ok if I can find the link I'll post it later it was really funny at the time.
Alaric had bought her back some little planes with - Pretty lights mummy! - on them, from Dublin.
The night of mums operation I went and helped dad clean (him being a cleaner) and Jean came with us and fell in love with Henry the hoover of which there was fortunatly multiple ones so that we could still actually hoover! Anyway mum and dad got her this little henry which came with a dustpan and brush and all sorts of fun excessories - she loved it 🙂 I'm wondering if it would be seen as child labour to get her hoovering the house (once we have one again) 😉 Of course Alaric and David had to open the poor little henry up to see how it worked and if there were any brains in there!
As you can see the meal and excitement of christmas day resulted in Mum going for a sleep and Dad - well... Jean thinks sleeping people need teddys to hug 🙂
Christmas Eve was spent making mulled wine both alcoholic and non-alcoholic even though it did mean sending someone to the shops on an emergancy tour! I also decorated the christmas cake I'd got dad to bake back at the Mill. I went for christmas trees on the snowy tundra (it would have been spikey but this was my first time using the instant royal icing mix rather than making it up myself). Becuase I am me and was thus unprepared I ended up having to improvise an icing bag out of greese proof paper and everything. You may have noticed from the picture that I have some little creatures that should not be there - my little family of marzipan hedghogs - these are special hedghogs who have awoken for the Snow Ball and it has nother NOTHING to do with the fact my brother loves marzipan and hedghogs - I didnt then refused to let anyone else have a hedghog honest!
Cooking wise we also roped peeps who'd come for mulled wine - namely Clair into helping us prepare the leopard pie which is Alarics traditional veggi christmas dinner as we where going to be spending christmas day at my perants we where preparing the pie to take with us and cook once there. I have only one thing to say at this juncture - 'Mmmmm Pie!'
Of corse the Christmas clock made an earlier appearance and after about three hours had everybody wanting to kill me or the clock or both - I still think its cute with its flashing lights and five minutes of tinny out of tune christmas carols, Jean loves it too with its riendeer going rouw rouw - tick tock rouw rouw mummy! Snowman! Snowman! Daddy lookit Snowman!
As the day progressed there where lightsaber fights with bits of cardboard!
Mucho mucho playing with the remote control darleck I got Al an eon or three ago!
There might also have been some dancing but I have acidently forgotton to upload the photos with this one being the least embaressing 🙂
We finished the day off by watching Jack's (whos office we're currently in) friend doing the christmas lectures which included inflatible real lungs on a resirator etc... It was fun 🙂
I discovered a new food that was YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY last week - me and Alaric were taken to Goldersgreen for dinner and there we discovered the delight of flaffles in a sort of cross between a pitta bread and tortia with some with some really nice humous and other sort of aubagine dip thing.
So yesturday imagine my joy when looking for food for me an Jean I come across a chickpea flaffle, in a medaterrian style flatebread in the first I came across that I could get into easily with the pushchiar (Happened to be a Starbucks so things werent exactly cheap!). Now I knew it wouldn't be as good but I was severlly disappointed with it so now I'm thinking I have two options - a) hunt around for the best flaffle there is or... b) find out how to make them myself and get good at it? Oh well looks like it'll be about ten yrs before I get the yummy again 🙁
Still the flaffle tasted very familiar to me which has been puzzling me since I first tasted (Well actually since the second time I tasted it as the first time I'd accidently got Alarics and therefore could taste nothing but chillis!). I think it is a taste remaniscant of something that my nan used to make but I really don't have a clue.
I'm also awear that I have probably spelt stuff wrong as I'm running on phonetics here!
This morning I broke down in tears - I knew it would happen at some point - in fact I was amazed that I got to almost a week without it happening. The pressures of having my home ripped apart and wondering if it will ever go back again was just too much. That and the fact the back refused to extend our overdraft and didnt even give us a chance to explain and all at the front inquireys desk 🙁
I did loose it a bit and demanded of the woman 'well what are we supposed to do now?' She then informed us that if we incure any charges over it then come back and tell them and they might not actually take said charges - sigh. This is all becuase I was supposed to collect payment from customers on Friday which obviously did not happen - grrr.
Still on the plus side it turns out that Jean hasn't got a bad tummy from the flood water but instead has chicken pox - in hind sight she was refusing to drink the tap water and informed me that it was errrr and hit the bicker repeatedly away and in fact got upset when I drank it to show her it was yummy water. I am actually quiet relieved about this.
The other bonus about today was that we traveled to a clients house today for a shower (blessed be the shower and all that lovely warm water and tap water - joy oh joy!) and the most wonderful vegatable resotto. It was simply fantastic food and this astonished me as it contained one of my dreaded foods - leek. I detest leek thanks to a chocking insident when I was in the about 10 but this tasted divine and the leeks weren't chewey - I never realised leeks could be non-chewey! 🙂
I like Pesto sauce with pasta, and so does Sarah - as long as it's freshly made pesto, as encountered in restaurants. I'll tolerate pesto sauce from a jar, which she won't, but I still vastly prefer the fresh stuff.
One day I'll set up the resources needed to make it, but in the meantime, today we found a way of reviving jar pesto... we were having gnocci with sun-dried tomato pesto, but were both craving garlic, so I decided to liven the pesto up by pouring a bit of oil into a pan and frying a crushed garlic clove, then adding the pesto, then the gnocci.
The result was YUMMY. Not in the way that freshly made pesto is, but in a different way; the garlic somehow took the bitter edge off of the pesto's taste, and made it lovely instead.
I plan to experiment with doing this to other types of pesto and seeing what the result's like - but I'd still like to make my own fresh pesto sauce one day.
Recipies, The Family | sarah | 
Sat 5th Jan 2008 12:16 pm | 
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