Christmas

We had a lovely Christmas day. My brother did a splendid meal to which I contributed two sorts of stuffing and the veg, though he did the cooking of the veg. I also took one of my christmas puds which seemed to go down quite well thought I forgot to take cream and so forth to go with it.

The two stuffings went down well, one was basically sausage meat, onion, garlic, and apple, the other was cooked rice, various dried fruits, a bit of garlic, parsley and some egg to bind it together a little.

We made various items for christmas hampers including chuckney, peppermint creams and noguat. I only remembered to take a photo of the noguat though but that is really nice if rather sticky. The photo at the start is of it, I made a honey, pastasio and cranberry version.

I also got a great haul of cooking books as presents which will give me plenty of reading materials for the next few weeks. I always read cookery books more like most people read novels but these ones even more so.

The first one is the biggest and boy is it big! You could kill people with this book.

I present The Fat Duck Cookbook by Heston Blumenthal. I love his TV programs and his fantastic OTT attitude that mixes cooking and a mad scientist lab. I got the basic version not the uber posh one that comes in it's own box and has a price tag to match but even the version I got is extremely heavyweight and has a great quality feel with wonderful photographs and of course his signiture dishes.

I also got another book by him "In search of Total Pefection" which looks interesting to read as well, it is about a set of TV programs he did about various well know dishes and looking for the 'perfect' version though very wisely he says everyones version of perfect is different.

Finally I got a  much more humble but almost certainly more practical in a day to day sense book. The Green Kitchen which is about being energy concous in the kitchen, ways of saving energy and so forth. The recipes in this book are more of the ilk to make me go into the kitchen and try them out where as the first two are more awe inspiring but probably a lot less practical.