A Very Foodie Lim-Mas

Happy New Year, one and all! Now that the festive season is safely behind us, I might as well tell you: my family takes Christmas incredibly seriously. More specifically: we take Christmas food incredibly seriously. I'm pretty sure that collectively, the four of us gain the weight of a small child.

We stay up late on Christmas Eve to do any food prep needed for the next day, such as boiling and roasting the traditional Christmas Day ham. This year we also decided to prepare our stomachs for the big day with a melted Camembert and sharpen our minds with a particularly taxing game of Trivial Pursuit. (Sadly, my dad tends to wipe the floor with all three of us womenfolk. T.P. is stacked in favour of old people. I'm sure of it). 

On Christmas morning my sister and I open our stockings and then go downstairs to ooh and aah over the presents under the tree. When we were kids we did all of this at 4 AM. Poor Mum and Dad. Now we tend to rise at a much more civil 11 AM...

We check that Santa has eaten his mince pie, taken his treat for the reindeer and drunk his tipple of choice. He seems to rather enjoy a tot of Baileys.

Next we make sure the dining table is attired in a suitably festal manner and start preparing food for Christmas lunch. Snacking along the way, of course. It's hard not to when you've got a prime cut of Hansen & Lydersen salmon just begging to be served with crème fraîche and blinis...

While the roast meats (duck and turkey this year!) are in the oven, we gather around the tree for the best bit: present opening!

 Here's a few of my favourites from this year...

A leather wallet and notebook that smell delicious.

Isabel Marant earrings.

A bevy of wonderful books. The Bone Clocks was my Christmas Day read and I can highly recommend it: a marriage of thriller and fantasy that had my fingers glued to the novel all the way through Boxing Day and beyond.

Susanne Kaufmann goodies.

Sunscreen from Bri. One of my New Year's resolutions is to wear this every day. More on my resolutions in an upcoming post...(maybe).

Alex and I made stockings for each other this year, and the highlight of his was this phone case! So utterly perfect for me. The boy knows me well.

And my favourite of all, this black leather rucksack. I'd been searching for one for ages but my parents found this one and it's perfect. Smart enough to take to work, but practical too - I need a bag that won't damage my back.

After present-opening merriment Bri and I worked together to make a pavlova. The meringue should really be made the night before, but this year we forgot completely. I blame Trivial Pursuit.

At about 4PM, it's time for Christmas dinner! Lunch? Feast?? It's such a weird in-between time that no one really knows...Next comes a whirl of delicious food, drink, cracker-pulling and general conviviality. 

After dinner we watch a spot of Christmas TV and movies (this year, Frozen and Miracle on 34th Street) and when the effects of our gluttony have worn off slightly, we decorate and serve the pavlova. 

And that concludes Christmas 2014! Bit of a late post on my part, but I'd love to know anyway - what did you get up to this year (well...last year?) Do you have any Yuletide traditions? 

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Late-Night Chocolate Pecan Cookies

The witching hour is upon us, and tonight I've got a short and sweet post on some chocolatey, nutty biscuits that proved a giant hit among my family (and Alex!) last week.

Anything that remotely resembles chocolate is likely to disappear very quickly in my home. The kitchen worktops are a particular danger zone. Make the mistake of putting a piece of much-anticipated chocolate down for a minute, be that a cube of Green and Black's or a salted caramel from Melt, and it'll be swallowed up forever. Usually by my father. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Chocolate biscuits are a particular favourite in the family. With these in mind, the mother and I fired up the oven a few nights ago. Following this BBC GoodFood recipe, we stuffed pecans and chunks of chocolate into mounds of sweet dough to make these truly delicious cookies. 

In the reviews for the recipe some people have complained that the dough spreads quite a bit during baking. If you want them to spread less during the cooking process, chill your dough for half an hour or so, but personally I like mine like this! They're crispy yet chewy, just the way I like them, and ridiculously easy. They take about half an hour tops to put together and bake - that's homemade cookies in your mouth in 30 minutes! And best of all, all you need to really buy is dark chocolate and a bag of pecans, as chances are you'll have the rest of the ingredients in your kitchen already.

Delicious with a cup of tea, or, even better, a glass of ice-cold almond milk.

Optimistically we put the cookies that weren't eaten straight out of the oven into a kilner jar. They lasted less than a day...Oh Dad.

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Hits And Misses In The Kitchen

In our household, we tend to while away the hours in our little kitchen. The kitchen table is my favourite blogging and job-hunting space, especially when accompanied by a cup of tea. We've also been spending more time in there of late, with my mother, fuelled by the Great British Bake Off, bringing home a shiny new KitchenAid last week to help her with her sourdough quest. August has been a wonderful month for gastronomic experimentation: here's a couple of the dishes we've been rustling up these past two weeks!

Here's a take on classic mussels, given an Asian twist with lemongrass, lime, chilli and coconut milk. Probably a little bit healthier than my beloved moules marinières, and wonderfully flavourful. This one was mainly my mother's work, with me hanging over her shoulder expectantly. 

A salmon fillet stuffed with salsa verde (and baked after these photos were taken!). I hugely enjoyed cooking this one. My knife skills leave a fair bit to be desired, so butterflying the fillet was a tense job, but garnishing it was so fun. The already delicious salmon was made even tastier by the addition of all these wonderful herbs, capers and olives, and a healthy drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

Roast lamb chops with diced potatoes and beetroots. This looked pretty before it went into the oven, but in hindsight the beetroots made everything a bit too wet, and the lamb chops ended up a bit grey, and I had to give them a bit of colour in a frying pan, resulting in them being just a wee bit overdone. They'd have been better off seared in the pan, which is how I usually cook them. 

So some high points and low points this month, but I've really enjoyed playing around with what works and what doesn't! I'm so looking forward to the flavours of the steadily encroaching autumn: pumpkin, cobnuts, wild mushrooms, celeriac, fennel, apple, swede, swiss chard and so much more. I'm also particularly anticipating the roasts that start becoming much more frequent once summer's wound down! I say bring on the cooler weather, and the wonderful produce that goes with the cold snap in the air.

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The Great British Summer

Put two Brits in a room together and it's likely that they'll immediately start up a conversation about the weather. We can't help it - when our meteorological conditions fluctuate this much, it's a genuine subject of interest! This year we've gone from almost-Mediterranean highs of 30ºC and blue skies to blustery days punctuated by heavy rain and…erm…hail. A typical British summer, in other words. 

What else is inevitable during our London summer?

1) Pimms. The taste of exam liberation and hopeful picnics for the last six years.

2) Men whipping their tops off at the first glimmer of sun.

3) Roasting at 35ºC+ temperatures on the Bakerloo line. Come on now, TfL...

4) 99p cones (that no longer cost 99p).

5) Barbecues!

We brought the old barbecue that's been lying dormant in the garage for the last twelve months out of retirement, gave it a good scrub down, and sent Dad out to the shop to buy firelighters. Or...er...coals. Whatever it is that makes heat in barbecues. I'm happy to leave those types of jobs to the menfolk.

The men are also allowed to do the things that I don't enjoy so much...like basting raw meat.

Someone caught the whiff of meat and fish cooking and wandered into our garden to get a slice of the action, rolling around in the vegetable patches to get our attention. This little cat has been a regular visitor this summer, playing with the plants, hiding behind the grape vines, searching for frogs in the plots. And I hear that she/he went into a neighbour's house the other day and went upstairs. Naughty.

Licking its lips. The tiger who came to tea?

Home-made satay on sticks, purple sweet potatoes, rolled-up Waitrose chorizo.

I love a good barbecue. Al fresco eatin' can't be beaten! And the smoke and delicious smells wafting through the garden are just the best, even if they do attract little feline friends... Especially because they do.

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