Christmas at Random

OH and I managed to get the house shipshape and OH also completed the last tasks around his masterpiece, the Christmas Cake:

This is a boozy fruit cake full of dates, cherries, apricots, apples and sultanas. It is absolutely brilliant -- moist and not too sweet, despite the icing (which is in this pic has not yet been added). It goes best with crumbly, strong cheeses.









On Christmas Eve, we made a quick outing into town by car for some last-minute shopping before we were going to pull up the drawbridge. OH slushed off towards the sodden allotment for a bag of home-grown parsnips. And I was on a roll -- perhaps a bit stupidly, given that my feet, while not too achy, were swelling up again. I stood in the kitchen and finally caught up on my seasonal baking and made trays upon trays upon trays of German cinnamon, clove, mace and ginger-spiced shortbread biscuits in shapes and sugar sprinkles as well as some flattened but nevertheless tasty walnut and hazelnut macaroons. Christmas Eve dinner itself was a fab combination of smoked fish (eel, salmon, mackrel from our trusted fishmonger's), baguette, half a wagon wheel of stilton, a generous piece of gorgonzola and a really nice goat's cheese, plus the Pouilly Fume from Aldi, which went perfectly with the oily fish -- very dry, very clean on the palate.

 Our Christmas Eve living room -- Extreme Cosiness Alert.

Spent the rest of the evening with the ailing feet up on the sofa watching Christmas telly, stoking the fire and stroking Neuroticat.

OH was looking forward to trying out his new Christmas present from me, a two-handled mechanical bottle corker, for all his homebrew bottling needs, and I browsed through mine from him, which was a tutorial book on Game Maker, the computer-game-creation software.  

We had the neighbours round that evening so had a mid-afternoon Christmas dinner. OH cooked and served us:

-- the duck -- stuffed with orange
-- roast butternut squash
-- roast parsnip
-- roast potatoes
-- home-made cranberry jelly
-- home-made gravy

This feast just had to be accompanied by the last bottle of elderberry red, to the left of the veg tray. Utter loveliness.





Later on, the neighbours rolled around for cheese, Christmas cake and various Christmas spirits, and we spent the evening peacefully playing board games and laughing at off-the-wall quiz questions and the tacky, plasticky QI klaxon that went with the game. Unusual for Random, she won at QI twice, and only because, for once, the luck of the dice did not desert her. Not sure if that's a good omen (score so far: unlucky/incompetent at games but pretty lucky in life).