AKA “Over My Dead Body I’m Going To Waste These Nice Leftovers Making Bubble N Squeak, Jamie Oliver!”

Ingredients:
500g or so of turkey mince
Leftover roast vegetables
Leftover stuffing
Leftover fresh herbs from Christmas cooking
Two thick slices each of cold turkey & ham, diced roughly
1 small carton chicken stock
Half a handful of plain flour.
2 sheets frozen puff pastry

Brown mince in frying pan with a dollop of olive oil. Chop leftover vegies roughly and mix into the mince along with leftover stuffing, fresh herbs, and meat. Pour stock over the top and let it all bubble away nicely for some time, sprinkling the flour over the top and stirring through to thicken the sauce. Pour all contents into a baking dish and make a lattice on top of pastry strips.

Bake in oven at about 170º (fan forced) or 180º (normal) for half an hourish or until pastry is brown and crackly.  Serve with steamed greens & yesterday’s gravy.

I have been domesticking up a storm this week, shopping, making things, cooking, and planning more cooking. Surely earned a Mother of the Year award this morning by entirely forgetting to take the baby to daycare – for her ONE full day this week, the one I had made many plans with Raeli for. At 10:30 (after a bad night’s sleep because someone had nightmares and had to climb in with us) I suddenly blinked, stared at the baby and said “we forgot to take Jem to daycare!”

Cue mass hilarity all around.

Once we had rectified that mistake, Raeli and I had brunch at the local cafe and then went down to Meredith’s Orchard to stock up on fruit and vegies for the Christmas weekend. Got a good deal on raspberries, picked today! Back home to rehabilitate her dolls house in return for putting away or chucking away a whole lot of old toys. And then it was icecream concoction construction (or possibly deconstruction). Using silicon cupcake cases & chocolate mould trays, we made vanilla penguins, turkish delight hearts, and mince pies, all by stirring interesting things into icecream. I also made the outside layer of the icecream pudding (Christmas Bombe!). I was going to have a Turkish Delight core but now I’m thinking raspberry-doctored vanilla.

Sadly I think the creativity overstretched practicality. The results were delicious but messy, and I don’t think the freezer is cold enough for the icecreams in the moulds to harden properly. The best results were the mince pies: brandied fruit stirred into vanilla icecream and scooped into star-shaped silicon cases to serve.

Oh, and I whipped up a lasagne too Though I managed to split the bechamel sauce like a bad hollandaise, leading to huge amounts of delicious but strangely lumpy cheeseness over the dish. Turns out that an extra large fruitcake pan is actually excellent for making lasagne in. Once again, messy but tasty. (actually that pretty much sums up most of what emerges from my kitchen)

Raeli and I alternated between bonding beautifully and grouching at each other, largely because her vocabulary seems to have reduced sharply to ‘BUT MUUUUUUM’ which drives me wild with irritation, especially when she follows up ‘don’t say that to me again’ with “BUUUUUT MUUUUUUUUUM.” There were times when I thought my head would explode!

She’s still only five, right? Not fifteen?

Tomorrow’s plan is to make it to Pilates for the first time in a month (a succession of disasters and babysitting letdowns have prevented me), to pick up a few groceries (no big pre-Christmas shop for me, I can’t face the queues), check the postbox and then come HOME and pretty much stay here until the holiday hits. Still need to finish the Christmas Bombe, bake a gingerbread cake, and probably make christmas muffins with Raeli because she desperately wants to.

Sigh. Baking with children is fun, but takes FIVE TIMES LONGER.

I should really wrap presents.

Kind of sleepy, actually.

(I think my favourite bit about this one is OMG Arthur Darville can play the piano)

It’s getting pretty Christmassy around here.  Raeli and I had a mammoth shortbread baking session yesterday, producing not only shortbread daleks but also cats, bunnies, high heeled shoes and other ephemera.  Sadly the sheep, cows and rockets didn’t work out as I had hoped as it turns out those fancy cookie cutters I bought are crappy, and you can’t get the dough out of them without breaking it.

I have a jar of dried fruit marinating in rather a lot of brandy, ready to be turned into a cake this week.  Should I worry that most recipes say to soak the fruit in rum or brandy overnight?  My jar has been going since November!

My other baking plans for the season are icecream centric – I want to make a frozen pudding bombe and some moulded icecream “mince tarts.”  Ironically with all my icecreamy plans, the weather this week has been cooler than we’re used to in December.  Good baking weather, not so good for melting icecream.  Still, not complaining over here!

(more…)

I’ve been giggling away over Trent’s homemade author vids over the last couple of months, and this is one of my favourites – not least because he recs my book as well as many others I love or am looking forward to.

I hope to see more of Trent and Trent in the new year! And that reminds me that it’s time to hassle my local bookshop again about that copy of Managing Death I pre-ordered…

So, last year I wrote about the icky feeling of lying to my intelligent child about the Santa myth. Well… the reindeer is well and truly out of the bag, thanks to the blabbing of young Dr Oscar, age 5.

“Oscar says Santa doesn’t bring the presents, it’s your parents,” she said, eyes welling in the back of the car as we drove home from a merry evening with friends (these questions ALWAYS come up from the back of the car). “Is it true?”

Caught on the back foot, I tried to weasel out of an immediate answer by trying to gauge whether she actually wanted an answer to that question, but when she said “I want the truth” in a solemn little voice, I crumbled and confessed all. She was sad and confused and it was HORRIBLE. I ended up trying to explain the history of Christmas over the next hour, tying myself in knots over the whole thing.

I’m still not sure how she’s taking it. She veers from excitement and delight at being in on the grand conspiracy, to being glum and dispirited. She did perk up a bit when she discovered we were responsible for the Monsters v. Aliens DVD (though she didn’t remember the Beauty and the Beast one that actually took effort to supply out of season, the wench).

Before going to bed last night, she firmly wrote a note to Santa. She seems to shift between accepting that it’s just me and her Daddy, and still believing in Santa. It’s like it takes time for the layers to peel away… today, at her insistence, we went to sit on the knee of a shopping mall Santa (which she had requested earlier, after a friend reported the experience – we’ve never done that with her before). If anyone’s looking for a good Santa in the Hobart region, by the way, I can recommend the one in Centrepoint – he was very respectable looking, the elves are well organised, and the photo only costs $10. After checking out a mum’s and bub’s forum I found out that some can cost as much as $25! There wasn’t even a queue.

Raeli and I spent time Christmas shopping, and she seems to have gotten over the whole experience. I’m not sure I have. I felt awful, every uneasiness about the Santa Lie that I’d ever felt just exploding, all at once. I don’t think I can bear to go through that again with Jemima.

Maybe I’ll just have Raeli tell her.

Santa's WHAT??? OMG, so who bought us the trampoline?

(more…)

Spending the day talking nonstop with  girliejones

Receiving presents from our girls’ various grandmothers all day (Raeli has had way too much sugar and scored a giant elephant puppet)

Chocolate chocolate chocolate

Gingerbread, shortbread, Ashgrove cheese and crackers, olives, cream cheese-stuffed peppers, apple cider, basically anything we saw in the supermarket and could justify because ‘it’s Tasmania, so Alisa needs to try it’

Entirely failing to make cupcakes, the one actual thing I had planned to do today.

 aifin making sushi & pancakes for dinner, mmmm christmas food.

Chat, more chat, sewing time, chat. Heads have almost fallen off from total conversation.

 aifin,  girliejones and I hanging out in the living room, tweeting each other about the plans for bringing Santaness into the house (stocking have been hung up with care & four year old is finally asleep) but not actually getting up off the couch to do so because hey, it’s not midnight yet.

The hashtag #jewtriesxmas has sadly not become a trending topic, though it has been entertaining on Twitter to watch her going through her disillusionment as regards who drinks the milk that was put out for Santa…

Merry Everything, one and all!

Wow, so this domestic thing. People do this every day? I’ve been spending the last 3 days predominantly on housework, and I’m definitely over it. Still, the house is clean and tidy for Christmas, we’re way better organised than we were last year, and apart from the tree randomly falling over and the second batch of shortbread being sniffed at suspiciously by my daughter, there have been no catastrophes.

(ah, the gingerbread house fail of… too many years to count, ahh the Christmas I was 8 months pregnant and decided to make my own puddings but in my exuberance failed to read the recipe and ended up going to bed while my honey stayed up until 1am watching a boiling pot… ahh)

The guest room is really pretty, though, and I’m leaving in under an hour to pick up anything (apart from maybe paper towels, grumble mumble) which means for once I can have a relaxing Christmas Eve. Oh, and my obsessive podcast-habit means that from now on, baking shortbread and gingerbread daleks will always remind me of the Radio Free Skaro boys.

I’ve done ridiculously well with gifts received already this year. The latest is the most beautiful leather-cover edition of Room with a View, a book I love greatly, and have been meaning to replace my battered orange paperback with a shiny new orange paper back for some time.

I can’t tell you how gorgeous this book is – not only lovely in its own right, but wrapped in Penguin-stamped tissue paper and placed in an elegant cardboard book. It’s a lovely object I can’t stop looking at and, oh yes, I’ll be re-reading this book very soon. How can I not?

It occurs to me that this was possibly the last beloved classic novel that I didn’t have a really nice edition of – a friend once gifted me with a gorgeous set of ancient hardback copies of The Forsyte Saga that he found in an aunt’s attic, I have a lovely old green edition of Wuthering Heights (and matching Jane Eyre, bah, but I keep it cos it matches) that dates from my mother’s brief ‘old books’ hobby phase, and I bought myself a proper hardback of Pride & Prejudice from a uni bookshop. Now Room with a View.

Yep, those are the important ones. Which books do you love so much that, even if you already have a copy, a lovely hardback edition would be an awesome present for you?

So a few people have asked for my dairy and gluten free gingerbread recipe – I feel a bit guilty about posting this, because I’m pretty sure I don’t have the recipe right yet. It’s very much a work in progress. If you try it for yourself and add any tweaks that improve on it, please let me know! In particular I think the mix of flours could use work…

Gingerbread Personages (gluten and dairy free)

Dry Stuff:
1.5 cups potato flour
2 cups rice flour
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1-2 tsp ground ginger

Wet Stuff:
1 egg
1 cup brown sugar (firmly packed)
2/3 cup treacle
140g pureed apple

1. Mix wet stuff in one bowl, and dry stuff in another bowl.
2. Mix contents of two bowls together; stir well, should end up a soft and sticky dough
3. Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour (overnight also good)

4. Pre-heat oven to 180?C (350?F)
5. Heavily flour (any gluten free option – rice, potato, corn) your cutting board & rolling pin. Carefully roll out gingerbread a small handful at a time to 1cm or so thick.
6. Cut out shapes with cookie cutters – gingerbread people, daleks, rabbits, whatever you have handy.

7. Place shapes on oven tray lined with baking paper. Leave a couple of cm between each but they shouldn’t spread that much.
8. Bake for 8-9 minutes.
9. DO NOT LEAVE IN HOT OVEN, COOL IN FRESH AIR ON WIRE TRAYS (sorry for shouting, just telling my future self)
10. Should make about 3 trays worth of biscuits.

You can decorate with icing made from pure icing sugar & water/eggwhite, bits of dried fruit, or any other dairy & gluten-free tidbit.