Ready for Christmas?

It is Christmas Eve Eve and I am feeling oddly contented. The last month has been very busy with work and rather stressful. The work isn't finished, I have drawings strewn across my desk still, but there is progress and an end of this project is within sight at last.

My lovely neighbour has just delivered one of her delicious Christmas cakes - a very moist traditional Finnish cake. Everyone loves it and it doesn't last 5 minutes. If my cupboards weren't bursting at the seams with food, I would try to hide it until Christmas day. That is the kind of neighbour I aspire to being - bringing home-baked cakes, but I always manage to fall well short. I haven't written a single Christmas card yet this year, and have wrapped a total of 2 presents! Oh well - still one day left ;-)

My youngest daughter however decided that she wanted to make Christmas cards for her whole class this year. She had a picture in her head and when she told me, I thought that she would never be able to make anything so fancy and certainly not 23 of them in a short space of time! But as always she completely amazed me. I sat and helped stick the tiny windows on, whilst she hand drew all the sleighs and reindeer. It felt really special :-)

Christmas dinner should be special this year too. All the meat is from the local organic farm and it is amazing. For us the taste and texture is always so much better than anything from the supermarket, and when you can see the animals and talk to the farmer and the butcher, you know that these are people that can be trusted.

My experience with supermarket meat is not great. For instance two weeks ago I bought a packet of "skinless and boneless chicken thighs" I did think that they looked quite small, but it wasn't until I was half way through chopping them up and came across white tendons, that I realised it was actually meat cut from the drumstick and made to look like thighs! I don't like to think what else they do to our food to make it more profitable (like last year's horse meat scandal!). Next year I'm planning for more of our meat to come from the local farm instead.

Shamefully I have only been to the allotment 3 times since the beginning of October, but each of those times, there has still been veg for harvesting. Swedes, leeks, fennel, beetroot, chard, kale, rocket and spinach mainly. It is amazing considering the recent neglect.

Thank you so much for reading my posts this year. I hope you have found them interesting. More regular blogging should resume in the New Year.

Wishing you a peaceful Christmas wherever you are.

Judy x