January 5th - I think!!

Saw this today and I am posting it for all my lovely friends to read - I am not saying who is which but lets just say whether you are nutty, firm or sweet you make John and my life complete and for that we thank you.

We thought that the two ladies on the end look like the heroines of the book we gave to Mum for Christmas - Peshwari Nans - Beyond the Bucket List by Stephen Haughan (available from Amazon and I would urge anyone to get a copy).  She is loving this book and soon I will not need to read it because every time we catch up she tells me little snippets of what she has been reading.  Now that Stephen has announced he has finished the fifth book in the series I shan't have to worry about her birthday and Christmas presents for a while.  Anyway I do hope with all this shitty weather that Stephen is safe and sound at the bottom of the hill because we have a veritable river running through the village and making its way down in his direction.  Today during the day hasn't been so bad - we had said to Mum if the weather was awful we would take lunch down to her but thankfully we didn't need to.

We have some visitors this afternoon, Simon, Melanie and the girls Jasmine and Frances are calling in for cake and a cuppa and to collect the Christmas presents which Father Christmas had left here for them.

I decided to make some fairy cakes for the occasion.  I must confess that they came courtesy of a Betty Crocker packet mix but I did make the butter icing cream myself!!!  They are little red velvets and when John did the quality control he declared that they were as light as a feather and they were.

For our pudding I had made a sort of caramelised apple and sultana strudel affair using up the pastry left over from the main course.  I had a bit of an issue initially with the pastry as I didn't have any beans for blind baking but I improvised and although the pastry started to shrink alarmingly it settled down and the finished result was delicious.  Mum seemed to really enjoy it and that is all that matters.

Our main course today was a turkey, gammon and leek pie using the leftover meat from Christmas.  Both the turkey and the ham were delicious the first time round so in the pie were a resounding success.  The pastry held out too which was good and the 'sauce' in the meat was delicious. 

I used a Jamie Oliver recipe as my base but substituted the bacon with the gammon and used some leftover sour cream instead of the creme fraiche, used shortcrust instead of puff pastry and ignored the chestnut bit but apart from that it was exactly the same!   It was served with some baby new potatoes in mint butter and some carrots and peas and the excess sauce on the side.  The pie will feed us twice and Mum had a take-away for tomorrow of both the main and the pud.  This is good because the weather forecast for tomorrow is absolutely appalling so we can be sure she will have a good hot meal.

Simon, Melanie and the girls arrived around 3.00pm and it was lovely to see them.  Mum had bought the girls colouring books which they played with for a while but little Frances was out of sorts so retreated to the sofa to read her book in peace whilst Jasmine kept us amused and John is now fully familiar with each and every LOL doll she had with her - confused?  we were as we had never heard of the LOL dolls!!!