Phew!

Well that was a busy few days! I've missed you...you've missed me too, haven't you...what's that you say? No? You didn't realise I was gone? Oh......*bleedin' muttering mutterers*.

Today, we completed the last of the Christmas shopping and all the food shopping for the next two weeks. Woohoo! Most people were in good spirits and friendly with the occasional grumpy sod ramming trolleys into our ankles. I send them karma.....

School finishes tomorrow so we'll be able to do Christmasy things with them have lie-ins, eat cake, not comb our hair.... and plan to whisk the kids off to the cinema but only after taking them to our friend Val's house to meet up with a crowd of revellers, hellbent on celebrating the holidays. What can you do but join in?

Since we've all been really quite ill this winter, we've been eating comfort soups, stews, pies and homemade breads. We're all bright eyed and rosy cheeked, if a few pounds heavier aye, ok, not that much heavier but health comes before waistline. We're moving back this week to roast chicken, pastas, still on the soups and some lovely fresh fish before having our blowout Christmas day dinner.

At the supermarket today, I asked for a side of salmon but the fishmonger said he'd give me two as a whole salmon was costing way below usual. He beheaded the thing and filleted it for me, with the total coming to just over £7! If I had any room in the freezer, I'd buy three more.

Last week, just before going shopping, I realised we had to use up as much as we could from the fridge and the freezer, hence the creation of leftover pie:

Such a creation can be wonderful and occasionally bleuch of course; this one turned out really well except for the use of the sun-dried tomatoes...what was I thinking? We just picked them out and ate it all up.

Thinly sliced potatoes topped with some leftover white wine cream sauce from the dinner with friends. Onion confit was sprinkled over.


The sun-dried tomatoes didn't work but it didn't destroy it either. We just picked them out.


Cooked sausages were sliced and thrown in.


And another layer of potatoes before doing it all over again until a top layer of potatoes was reached. The remaining cream sauce was mixed with chicken stock and poured carefully into the dish. A mix of cheddar, mozzarella and Gruyere cheese was sprinkled on the top. It was roasted in the oven for approx. 45 minutes at a medium heat. The kids LOVED it. Without those bleedin' tomatoes of course. Normal cream...not cream sauce would be perfect too.

Messy looking but yum!