Blog or bust...

I realised the other day that I haven't blogged in almost a year. I thought "maybe I should just delete it entirely" But then I thought "maybe I should persist. So this is my attempt at persisting...

I have been doing Christmas baking over the past week or so.

This is how my kitchen normally looks:




This is how it looked with two Christmas pudding steaming for 8 hours, the other ingredients out, lunch being cooked, and my slow cooker on the go...





Traditional family cookie recipes



The Gingerbread Men A&E Department...


My first proper attempt at Home made Mince Pies...

Common Sense Doesn't Sell

A Yahoo! Article on how to save money in the January Sales:

http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/23122008/401/golden-rules-successful-sales-shopping.html

My thought was "don't go shopping", but apparently that's not the slant they were looking for...

My pleasant pheasant experience

Mr P came around for dinner last night to bring in the New Year, and something inspired me to cook a feast featuring pheasant (having never done that before!).

The menu consisted of:
Roast Pheasant with Lemon and Rosemary
Pan-friend brussel sprouts and shallots with pomegranate and purple basil
Boiled Potatos
Crusty Bread
Dark chocolate mousse with Baileys and mascarpone cream.
Mr P had picked up a lovely 2007 Zinfandel from a wine show we went to in October and it complimented the meal perfectly (apparently pheasant and zinfandel are a good combo!)

I got the pheasant recipe from Mike Robinson on www.bbc.co.uk/food. He very helpfully had a video on how to prepare the pheasant, and while it looked much easier to get the backbone out than it was (although it wasn't too hard - just more messy than it looked on the video and he didn't say anything about dissecting the giblets out either!) it was very helpful and very yummy!

In the end, it turned out rather well (if I may say so myself!)


The pheasant - in packaging...



The pheasant just before the preparation...



The final result...