Preparing for Christmas 2011

Ha - did you think I'd forgotten about Christmas? Well, it's never too early to start preparing, and the sales are a great opportunity. I have already bought two silver Christmas trees for work next year, and then I spotted this in Oxfam in the sales:
So, that is what I have been doing with my morning off this morning (it's very frustrating - I wanted to bake but Ken is still eating up his gingerbread house and under frugality of baking, I am supposed to wait until he has finished that before making something else - which is frustrating as the February Good Food Magazine had a fantastic cookie recipe that would have used up loads of the odds and ends from my cupboards)





It now goes in a light place at room temperature for 2-3 weeks, then in the fridge for 6-10. Christmas trees are v. difficult to propogate so it is lucky that the kit contains several chances! Fingers crossed that I'll have a mini tree by Christmas!!

The good psychologist (Noam Shpancer)

It's been absolutely ages since I wrote properly about a book; I've nearly forgotten how to do it! But here goes...

Written by Noam Shpancer, and originally written in Hebrew and becoming a bestseller in Israel, The Good Psychologist is an intriguing mix of novel and psychological theory and insight. The author, Shpancer, is both a professor of psychology and a clinical psychologist and it is obvious that he has drawn considerably on his experience in these two roles to write the book. I am quite interested in psychology and psychotherapy so was quite excited to read this book.

The book tells the story of a man, the good psychologist, who by day sees clients at the Centre for Anxiety Disorders, and by night teaches an evening class in an introduction to therapy. In both of these "lives", and in his own personal private life, he is facing crossroads and the need to address situations. At the same time, he shares his own psychological learning, with his clients and his students, and tries to apply it to his own life. It's less a gripping novel that you read for the story, and more a book which gives you an insight into the way people think as well as introducing you to some ways of understanding human behaviour and interpretations.

For example, I found this extract from one of the Good Psychologist's sessions particularly enlightening:

My daughter says that she loves her father more than me.
Right. But that was not the reason for your foul mood. The reason for your mood was your interpretation of your daughter's statement, the meaning you decided to attach to it. Let's track your internal monologue. When the girl said what she said, what did you think?
That she doesn't love me, that I'm losing her, that I'm a bad mother.
Ok. Now look at these interpretations. These are thoughts, and thoughts are not facts, they are guesses, hypotheses. And hypotheses must be tested before they are embraced as truth. Perhaps it is possible to interpret what your daughter said differently.

He goes onto suggest that his client should "shop around" when choosing how to interpret things:

Shop around?
Yes. I want you to regard the process of choosing your thoughts like you regard the process of choosing a new pair of shoes. You like shoes, don't you?
You've noticed.
Yes. When you enter a shoe store, do you buy the first pair you seen?
No.
Right. What's first is not necessarily what's best. Same thing with you thoughts...So how do you decide which shoes to buy?
I walk around the store and compare.
You compare,based on what?
The brand, the size, the fit, the style, the price.
Correct. You look for evidence, information that helps you decide cosnciously which shoe is the best for you.
Yes.
You must use the same method to choose your thoughts.

I did very much find that an interesting passage.

I recieved this book to write about from the publisher, Little Brown, and it is released on the 20th January. Thank you very much to them for sending it to me!

My baking challenge

It's January, we got paid for December BEFORE Christmas, and although there are still another 2.75 weeks until the next payday, I have all but run out of money. Lots of book bloggers are doing the TBR dare, where they just read books from their TBR pile. I'm making a spin on this and I've decided that my baking for the next few weeks must be driven by the things that I have in the cupboard rather than baking recipes that I spot on a whim! Obviously I have plenty of flour, different spices butter, and will buy eggs, but the additional ingredients should all come from what I have in. Raisins and currents will also count as staple ingredients and I might buy the odd bar of chocolate. But apart from that, I must work with what I have, and use at least one ingredient from the stash each time. Sadly that means that the sachertorte is on hold, but I think I will make that delight for Valentines Day!

So, I thought I'd start by assessing what was in my cupboards, and this is what I found:



And that's not even including some things which I forgot to include - namely tins of coconut milk, a tin of treacle and a jar of pumpkin puree, Or the half empty packets - I have some figs somewhere, half a tub of custard powder, the box of rice crispies and many more sunflower seeds. Or the frozen fruit in the freezer!

I also took a picture of all of the bits and pieces that I have which I could use to decorate cakes with!



Here are some ideas:
- white chocolate and dessicated coconut in "Snowfall shortbread" from the Eat me book
- chocolate gingerbread men - on top of some ginger cupcakes
- treacle tart (have never tried this, but I spotted a recipe in the new Nigella book - may try adapting it to make it gluten free as enjoyed some wonderful gluten free treacle tarts from Asda recently)
- Christmas pudding cupcakes from the Eat me book - yes, it's a bit late, but the recipe looks so good - brandy butter flavoured icing = YUM!
- more mince pies?
- almond cake
- chocolate custard sandwich
- chocolate rice crispie cake

I also discovered some marmalade flavoured cookie dough in the freezer so I must make that too! I may not have much money but at least K will not suffer cake withdrawal!

I started with the Snowfall shortbread, as it has become a tradition that I make K some millionaire's shortbread after major sporting events and on Saturday he did a 200k bike ride as part of his training for L'Tour D'Etape next July. It's essentially millionaires shortbread but using white chocolate, and with dessicated coconut sprinkled on the top to make "snow". A fun variation!

(Picture kindly taken by K as the light is so much better during the day!)

Penguin bookchase

Who could resist a game where you are told that you have been voted Reader of the year?! Unsurprisingly, I drew this card - the rest of my family are great readers but certainly not as great a reader as me, and now it's official!

The Penguin bookchase game came out last year, and I had been quite keen to get my hands on a copy. My Gran kindly sent me a Christmas cheque in advance of Christmas so I decided that this would be something good to spend it on, since we were spending Christmas in the UK this year and at various family gatherings.

I can report that it is an excellent board game. You move around the board landing in each of six colour themed sections, answering questions which are predominantly (but not exclusively) related to bookish themes. It is a little like Trivial Pursuit, only rather better, in that each question has a choice of three answers, so even if you don't have any idea what the answer is, you still have a 1 in 3 chance of getting it right (and winning a book to put on your bookshelf playing piece). When you have books from all of the six colour categories, you must get back to the middle, but the presence of "Award or sentence" spaces where you must pick up a card that is a bit like a Monopoly chance card means that you can suddenly lose one (or three) of your books. This makes it fairer for the less bookish players (although, I think I have played it 8 times now and won all but one times). I have played it with an assortment of friends and family and it's easy to pick up and an enjoyable way to pass half an hour (if there are two of you), or more...

In other news, I am struggling somewhat with EXCRUCIATING pain in my ribs. I never shook off the cough that came with my flu, and coughed so much on Thursday that I have either cracked a rib or strained a muscle. I am unable to laugh without much pain, so have been sticking to sombre television and reading - I have managed to do quite a bit of reading as lying on the sofa seems to be best!

Two more Christmas bakes

I will try to get this blog back on the straight and narrow, where I stop talking about Christmas and try to focus a bit more on books (and try not to substitute talking about Christmas with talking about weddings perhaps, as there are now less than 7 months to go and we booked our flights yesterday and I am very excited...), but first I have two final Christmas bakes which I can't resist sharing!

First of all Pannettone. I have long enjoyed this Italian yeasted cake, and decided that it was time that I had a go at it. It is traditionally served at Christmas and New Year, so I planned to make it for New Year. Even having flu did not prevent me from attempting this; lying in bed on the 31st I cried with frustration at not being able to do the things that I wanted to, so got up and got into the kitchen (after all, K already had my germs...). I used a recipe from BBC Good Food, but I modified their white chocolate and cranberry version to a more traditional fruit and mixed peel. I was sooooo glad to have my Kenwood mixer to knead the dough, but actually it was quite a flu friendly recipe as there was lots of waiting for the dough to rise when I could return to the sofa. It came out wonderfully; K, who, in my indisposition had had stollen for breakfast and danish pastries for lunch, immediately had a large piece (and then claimed that he was coming down with flu too because he felt sick). And then it has been a breakfast food for another week. It didn't come out as tall as they sometimes look, mainly because my tin was quite wide, but it certainly seemed to taste and smell authentic.



Secondly, snowman-embossed shortbread! Just this week before we were about to take the Christmas decorations down, I recieved a little package in the post from Geraldine (a wonderful email friend who I met through this blog). It was a jolly Snowman cutter! Fortunately its arrival coincided with my morning off so I was able to try it out straight away - it didn't work with the shortbread dough I whizzed up, because it was too soft and got stuck in the intricate design, but just as I was disconsolately pressing the dough into a round tin, I had a brainwave with an exciting way to use it!

Christmas preparations revisited

I wrote a whole series of posts during October/November/December detailing my plans for Christmas and I thought it would be fun to revisit them and see how they worked out!

Christmas chutney We have eaten one of the 6 jars of chutney and given one away - it has a lovely Christmassy flavour but is a tiny bit too vingerary for my tastes - perhaps it needs a little longer to mature. It certainly looks very Christmassy on the plate and was a welcome addition to our plates of cheese and biscuits over the festive period.

Christmas cards
Christmas cards
Christmas cards My Christmas cards were universally admired and appreciated. I was suprised by how many compliments the spray painted ones were, even if it was the Snowman cross stitch ones which were the real hit.

Mincemeat This recipe was absolutely fantastic - I made mountains of mince pies with it, as well as a large mincemeat shortcake (which I forgot to photograph), and my only complaint was that I didn't make more of it! It was nice to have a fat-free mincemeat as it felt a tiny bit healthier and had a lovely fresh taste. I still have one jar left which I will be using to cheer us up at some point in February.

Thank you cards I've used a lot of my Snowman decoupage cards to write my thank you letters which has nade the chore a little less painless.

The one thing that I didn't get the chance to blog about was my Christmas Granola, which I made using a recipe from Nigella's Christmas book. It combined oats with almonds and pecans and honey and sugar and cinnamon and then some yummy cranberries were stirred in after baking. It smelled AMAZING and tasted fantastic - the only thing was that I had made so many other nice things for breakfast (namely a large stollen and then a large pannetone) that not much of it actually got eaten over the festive period (perhaps cereal is a tad healthy?). At least here is plenty left to enjoy now (and I even used some in a cookie recipe this week). I am definitely a convert to making granola now and don't think I'll ever go back to buying it in a shop as it was ridiculously simple to mix up the ingredients in a large bowl and then bake them, and the bonus is that you can include your favourite things (just remembering not to put the fruit in until afterwards).



As to next year - I will definitely be making my own mincemeat again, in a double quantity so I can give some away. I want to make my own cards again, but I think I will go for some papercraft next year, which means I probably need to start thinking about them NOW as we will need around 75 I think!

We still have quite a lot of Christmas food left, so I hope that the Twelth Night rule doesn't apply to that...and we will be eating the gingerbread house in a gingerbread plundering party on Sunday :)

On the eleventh day of Christmas (and twelfth)...I was reading

On the eleventh day of Christmas
I was back to work but I was determined not to let it affect my reading. I decided that one of my NY resolutions should be to make sure that I take my breaks and to spend at least one of them reading -that'll last, ooh about a week until things get really busy with term - and so I packed a book and took myself off to the staffroom at coffee break time. The book was Stoner by John Williams. When Thomas from My Porch came over to the UK last November, he brought books for the book bloggers that he was meeting up with. I wasn't able to go, but I still got a book and this was it. He chose it because of its university theme, since I work at a university and Thomas knew that I have often enjoyed campus novels. It was an excellent choice and I looked forward to the end of the day when I could finish reading it (because yes, life conspired against me to have a decent lunch break or a teabreak) - dinner was an hour late as I refused to put it down until I got to the end. It's a simple tale about the life of William Stoner, a man who becomes a university professor, and his failed marriage, but it is extremely elegantly told, and somehow even though the story itself isn't terribly surprising the book manages to be very gripping. Here's a link to Thomas' original review.

To take the taste of a day at work away, I made cookies to do something practical and cosy and domestic. And I was pleased to find that my Fortnum and Mason's Afternoon Tea book had arrived while I had been out at work, and after our belated dinner, I settled down to peruse it. A combination of a guide to the art of tea making and drinking and recipes of wonderful things to bake to accompany afternoon tea. This book would make an absolutely perfect gift for tea-drinking friends I think, and I have my eye on the sachertorte recipe (even though it needs six eggs!)

On the twelfth day of Christmas
My resolution to find reading time at work didn't go so well on the first day. It wasn't so much the pressure of work but more the inconvenience of things happening at the times when I would usually have breaks. When I mentioned this (in passing) to my manager, I was reminded of the importance of taking breaks, so I Really Have To Try To Amend My Ways. So I thought one idea might be to ensure that I have a Really Excellent Book with me. It was going to be hard to find a book to read on the back of Stoner but I had picked up my reservation for Girl in Translation at the library the other day, a book that I've been wanting to read for a while. This kept me gripped throughout coffee and lunch and it was just too bad that owing to another leak in the library I didn't get my teabreak....

Somewhat appropriately, I picked up Trisha Ashley's Twelve days of Christmas at the library yesterday and that is my in bed reading at the moment - it might be a little late to be embarking on a festive read, but I'm quite enjoying it.

I think I've done pretty well with my reading over the last twelve days of Christmas. I hope excellent reading material will continue to be had throughout 2011.

December

Joan mentioned that she'd been hoping for a December round up from me - so, somewhat belatedly since we are now into January, here it is!

Ending with FLU, the month began far more auspiciously with an early start to the festive season.
I delighted in seeing The Snowman for the third time, and did some book-shopping on the cheap with a good friend and fellow biblioblogger.
I was disturbed to find out that I look like a flailing spider when I swim in a session at Swim Therapy (which I hope improved my stroke)
We entertained family and friends with a wonderful advent tea where we all admired K's gingerrbread architecture.
I made mince pies for the first time (and they were gluten free too!)
We went to London and participated in tuba carols.
I was incredibly touched to be included in the Persephone Secret Santa!
We had a double-bill-ballet weekend.
I was left in charge of the library (well, it might have only been the Reader Services department) during the last week before Christmas and had to contend with snow, leaking roofs, clouds of dust, first aid incidents and people making stack requests using Stephen Fry's new library card.
We dashed through the snow on Christmas Day to visit many of my future in-laws.
We thought Matthew Bourne's Cinderella was FABULOUS.
And finally, I managed to do some proper reading which was just wonderful.
Until I got flu...

January will be a month of...
Being back to work (when this posts tomorrow night, I will have done the first day) (and it will be busy)
Working on Sundays
Starting to train properly for my 1ok swim next September
Planning my hen party
Working out how we will get to our wedding
Finding somewhere to make our wedding rings
Visiting a friend in London
Doing plenty of baking!

On the ninth (and tenth) day of Christmas I was reading...

On the ninth day of Christmas...

My flu was starting to go. Unfortunately K has now come down with a cold (definitely not flu at least), so I started to get extremely bored - partly because I was still not well enough to really do anything, but also because there wasn't anyone to not do anything with! I did some cleaning, I tidied out my cross stitch box, I made soup, I did some washing...and finally I sat down to read.

I started with The mystery of Mrs Blencarrow by Mrs Oliphant, which was my Persephone Secret Santa gift. I quite enjoyed it, although I may not have still had my reading mojo on and it wasn't one of my favourite Persephone books - the story was too obvious and perhaps not well developed enough. It has persuaded me that I really should pick up some of her Chronicles of Carlingford which I have lurking on my Virago Modern Classic pile - they have been languishing because they are so meaty, but I am wondering if she has more success as a saga writer than a novella writer. I think the interesting element of Mrs Blencarrow is not necessarily the plot, or even the domestic settings, but the moral issues which it covers which would have been quite controversial in the Victorian period when it was written (I can't really say more without providing a massive spoiler!) I have yet to see any people blogging about Mrs Blencarrow so I will be interested to see what people say!

I then got out my first VMC of the year, Bid me to live, in order to get on with my first New Year's resolution. I've even blogged about it on my VVV blog!

On the tenth day of Christmas
I had rather run out of Christmas books, so it was back to the TBR pile. I am in the middle of reading Goldengrove unleaving by Jill Paton Walsh which is set in Cornwall and a nice gentle read.

It is the last day of the holidays, so I made myself get up at 8am so that 6.35 am is not TOO much of a shock tomorrow (and yes, I know it will be). I managed to go for a swim, and met up with one of my friends, and that is pretty much it, although I have done a last bit of baking. I am actually quite looking forward to going back to work as the second half of the holidays has been such a disappointment with having been ill. It's going to be a hard term as the Spring term is always our busiest and I will be working Sundays from 16th. But I have lots to look forward to, and we need to get on and plan a break for my birthday!

Here is the baking that I did today, using up a slightly past-it orange, some remnants of coca to make these chocolate hearts sandwiched together with orange buttercream:


And some mincemeat puffs - using my very own danish pastry (more on this later):
I'm just about to go and put a pudding in the oven - it's a cross between eve's pudding, bakewell tart and mince pie with some cranberries thrown in for good measure (again, more on that later too!)

(PS: It was observed that it was a shame that I didn't do a December round up - I want to review my Christmas preparations at some point this week, and I might indeed do a round-up too, although there are two further days of Christmas left to post on!).

On the eight day of Christmas.... (and a Happy New Year!)

On the eighth day of Christmas
I still wasn't reading very much, but I am starting to feel a bit betterfrom the flu (and better enough to feel spectacularly grumpy that we can't do our usual trip to the outdoor pool at Hampton to start the New Year) and have been dipping into some short stories by Mrs Horne De Vaizey, entitled The ignorance of Sybilla which is one of the latest Greyladies titles. I have been having lots of cuddles with Bernard, my Christmas bear from K:


I still have various things to wrap up from 2010, a month of December post and my November/December reading. But they join the other things that I want to blog about in the next couple of weeks - a couple of great books that I recieved review copies of, pictures of baking over the holiday period.

I am really looking forward to 2011 - mainly to August 2nd when I will be getting married and August 13th when I will be celebrating my marriage with friends and family. But I will also be doing a 10K swim (assuming that the lack of swim today doesn't bode badly for that!), and K will be doing Le Tour D'Etape (a stage of the Tour de France open to non professional riders). And we may be buying a house...

I don't have too many bookish resolutions - I do resolve to read at least 1 Virago Modern Classic a week as I have really fallen behind with those of late. I also resolve not to have an out of hand TBR pile. I'd love to continue with all of the Cornish reading that I did in late winter/early Spring last year, as inspired by the wonderful Fleur Fisher; and I hope that I won't be relying quite so much on reading Babysitters Club books next year! And we have Persephone Reading Weekend to look forward to at the end of February.

Happy New Year to you all!