Starting a blog just before Christmas is quite possibly a very dumb thing to do. That is, of course, provided you wanted to actually keep it somewhat up to date... I am not so stupid as to apply such a draconian law to ME.

I have been in such a cooking/baking phase lately. Yes, of course it's cause it's the holidays! And I don't hear anyone complaining. I totally believe that during this festive time, you should not be eating proper meals. Unless you have something booked - like tonight M and I are going out to dinner with a group of friends. I should rephrase that. We are going out with a group of parents whose children go to the same school as ours. Looking forward to it though cause some are actually people we like to socialize with.

But, as I was saying before about meals... there should be no proper meals. Last night M and I had Nigella's cocktail sauages for our dinner. And damn they were good. I think it's the toasted sesame oil and soy sauce combo that I love. And if you nearly overcook them, it's heavenly - they go all sticky and gooey. Yum. That's a meal, right?

Then I boiled a ham. This makes me feel so English. (Which I think I have mentioned I'm NOT.) But boiling meat seems so wrong, something only a country that is known for it's bad cooking (but obsessed with celebrity chefs) would do. However, if you boil a supermarket ham (known over here as gammon... whatever) it's just the right thing to do for sandwich meat. I however couldn't put it in bread. It would get lost! I just slather it with Coleman's (if you are a FB friend of mine, you will know that I am slightly taken with Coleman's) which is proper hot English mustard. It's the same kind of hot as horseradish sauce. Not like chillies, which I can't really take the heat of. (Wimp, I hear you say?) But with mustard and horseradish, I love it so hot that my top lip sweats. (I know I haven't painted the prettiest of pictures for you, but it's true. Try it yourself!)

The baking goods I did were: blueberry muffins, chocolate chip cookie bars, brownies, flapjacks (the English sort, I know of no equivalent in the states), and a blueberry pie. For lunch today I finished off the brownies. (Don't look at me like that, there were only four left.) (Okay, five.)