Ride ’em In

So with Christmas over and the New Year beckoning, it must be time for the annual roundup. Of course, creeping senility means that my memories of this year go all the way back to…oh, last week some time. With that in fragile mind, I’ll begin with Christmas and see if anything less recent hoves into mind.

We had a fairly sedate Christmas this year. No panics, no arguments, no over-indulgence, no leftovers (apart from some salmon from Christmas Eve) and no excesses*.

*chocolate doesn’t count

I won’t pretend that we didn’t eat well, if you read this blog, you will know that I like to cook and this year was no exception. DD and I spent half a day manufacturing 110 pierogi, mostly with the traditional sauerkraut and wild mushroom filling, but also some with potato and cheese and a few with jam to use up the surplus dough. Some went to my  family for Wigilia (Christmas Eve), but we scoffed the rest and jolly nice they were too. We also had a baking day and made our specialities: DD’s much-requested Piernik (Gingerbread) Village and my Orange and Almond Cake, both of which were the best yet. We had a duck crown for Christmas Day and there were no leftovers apart from a little of the cherry sauce. Neither were there any leftovers from the post-Boxing Day individual Fillet of Beef Wellingtons (much to DH’s chagrin, as he rather hoped that DD wouldn’t manage a whole one).

I seem to have made rather a lot of pastry this year, what with the pierogi and Wellingtons and yesterday finally managing to get around to making mince pies loosely using an 1861 mincemeat recipe* containing meat (mine had apricots and cranberries and less sugar). They are really very nice and you can’t taste that they contain meat, although they are probably more filling and robust as a result. I think that I will try the Medieval recipe at some point. Christmas aside, I made Tudor peascods earlier this year and have been churning out shortcrust for pies, quiches and whatnot throughout the year.

Food aside, or perhaps not, among the lovely things I received for Christmas was The Vintage Tea Party Book and the rather nice heart shaped cake stand showing off my mince pies above. Tea has been something of a theme this year, with my Good and Evil Twins treating me to some lovely china for my birthday and DD enthusiastically churning out cherry scones to go with the Keemun.

That’s not all she’s been making and I was gratified that this year she has taken to crafting like a chip off the block. Her lovely rag dolls have been for sale at Medieval Fayres (and what a lovely sunny year’s trading we had) and in my online shop (she does commissions, btw) and she has recently started to crochet as well, so I have high hopes that the trading tables will have lots of new items for sale next season. As for me, I haven’t made as much progress developing my ideas as I’d like and several things on the drawing board haven’t made it into production yet, so I must strive to do better next year. I will shortly have some Lenormand-sized and themed bags and I have some nice designs lined up, but if there are any motifs you’d like to see on these, do let me know.

Knitting is more my thing and after a bit of a hiatus, I have resumed various projects and even managed to finish a few things, though the dog did not get his jumper in time for Christmas, which brings me rather neatly to the major event of this year…Dexter!

In July, we rescued this very sweet and handsome (when he’s not looking extremely silly) but rather scaredy dog:

As you can see, he’s made himself right at home:

 and we love him 🙂

I’m sure that my year was filled with many more things worthy of mention and these are just a few of the memories that sauntered into mind while writing this post. Overall, I feel it’s been a good year on many fronts (I’ve just recalled the lovely feedback I received after speaking at Witchfest last month) and I trust that next year will be as good if not better. I hope that your 2013 has left you with happy memories and that 2014 brings you joy.

Happy New Year! (in advance) 🙂

* Update: The mince pie website is no longer there, but you can still access the info via the Wayback Machine Snapshop here