Dec 21 2008
Christmas party reflections
Last night we had a grand Christmas party. We had about 20-odd people in the end, though a few notable exceptions. I’m glaring at you, green jumper boy.
As with all things that happen at the moment, the focus of the preparations was the food. We had a significant list of recipes that we wanted to tick off, and we did fairly well. The only major loss was the mincemeat parcels, but we compensated for that in another way.
Matthew was really kind and agreed to help us out for the preparation work. He came round in the middle of the afternoon and worked hard to bring everything together. It certainly wouldn’t have been possible without his input. If you were there and had any of the mince pies, apple pies or the mulled wine you can thank Mat for them. I don’t know what I will do to repay him, but he certainly deserves our heartfelt thanks.
A few months ago Kirsten emailed me to ask for a cranberry bread recipe to pass to her mother. Until last night I didn’t know how it had worked out, so I thought I would try my hand at a loaf with cranberies in it, because they’re quite the Christmas fruit. I used two of the recipes from Richard Bertinet’s Dough, making something suitably Christmas-party flavoured. I removed the nuts from the Pecan and Cranberry Loaves, and moulded them like Poppy Seed Stars. I didn’t have any proper dried cranberries, but I used the same weight of “craisins”, which is a cranberry-heavy dried fruit mix. The result was very tasty… almost like eating bread that had jam already spread on it.
The mince pies that Matthew made (from a recipe in Nigella Lawson’s Feast, so it doesn’t count towards the challenge) were made with cranberry mincemeat supplied by Nick. I’ve a suspicion that the recipe he used for that mincemeat also came via Nigella Lawson too. There’s something terribly incestuous about it all.
I’m very happy that so many people brought a decoration for the tree. We’ve got wire-basket stars and baubles now, and gingerbread trees with coloured-sugar windows, and jangly-legged snowmen and even a festive red double helix. On top of that we’ve inherited several bottles of wine and many packets of crisps, not to mention all the leftovers of pies, popcorn, olives and chocolate. We even have a 1.5 litre bottle of white wine which is probably too big to be chilled in the fridge.
Thanks to everyone who came, and especially to everyone who helped out in some way or another. You’re all great.