Thread 11 - TalkLair: “The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles.”

[Kucinghitam]

Whoops, missed the filling up of the previous thread! (thread 10).

Although the nights are gradually drawing in, the new lair of JTT escapees is all cosy and homey inside. The hearth is glowing, the walls covered in dubious artwork, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors (and assorted pets curled up on them).

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

Anyway, Merry Christmas, everybody!

... Orthodox Christmas, we have some Baltic Russians, Ukrainians, a Bulgarian and at least one Romanian who goes by the old calendar. They all get on well, if anyone is wondering.

It's also Christmas in Foula, an island in the Shetlands, the only place in Britain to keep the old calendar.

I love that you had to have a lie down after a bacon and onion roly-poly pudding! Now that's what I call a recommendation (1)!

7:36 a.m. here and I'm just awake. The promised snowstorm has arrived. This is what I saw from my bedroom window - maybe 2-3 inches - and it's still snowing hard.

Yes, that was probably me. I love food and love cooking. The bacon rolypoly thing was interesting and there's a story.

I'd been reading 'Lifting the Latch' by Sheila Stewart which tells the life story of Mont Abbott, who spent almost his entire life in Enstone, an Oxfordshire village, and who worked the land in one form or another from the age of seven until he was about 80. He was a natural raconteur and when Sheila Stewart heard of him and they met, he agreed to recorded meetings where he talked about his life, starting in the early 1900s, and she then created a book using his words. It's a fascinating story.

Mont came from a poor family who often struggled to make ends meet and rolypoly puddings were on the table nearly every day, usually filled with jam but, when money was short, just the pudding with no filling. I was very curious about them and asked a few local people if they knew of them. It turned out that two of the men I asked had grandmothers who were in service and part of the job was to make bacon and onion rolypoly for the nursery. One of them said wistfully, 'My gran made a bacon and onion rolypoly that was to die for. To die, for it was' which kicked off a months-long rolypoly making session. I kept making them until they were right, finally finding an intensely smoked bacon I thought should match the the flavour of the flitch of bacon hanging in the chimney of those fortunate households who kept a pig. The puddings are a winter treat and we don't have as many these days, but I do love them.

Lovely looking snow, Brit!

Sadly gaining weight comes all too naturally to me.

In todays news from the leafy suburbs: I was surprised to look out of the kitchen window a while ago to see that one of the local foxes (who do favour my garden as a regular lounging spot) seems to have brought a packed lunch (in the form of a bag of scraps from someone’s food waste caddy, not mine as the bag was wrong). I’ve found bags and bits of foil before but this is the first time I’ve seen a fox happily eating the lunch they’ve brought.

Also, I now have serious snow envy! I miss snow.

I have bacon and onion roly-poly pudding envy and would love to know how to make it.

We will be hunkering down indoors today and DH will decide at the end of the day whether to snowblower then or leave it until the morning. Normally the snowploughs are out by now and the street would be clear, but apparently this is very dry snow and they'll wait until it stops before ploughing. If it's wet snow they get to it quicker because if the temperature drops it turns to ice and then the roads get dangerous. Main roads and the interstate were all salted in advance of the snow.

Snow is one thing the system knows how to deal with here!

Whereas we have no clue. At least now that snow is more occasional there’s kind of an excuse for it but until recently it snowed every year and every year it took us by surprise.

@Britinme the recipe I used is based on this one, the difference being that I use far more bacon, don't cut all the fat off, add some chopped parsley and wrap the pudding in baking paper rather than muslin. Here we use Atora suet, which may not be available there, but if you can find tallow it's the same thing. Suet has a high melting point and when it melts it leaves behind little gaps in the dough and makes it very light.

https://www.aglugofoil.com/2016/03/bacon-and-onion-roly-poly-pudding.html

We will be hunkering down indoors today

That brings lovely images! I wish we'd had some snow rather than the endless rain. Snow's troublesome stuff but at least it looks nice.

Quite so. That looks so pretty Brit.

When miniPSD was about 9 we had two consecutive winters with a lot of snow, so we got to go to the park with the sledge that I'd bought when he was 1 and had never used. Our park has the perfect slope for sledging and it was glorious that he could have a go.

I grew up in Yorkshire but we only used our sledge once, and the memory of what fun it was, lasted a long time.

Snow is now up to at least six inches judging by what's on top of the car, and it's still snowing. We may get up to 10". It's a bit of a relief to see it, though clearing it is a PITA. Climate change has made stuff warmer around here. When I first came over nearly 22 years ago the winters were definitely colder, with temps down regularly to -10F (no idea what that is in C, sorry, but 32F is the same as 0C). It's been a couple of years at least since it's dropped below 0F, and the lack of deep cold in the winter means the ticks are more likely to survive, and they batten on to moose calves and kill them slowly by making them anaemic. This is the first real snow this winter, and in the past we would normally be getting snow starting in November.

@Vegemiteandhoneyontoast - thank you for the recipe. Would vegetarian suet work do you think? I can get hold of that.

Actually my main problem with that recipe would be getting hold of the bacon. Bacon here is never back bacon, always belly and very fatty. We can get Canadian bacon, which is more like ham and has no fat. Maybe ham would work? I could imagine leeks in it too.

Doing a search on tallow and smoked bacon in the US, you can find it online so maybe that would be the way to go. Maybe there's a small smokery near you? From what I've seen there are many small producers in the US these days and they make some fabulous looking stuff.

Never tried vegetarian suet but have found that products like that usually don't live up to the real thing.

Vegetarian suet will work fine for a suet pudding. And leek is a traditional suet pudding ingredient (although not in a bacon rolypoly).

Belfast lough is wide but for the most part very shallow, so anything larger than a dingy is confined to a narrow dredged lane. Even there the larger cruise ships have only 3 feet of clearance beneath the hull, so they cannot deviate from their course at all.

We've had a clear, bright day today but with a constant chorus of foghorns. So I wandered down to have a look, and found this. Perfect visibility everywhere except 1 very solid, defined fog bank sitting exactly along the shipping channel.

Stunning snow, stunning lough view! Thank you for those.

Vegetarian suet is different to distinguish from meat based ones. I've used both in the past to make dumplings and both worked as well as each other. God I love a suet dumpling. And suet pudding. I love steak and kidney but years ago on my birthday we went to Terre a Terre in Brighton for dinner. It's vegetarian and sort of high end. I had a mushroom and sherry gravy suet pudding. It remains one of the best meals I've had.

I did end up having mango sorbet for breakfast and I'll probably do it tomorrow as well. I've never been good at breakfast and sorbet is a light way to get some food into me to start the day. Within an hour or so I can eat something richer so I'm going to be sorbet breakfast woman for the foreseeable.

Anyway! Something that felt almost miraculous today. On Thursday I get to Morrison's by car and use a scooter around the store. Today I walk there and back and use only a trolley to lean on in the store and because a basket is going to be harder to carry. It's a five minute walk each way from my flat. I didn't do a big shop. It took me an hour, but that was the secret of my success. I went at a really slow pace and didn't allow that to dishearten me. I came back absolutely knackered but chuffed as anything. After about an hour I did a bit of washing up from last night. Made myself a scrambled egg and then washed up again. As an aside I was watching Arsenal v Liverpool in the FA Cup third round. Both times that I was in the act of washing up Liverpool scored. I believe that my washing up was the secret to their success!

All of this has made me feel more positive about the next round of chemo in two weeks. I know that it will be awful again for nearly a week and then it will improve. I can deal with that.

I have a slight worry that maybe it's not having the pump on has aided the recovery but I'm hoping that's not the case. If it is I'll just have to deal with that.

It's heartening to hear of your improvement, Mouse. I hope you enjoyed your mango sorbet, did you make it yourself?

Just before I came away, my daughter asked for some for her friend's sleep over, but they had to slum it with raspberry sorbet (Sainsbury's) and slices of mango. No whingeing involved, surprisingly!

Snow has finally stopped and judging by what's sitting on the top of DH's pickup truck it's about 10". He's making noises about going out there tonight to start clearing but more likely to wait until tomorrow.

So DH went out to start snow clearing- reckons about a foot of fluffy white stuff - and got halfway across the front of the driveway before the snowblower sucked up the Sunday paper the paper boy had seen fit to throw onto the driveway this morning, where it was promptly covered by the rest of the snowstorm. One jammed snowblower and a lot of swearing later, he's managed to clear the front of it so I can get out tomorrow, assuming the roads are fit to drive on. Won't be driving far though - my friend and I might just have lunch and go to a movie or to a couple of thrift stores (our favourite activity apart from art galleries and museums).

So DH went out to start snow clearing- reckons about a foot of fluffy white stuff - and got halfway across the front of the driveway before the snowblower sucked up the Sunday paper the paper boy had seen fit to throw onto the driveway this morning, where it was promptly covered by the rest of the snowstorm.

I must confess that I've just had a good giggle at picturing your DH's (and snowblower's) sudden clogged-up misfortune, complete with imagined schlurp noise @Britinme

Me too, sorry @Britinme

It's just started snowing here and I am full of childish excitement!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-67892869

Lost Doggo found, happy story