Thread 19 - TalkLair: "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long"

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 18)

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...

In the TalkLair, the fairy lights are festooned on the mantlepiece, the tree is twinkling with baubles, the mince pies are in the oven, the MN legendary chicken is ready to feed the hordes. The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

9 lb of rib beef for us, I have out, losing its chill. I made pigs in blankets, I was worried that I'd be short of bacon, but it turns out that pound of streaky does a pound and a half of fat chipolatas. (Short ones from the butcher, as thick as normal sausages).

Hooliganette has made gingerbread.

Merry Christmas to all, with my favourite carol of all time - Riu riu chiu, performed to perfection by a Lithuanian boys' choir.

Merry Christmas threadsters!

🎄

I'm moreover the Bah, humbug! persuasion, but Merry Christmas, all of you.

Merry Christmas you lovely people!

Merry Christmas and - appropriately on the centenary of the first Winnie the Pooh story - Ancient Bears to one and all.

And for entertainment value, the BBC reports: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czdgz84dn35o

US authorities have discovered more than a million more documents potentially related to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein that they plan to release in the coming days and weeks, officials say.

So (provided that nobody gives us a book for Christmas) that should keep us occupied for the rest of our lives.

Thanks for the reminder of Ancient Bears!

Happy Christmas to all.

Epstein must have had a whole staff devoted to generating and retaining blackmail fodder - which suggests he was seeking out influencers to add to his stable.

"More of a..." blooming autocarrot!

Merry Christmas! I've been cleaning dog puke off the rug in the front room. One patch was mm from some of the presents.

Gaaah!

Merry Christmas all.

It's lovely to wake up at home and not have to think about going anywhere. I'll start the pizza dough in a couple of hours, assemble the toppings and make coleslaw. Looking forward to this.

Have a good one, whatever you're doing!

I'm not a fan of Christmas food, so this evening we had Madhur Jaffrey's "spicy baked chicken" + "dry potatoes with ginger & garlic", both from a 1982 cookbook based on her TV series. No actual veg, as I had somehow failed to buy anything apart from endives, which wouldn't really work! It was very delicious and there's only enough left over for one person's lunch ... I fear it won't be mine. 😞

I did a rib of beef, with onion and anchovy gravy. Mashed turnip and carrots with butter and ground black pepper, garlic & thyme roast potatoes and parsnips and sprouts and cauliflower in cheese sauce.

It went down well. Luckily for me, my wife went back to bed afterwards, allowing me the privilege of doing the sodding washing up, as well as the entire dinner.

Arf! I think we should swap partners, @SinnerBoy, and see if they survived.

I've probably got the Madhur Jaffrey's dry potatoes with ginger & garlic in the yellowing pages of her book. In fact I'm sure I've made it in the past, and similar ones with black mustard seeds. Must get back into that again! I have a cast-iron kadai that I bought in India for a few rupees when young and foolish, and lugged it like a loon back to the UK in hand-luggage, and it weighs an absolute ton.

@moto748e Ha! My original copy fell apart many years ago, but I bought a copy for my dad, who was a keen "exotic" cook, in about 1985 and he died in 1986. When my mother was sectioned, I cleared the house and there it was, in pristine condition!

By the way ... this is only mildly interesting, but I happened to hear a clip from Chuckie-the-king's Christmas message and he sounds as though someone has been giving him lessons in sounding not quite so much as though he was born in about 1920. This is probably quite a good thing.

We had baked Camembert (fake in my case), followed by root vegetable pie, with more roast veg to accompany it, and sprouts fried with some fermented¹ cranberries. Then a pause to watch The Nutcracker until we had enough room for the cheesecake.

¹ Salt fermented, like sauerkraut; not sugar fermented like wine.

I've got that Madhur Jaffrey book too. It was a gift when I left home in 1980 and it's been well used. Plenty of stained pages and the back cover is scorched from when someone left it on top of the grill.

I regularly make small amount of the garam masala recipe, which is excellent.

Just about recovered from Christmas Day hosting and the backlog of washing up. And we don't have too many leftovers by today, having had almost everything again on Boxing Day. So we might actually have to venture to a supermarket today!

We had bought (amongst other MN picky bits) a large tub of mini Twiglets, for nibbling purposes for the guests, forgot to put them out so DH opened them on Boxing Day for his own snacking pleasure. DD2 hates Marmite but decided to try a small piece of Twiglet... half an hour of crunching later, she wailed "Help me! I don't like these, why am I still eating them?? Why do we have these in the house? Please take them away from me!"

Twiglets do that. It's the gjetost effect: you take a bite, can't believe anything that awful counts as 'food' so take another bite to check you aren't missing something; the second bite isn't ant quite as mad as the memory so you get a 'rebound' effect and think maybe you do actually like it: so you take a third bite that lands you back at the start of the cycle.

They're vile.

How much Umami and Crunch do you want in this new snack, boss?

YES

I used to like Twiglets but don't any more. We missed them when we lived abroad for a few years so had quite a few when we got back, but over did it. Despite being told this, Mr Bear's mum kept buying them every time we visited her, 'because I know you like them'. It went on for about ten years before she finally got it but our lives are now Twiglet-free.

I love Marmite and used to love Twiglets but haven't had them for years. I'm now tempted to pop out to the shops ...