Christmas spices in "ordinary" food?

[MaryMotherOfCheeses]

I have a cupboard full of recently acquired spices.

Can you give me any top suggestions for regular ordinary use? And not curries.

eg a friend of mine recently made cheese on toast with cumin seeds over the top. Gorgeous!

I have:
Cumin seeds
Coriander seeds
Juniper berries
More nutmeg and ground cinnamon than the proverbial stick can cope with
Fennel
Cloves

Can you chuck 'em in cottage pie????

try this site

That's interesting in that ou can search by ingredient, and there's a lot of recipes.

I was wondering more about just livening up ordinary stuff though.

I've never tried nutmeg in mashed spuds, people seem to do that a lot, yes?

Fennel is absolutely delicious with sausages/pork. Smear it over a joint before roasting it. Or I do a delicious sausage and fennel pasta I'll find a link to and post here.

Cloves always liven up mince/stews.

Cinnamon is excellent with butternut/pumpkin. roasted, steamed, boiled or in soup,.

last post

nutmeg in rice pudding

cinnamon in apple crumble

Juniper is great with roast pork, I would smash up a few berries and mix them into a marinade for pork.

Cinnamon is commonly used in baking so you'll get through that easily if you make a few cakes and cookies, although I use Delia's cottage pie recipe which calls for cinnamon too. Or cinnamon toast... hot buttered toast onto which you sprinkle a mixture of ground cinnamon and caster sugar and flash back under the grill. OK, not exactly health food but yum.

I have a suspicion Nigella's pea risotto from How To Eat uses nutmeg.

Also if you make bread, Jamie Oliver has a fab recipe for a sort of middle eastern flatbread that has crushed cumin and coriander seeds mixed into the dough. In fact, I've found it

Oh, and I roast cubes of butternut squash that I've tossed in olive oil, dried chilli flakes and crushed fennel seeds (although DH hates it because he doesn't like aniseed flavours )