Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Three days before Christmas and I am realising that if any of 2011 remains unblogged-about after today, it will probably remain so for evermore.  So I'll fly back a couple of months and give you a quick scattershot tour of our latest trip to the UK. To start with, our flight was cancelled and we had to come home and try again the next day.  Fortunately Toby regarded DFW Airport as a super-huge playground filled with nice people who smiled at him.  We just had to prevent him from throwing himself under luggage carts. Toby at the airport Toby slept like the proverbial baby on the aeroplane, but once we arrived he started sleeping like a real baby - that is, up and screaming half the night.  Our friends Naomi and Steve suffered through one night with us, although we were told they had a giggle at us desperately intoning, "You are feeling sleeee-py", in harmony, at 2 am.  With very little effect.  Our one consolation was that their baby didn't wake up ...

You will probably remember me blogging about Granbury and Dinosaur Valley State Park before - it's a favourite place of ours to take family when they come to visit, or just to hang out ourselves.  Normally we would just do a day trip down there, but this time we decided to make it a weekend. Maddy, Graham and Toby in Granbury Granbury town square was all dressed up for Christmas, with cowboy-hatted Christmas trees and wreaths in every window.  Anthony and Maddy picked up some Texas souvenirs in the stores and we ate lunch in our favourite 50's-themed diner, Rinky-Tinks, with a bit of Elvis on the juke box. In Rinky-Tinks Venturing outside the square for a change, we strolled along a pleasant street and found a park.  Standing in a playground for the afternoon would not previously have been high on our list of weekend-away activities, but having a one-year-old kinda changes your perspective on these things.  Toby discovered slides for the first time an...

OK, I have to confess.  This will be a very boring Thanksgiving story.  Everything went right and it was a lovely day.  For an interesting story you need a few things going wrong.  I heard a couple of interesting stories this year - like the one about mis-measuring bourbon to go in the stuffing.  Apparently if you put far too much in, all the alcohol doesn't boil off.  Or the one about going to cook dinner at an Asian friend's house, and discovering at the last minute that she doesn't have any baking trays, and it's quite difficult to roast a turkey in a wok.  But as I said, we didn't have so much as a lumpy gravy panic. Where's my food??? We're working on it, baby! So what do you want to know?  Well, it was my first Thanksgiving dinner cooked on American soil.  Back when I was free and single and shared a house with lots of people who liked to eat, I got into the habit of celebrating the American feast for a few years, until the...