Martha's Marvellous Munchies

I promised my grandparents some house photos months ago (are you sensing a certain theme here?) but kept thinking, "I'll take some when that bit's organised" or "when it's tidy" or "when we've got those shelves up".  Finally yesterday I decided it was about as good as it's going to get. So: pretty standard front view.  Useful garage for stashing stuff in (and Graham's just got a chin-up bar and dartboard in there) and huge driveway. Welcome!  I think... Not sure what that expression's about! The hallway leads through to the living room on your right... ...which is nice and long, so we've partitioned off a toy section, which is not normally so tidy... ...and also off the hallway is the kitchen to your left.  The floor and counters have the curious property of really not showing dirt, which is useful to an extent, but quite disconcerting as well.  I always feel like I'm cleaning blind. Looking ...

I know, I know.  Waaay too late really.  But you want to know what I was doing when I wasn't writing Advent blogs, don't you?  We had an Advent candle on the dinner table every night, and said a prayer together (which after ten days Toby could recite along with us; we were quite impressed).  Also Toby had an Advent calendar.  Yay, chocolate!  We paid a visit to a Christmas fair in Matlock, about 45 minutes north of here.  Lots of handmade stuff to buy, and Toby got his first ride on a roundabout.  He rang that train bell all the way round!  We put our Christmas lights up, and had many evening walks around the village admiring other people's.  This is Findern village church looking very atmospheric.  We made and decorated a Christmas cake.  I kept things simple and used coloured fondant and cookie cutters, which was dead easy and meant Toby could help.  We made gingerbread cookies with the same cutters...

I had a birthday recently, and my parents' present this year was a couple of cookbooks to add to my collection.  They are both collections of vegetarian recipes, and manage to incorporate things I would actually cook, which are also slightly different to what I cook all the time.  Cottage pie?  Sure.  Indian spiced vegetarian cottage pie?  Now that sounds interesting. So the other day I was feeling adventurous, and came across a recipe for potato pancakes with spiced beetroot in the Accidental Vegetarian .  Is it me, or has beetroot become fashionable all of a sudden?  I can't remember when I last ate beetroot, never mind cooked with it.  In my head it was firmly tucked away with other weird muddy knobbly vegetables like celeriac and artichokes, that you've vaguely heard of but wouldn't have a clue what to do with.  And then suddenly you pick up a supermarket magazine and the cover story is something like, 10 best things to do with be...

Some months ago I asked for blog post suggestions, and my friend Claire wondered if I'd write about recipes for toddlers.  It's been in the back of my mind since then, and I thought I'd better get on with it before her little boy ceases to be a toddler!  These are not so much recipes as suggestions, though, since once we got past the pureed veg stage, Toby pretty much ate some version of what we ate. Look at that beautifully healthy plate of food!  (Did he eat any of it?  I forget.) So, the most important thing: GET AN ICE CUBE TRAY!  Or rather, several.  With ice cube trays, ziplock bags and a microwave, you can produce entire toddler meals in thirty seconds flat, and this will probably save your life.  Believe me, there is hardly anything you can't freeze in an ice cube tray.  Start with the aforementioned pureed veg, then move on to pureed meals, then pretty much anything that doesn't have large chunks in.  Bolognaise (spaghetti) ...

And a happy new year! Toby as a snowflake for his first nativity play, refusing to pull any kind of sensible face! Or Happy Twelfth Night, or Happy Epiphany, if Christmas and New Year seem like an aeon ago already.  Here, January 6th coincided nicely with Graham going back to work and Toby going back to preschool.  At least, I thought it did until I turned up at the village hall to find no one else there, and discovered I had missed a letter saying there was an inset day today.  Once I'd got over my initial panic that maybe he didn't start till next Monday, it was actually quite nice to have him around for an extra day.  He had to come to the doctor's with me, but he thought that was fantastic because there's a train set in the waiting room, and I was only getting a flu jab so it didn't take long. I'm really glad so many of you enjoyed the Advent postings!  Your appreciative comments certainly kept me going.  I'm going to tell you now, though:...