A Kitchen Diary of sorts with rather a lot of chit chat and some exceptionally useful recipes. Photos and artwork by Anna Vaught (me), Giles Turnbull and the generous people at Flickr who make their work available through creative commons. They are thanked individually throughout the blog.

Tuesday, 15 December 2009

Susie's "mulled wine and a mince pie"


Are you familiar with that bit in The Wind in the Willows when Rat itemises the lovely range of food he has in his picnic basket -- in response to Mole's innocent enquiry as to what was in it? Rat's description is told all in one sentence. I was reminded of this when I popped round, on Sunday, to the house of the Susie. "I'm not doing much", she'd said, or something like that. BUT here, in addition to a treasure hunt for children and a chocolate Santa on the way out, was a table of plenty. Here is what was on it:

mulledwinemincepieswelshcakes...no, I cannot keep this up as I'll alienate my readers. So, dates, stuffed with marzipan and studded with silver balls in a row (lovely, this one), crackers, bread, pork liver pate, a good hot tomato salsa, tortilla chips, twiglets, little sausage rolls, hummus, cheese straws (the nice twisty ones), celery, carrots and cucumber, baguettes a plenty plus Cheddar, Brie, smoked Applewood, and Stilton. Olives - plain and also stufed with feta and herbs. Also, I noticed, a big dish of little stick glazed sausages. To one side, hefty mugs of all kinds of tea for those not mulling.

Just a mince pie, then. Christmas has begun.

Thanks to Adactio at Flickr for the mince pie. Above, this is the snow of earlier this year. Note hat, American readers. x

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