a few days onward

Picking up last post's thread, here is my way of celebrating Christmas...

Operation Desert Kitchen Storm
I cooked an okay amount of desserts in exchange for a full English-style Christmas dinner (with a good measure of cat-stroking thrown in, lucky me.) Thickly-crumbled apple crumble and double chocolate cookies came out of a borrowed oven. Given the oven works well, they are some of the things that are almost always guaranteed to come out of the oven alright without having one to scale and measure every single ingredient to the 1/nth.
The cherry on the cooking cake was the Boxing Day culinary insomnia: waking up at 3AM without knowing why or how, before deciding that there must be better ways of killing time and going back to bed than watching TV or doing something equally mind-numbing. I then proceeded to make a pot of stew which took three hours to cook, before successfully tumbling into bed smelling like lamb stew and waking up at a respectable time.

TV ahoy
Karaoke for the musically ungifted, BBC documentaries and all things illegally possible without the possession of a TV licence. A spillover bonus of the Christmas dinner. Nice.

Glory to God in the high-street
Went to a bookshop to some books, some of them quite nice. Followed by book buying, and quite possibly book returning. Also went to this faux-village high street shopping site (my first time!) for a spot of retail exasperation, with shoppers being mildly rude and sale items strewn on the muddied floor. Yet still this semi-dedicated consuming-worshipper found a number of useful, visually pleasing and fairly priced items.
Ate at Villandry, in my Great Portland Street days a restaurant with nice food and posh aspiration, which turned out to be vile. You see, I had game pie, which turned out to be stew garnished with a circular disk of puff pastry. Wrong.

Anyway, that aside, the novelty of Christmas holiday is wearing off. I'm keen for things to swing back into normal gear.