Little words of wisdom

A sigh of relief...

Well, that's the Christmas puddings made ~ later than I usually make them, but done nevertheless.  I like to get them made late October/early November, really, but wasn't going to bother at all this year.  

This is the recipe I use every year, and have done for absolutely ages now!  I found the original recipe many years ago in an old cookery book but over the years since then I've made various alterations to make a pudding that my family all enjoy ~ well, except for my son as he doesn't like any fruit puddings!

12 oz/340g sultanas
12 oz/340g raisins
6 oz/170g glace cherries, halved or quartered
8 oz/227g finely chopped mixed candied peel
8 oz/227g plain flour
1 level teaspoon ground ginger
1 level teaspoon mixed spice
1 level teaspoon nutmeg ~ freshly grated if possible
1 lb/454g soft brown sugar
8 oz/227g breadcrumbs
10 oz/284g shredded suet ~ beef or vegetable, whichever you prefer
6 eggs
5 fl oz/142ml barley wine
5 fl/142ml oz brandy
grated rind and juice of 1 orange
1/2 pint/284ml milk (approximately)

Grease whatever size of pudding basins you would like your finished Christmas puddings to be ~ this recipe will make enough to fill four 1 pint pudding basins, each one of which will give about six servings. 

Sift the flour and spices into a very large mixing bowl ~ I usually use a preserving pan but couldn't be bothered to rummage around in the kitchen cupboard this year! Stir in the sugar, breadcrumbs, suet... 

...and then add the dried fruit and grated orange rind (I almost forgot to add the orange rind 😲 ). 

Beat the eggs and add to them the barley wine, brandy and orange juice. 

Stir this into the dry ingredients and mix well, adding enough milk to give the mixture a soft dropping consistency.

Put the mixture into your well greased pudding basins and cover each one with a doubled-up sheet of greaseproof paper, with a pleat in the centre to allow for expansion whilst the pudding is steaming. 

I used to fiddle about with string to keep the paper in place, but one year I had a brainwave and started to use elastic bands instead ~ this year it was back to the string as I couldn't find any elastic bands!  If you haven't got a pudding basin net, just use string to make a handle as it will be easier to lift the pudding from the steamer. 

Bring a pan of water to the boil and place the pudding, in a steamer, on top; turn the water down to a low simmer. The puddings will take between 5 and 7 hours to steam, depending on the size of basin you use.  I made three one pint puddings, which I steamed for 6 hours each, and one slightly pudding which took 7 hours.  I usually set my timer for one-hour-at-a-time so that I remember to watch the level of water in the pan, and keep it topped it up as necessary with boiling water from the kettle. 

This old saucepan belonged to my Grandma and I only ever use it for steaming puddings ~ each time I use it, though, I am reminded of her 😊 I've had the steamer forever; it's a wee bit battered these days as it's been dropped on my quarry tiled kitchen floor a number of times of the years!

At the end of the steaming period, take the pudding from the steamer and remove the greaseproof paper. Cover with a clean tea-towel and leave on one side to cool. When the pudding is totally cold, remove it from the basin and wrap in a fresh double sheet of greaseproof paper and then wrap tightly in cooking foil. Store the puddings in a cool place. As I said earlier I really like to make my puddings towards the end of October and it's a family tradition to have one at Easter, too. They should keep well, what with all the sugar and alcohol in them!

When you want to eat your yummy Christmas pudding, you can either gently steam it for about 1 1/2 hours or reheat in the microwave. I can't really tell you how long to cook the pudding in the microwave as it is very much a trial-and-error process! I just tend to heat it on full in approximately five minute bursts until it is good and hot all the way through.

Serve your pudding with whatever your family likes best ~ rum butter, cream, a white sauce, custard, etc. We like to have our's either with cream or a white sauce with brandy, which I make very simply like custard ~ just substitute the custard powder for cornflour and add brandy to taste! 

I hope you enjoy this recipe. You can tweak away to your heart's content on the proportions and varieties of dried fruit, so long as the total amount remains about the same. You could have a little less fruit and add nuts. You could also use rum instead of brandy ~ I use brandy as I'm not keen on rum!  Make the recipe your own by using the fruit (and nuts) that you and your family like to eat 😊

Yesterday was spent mostly.....

...wrapping Christmas gifts ~ 25 of 'em, to be precise!

A couple of years ago, whilst I was idly surfing the net, I came across what I thought was a very sweet Christmas idea which I was sure Beverly, my (grown-up) daughter, would love.  It was a photo of lots of little gifts dangling from a clothes-hanger, one for each day of December.  I thought it would be a particularly lovely gift because as she lives up in Orkney, it is quite difficult for her to get back down south for the holidays ~ she came down one year and got stuck in Aberdeen for a couple of days on the way back because of the weather!

Anyhoo, she did indeed love "Christmas-every-day" and asked for the same again last year.....it would appear that I have now made a rod for my own back started a new Christmas gift tradition for her!  With everything that's going on here at the moment with the imminent house-moving, I wasn't going to do it this year but she sounded so disappointed that I rather belatedly relented ~ hence yesterday's marathon gift-wrapping session 😵  

This year I went for my favourite brown paper wrapping (I think it's fab, as it can be dressed up in countless ways!), along with coloured butcher's twine and the number labels left over from last year.

Ta-daa ~ here is the end result!  The parcel just peaking through at the back in red and white paper is for Christmas day.  It's quite amazing just how long it takes to wrap each of those pesky little gifts.  It's worth it, though, as I know she will so love opening one each day 😊

Today, I shall mostly be making Christmas puddings.....again an afterthought as I wasn't going to bother this year but a certain someone was disappointed about that, too!

Peace...

www.allposters.co.uk

Father, Mother, God,

Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence during the bright and sunny days.

For then we can share that which we have with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence during the Holy Days.

For then we are able to celebrate you and our families and our friends

For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed, we ask you to shower upon them the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most.....PEACE.

Maya Angelou

(4th April 1928 - 28th May 2014)

Little words of wisdom

Books...

Not quite true, actually ~ I've spent years taking very large overdoses of books and am still in the process of weaning myself off them!

If only that were possible LOL  Trouble is, as you already know, our new home in Orkney is smaller than where we are at present so there is no hope of a bigger library!  Like my craft materials stash, I've let myself be seduced by craft books too.  I find crochet and dolls' house books particularly hard to resist, but other craft books have also crept into my not-so-little hoard over the years.  I have already had a ruthless clear-out of the "miscellaneous" craft books, which I suspect is why I found it easier than I thought it was going to be when I was sorting out the materials stash.  After all, no point in having the raw materials if there are no instruction books to hand to refer to 😉

Anyhoo, I confess that I was getting a tad craft-materials-sorting-out overloaded, so I decided to have a break and take a second look at my crochet books.  And yes, I do mean "a second look" because I've already tried weeding some of them out, with spectacular non-existent results LOL  Boy oh boy, did I have a way-more-than-I-could-ever-use collection of 'em!

I must be on something of a roll at the moment, though, because this time around I found it a breeze to let a good third of them go off to MusicMagpie.  I'm also going to trot over to amazon later and drastically cull the craft books on my wishlist.

Years ago I used to read lots of novels, especially detective and crime, but once the craft book "drug" hit I just stopped reading anything else.  Oh, except self-help/improvement and diet books that is!  I weaned myself off those successfully, though, thank goodness.  Adrian bought me a Kindle some time ago and I quickly discovered that it really isn't a decent substitute for an actual craft book ~ so an excuse to still buy the dratted things.  Still, I have rekindled (ha ha ha 😄 ) the joy of reading novels again and the Kindle is perfect for them ~ with the added bonus of no worries about filling up my shelves with masses of books that will only be read once!

Now that I've had a purge of the craft books I'm going to get back to the craft materials-sorting ~ including my yarn stash.  Hopefully now that I've let so many crochet books go I'll be able to downsize the yarn pile too 😊  

Peace...

www.allposters.co.uk

Father, Mother, God,

Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence during the bright and sunny days.

For then we can share that which we have with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence during the Holy Days.

For then we are able to celebrate you and our families and our friends

For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed, we ask you to shower upon them the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most.....PEACE.

Maya Angelou

(4th April 1928 - 28th May 2014)

I took a deep breath...

...girded my loins and began downsizing the contents of my craft shed!  I started on Wednesday and am still working through everything *sigh*  Still, I have already donated two large boxes of stuff to a friend who works with elderly folk in a care home ~ she does various activities and crafting with them ~ and there are a couple of bags ready for the charity shop.  So at least nothing is going to waste 😊

As I mentioned before, our new home in Orkney is smaller than here so I am being ruthless in deciding what to keep and what to let go.  I have also had to accept that I simply don't have time to create everything that catches my eye and strains my purse!  I have collected so much of this and that over the years, and it has all just sat in the shed gathering dust.  To be honest, it has been rather overwhelming when I've gone in there ~ too...much...stuff ~ and I haven't known where to start.  My creativity has long since ground to a halt, which should have been a wake-up call to stop buying yet more materials.  Sadly for me (and my bank balance!) I just ignored the fact that I was hoarding way more craft materials than I was ever going to be able to make use of.  Perhaps I was secretly hoping that the more variety of stuff I had, the easier it would be to actually get on with making things...

Who knows what's been going on in my poor 'ole brain ~ not me, that's for sure!

During all this downsizing I have had to be very focused and ask myself whether what I am sorting through are things that I truly want to keep, or whether I am just hanging on to them for the sake of it.  Thankfully I have found it easier to let stuff go than I was expecting, which has been a tremendous relief to me.  I have also had a thorough clear-out on my computer.  I had so many documents stored: things to make, pictures that had given me an idea, links to websites, etc.  Plus there were all the craft books I had collected ~ they have been downsized too 😉 

 So my new craft shed will be much more streamlined.  As well as using the space for creating and making, I will be displaying my dolls' houses in there too.  Luckily for me it is a lovely large space!  I still have craft materials to sort through but I am definitely on the homeward stretch now.  When I've finally finished that task, I will be moving on to sorting through all the dolls' house things I have collected over the past few years.  As I don't actually have any of my houses properly built yet (most of them are still in their boxes!), there is nowhere to display all the bits and pieces I've gathered together.  I don't anticipate that I will be wanting to get rid of many items, if any, but I do want to get everything into some semblence of order.  I'm planning on storing things together in "rooms", e.g. all the kitchen things together, etc.

I also have my humungous stash of yarn to be ruthless with ~ hopefully I'll be able to get that done before we actually move LOL 

Little words of wisdom

Bad Blogger!

Tea for Three by Sam Toft
www.allposters.co.uk

My word, I really am a very bad blogger ~ I don't think I've written a "proper" post since way back in June!

There has been rather a lot going on in my neck of the woods these past few months.....not least the fact that we have made an offer on a house in Orkney, put our house up for sale and accepted an offer on it today 😲

We were up there again at the end of September for our daughter's graduation 

Adrian and I (the very proud ma and pa!) with our daughter
 after the graduation ceremony on 30th September

and thought we would take the opportunity to have a look at a couple of houses that were for sale ~ as you do LOL  Anyhoo, to cut a long story short, we ended up putting in an offer on a sweet little house.....and it was accepted!  Hopefully the sale should be completed by the end of this month 😊

Since then, life has been something of a whirlwind!  We have lived in this house for 34 years, having moved in from a furnished, rented flat, so this will be our first "proper" house move.  It has been a steep learning-curve and there have been some very stressful times already.  We had an earlier offer which we had accepted, but the would-be buyers had to pull out just under a fortnight ago when they lost their buyer, which was very disappointing as you can imagine *sigh*  So the house went back on the market again the day they pulled out and thankfully we had some interest straightaway.  A couple came to view on Monday of last week and again on Saturday, and they put in an offer today which we have accepted.  We are keeping fingers and toes crossed now that all goes through okay this time.

34 years is a long time to live in the same home and we have had an awful lot of sorting out of "stuff" to do.  Our new home is somewhat smaller than here, so we are making lots of downsizing decisions.  You wouldn't believe how much stuff we have weeded out already ~ and we still haven't finished!  It was amazing how much was being stored in our loft; some things we had forgotten about and there were a few things we couldn't even remember having put up there in the first place!  A lot of very full bags and boxes have been making their way to the charity shop, and I have been busy selling books, CDs and DVDs on Music Magpie and We Buy Books.  We haven't had too much outright rubbish to get rid of, not as much as I was expecting anyway.  We have also been able to rehome some things by putting them out on our driveway with a "Free ~ help yourself" sign in a prominent position!

I am planning on making a start on being ruthless with all the gubbins in my over-stuffed craft shed tomorrow ~ wish me luck LOL  

Peace...

www.allposters.co.uk

Father, Mother, God,

Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence during the bright and sunny days.

For then we can share that which we have with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence during the Holy Days.

For then we are able to celebrate you and our families and our friends

For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed, we ask you to shower upon them the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most.....PEACE.

Maya Angelou

(4th April 1928 - 28th May 2014)

In remembrance...

I Do Not Know Your Name

I do not know your name, but I know you died 

I do not know from where you came, but I know you died 

Your uniform, branch of service, it matters not to me 

Whether Volunteer or Conscript, or how it came to be 

That politicians' failures, or some power-mad ambition 

Brought you too soon to your death, in the name of any nation 

You saw, you felt, you knew full well, as friend and foe were taken 

By bloody death, that your life too, was forfeit and forsaken 

Yet on you went and fought and died, in your close and private hell 

For Mate or Pal or Regiment and memories never to tell 

It was for each other, through shot and shell, the madness you endured 

Side by side, through wound and pain, and comradeship assured 

No family ties, or bloodline link, could match that bond of friend 

Who shared the horror and kept on going, at last until the end 

We cannot know, we were not there, it's beyond our comprehension 

To know the toll that battle brings, of resolute intention 

To carry on, day by day, for all you loved and hoped for 

To live in peace a happy life, away from bloody war 

For far too many, no long life ahead, free of struggle and pain and the gun 

And we must remember the price that was paid, by each and every one 

Regardless of views, opinions aside, no matter how each of us sees it 

They were there and I cannot forget, even though I did not live it 

I do not know your name, but I know you died 

I do not know from where you came, but I know you died.

Kenny Martin

Little words of wisdom

Bonfire Night!

Stay safe, folks!

Peace...

www.allposters.co.uk

Father, Mother, God,

Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence during the bright and sunny days.

For then we can share that which we have with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence during the Holy Days.

For then we are able to celebrate you and our families and our friends

For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed, we ask you to shower upon them the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most.....PEACE.

Maya Angelou

(4th April 1928 - 28th May 2014)

MAN vs EARTH

Little words of wisdom