The Leewit @ghost_bird@witches.town

🍄🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🍄🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪 🍄🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪 🍄🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪 🍄🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪.... halfway through.

Next: hand-chop half a kilo of mushrooms into 2mm pieces, to make the stuffing for mushroom pancakes. (I usually make double quantities, so this won’t be as bad as previous years.)

There’s a robin perched on the highest vertical twig on the cherry tree in our garden, singing away. Alas, I have no zoom lens and there’s bright sky behind.

Tired: Die Hard
Wired: Sneakers

Since I’m thinking about cooking, here are some of my mother’s Christmas recipes, from my no-longer-very-active tumblr.

Christmas Pudding - Best made around August, to allow time to mature:
http://samsfoodnotes.tumblr.com/post/103903319502/christmas-pudding

And for Polish Christmas Eve:

Barszcz - soured with lemon rather than fermented. Taste and adjust the seasonings until you like it:
http://samsfoodnotes.tumblr.com/post/76131293178/samdodsworth-my-mothers-recipe-for-barszcz

Mushroom pancakes - more work than they sound but very good:
http://samsfoodnotes.tumblr.com/post/76244200944/my-mothers-recipe-for-mushroom-pancakes-to-go

I don’t actually like much about Christmas at all, but doing a lot of cooking helps me feel more in control and gives me an excuse to avoid some of the other preparations.

Preparing dried fruit compote for tomorrow’s Inauthentic Polish Christmas Eve. Apples, blueberries, figs, apricots, raisins, prunes... No pears or peaches this year - I’ve not seen any.

Shopping done. Next: slice a dozen bagels for the freezer, chop three small white cabbages and put them into the pickle press to ferment, and stew some rhubarb.

But first, the all-important “hide in a dark room and read” phase.

About to bail on work until the new year. Next: off to Brick Lane to stock up on bagels, then home via the supermarkets. I don't expect it to be fun, but it'll be less crowded than tomorrow.

I've said it before, but the best thing about Pilates is that it's non-competitive and (at least in my class) there's no one constantly yelling that you're doing it wrong.

I can still feel the effects of last night's Pilates class, but not in a bad way. There weren't many people this close to Christmas so we got more of a workout than usual.

Team Christmas lunch update: my new boss thinks David Cameron was “quite statesman-like”. This is not at all a good sign.

Sadly, it looks like our team Christmas lunch is going to happen today. Awkward smalltalk ahoy!

Reminder:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJT5i5NmONc

"When we are in great distress, sometimes we also become acutely sensitive to the distress of other people. Because just about everyone is wounded to some degree in some fashion, and the world is full of terrible things, it can seem as though grief is hailing down on us, unstoppable, and it’s hard to endure long enough to be of any help."
- Emily Short
https://emshort.blog/2013/10/16/if-comp-2013-their-angelical-understanding-porpentine/