Ouf.

Does anyone else still feel full?  Full when you wake up, full when you go to bed?  My eating habits are all out of whack as well - it seemed perfectly reasonable over Christmas to have breakfast at about half past eleven, probably consisting of a satsuma, a cold sausage, a mince pie and a couple of dates.  I should be sick of stodgy food, dedicating myself to being teetotal and veering solely towards vegetables and steamed fish, but I'm not...maybe it's partly because I want to prolong the holiday feeling, maybe it's because it's cold and wet outside and I just want to eat loads of cosy comfort food.  Whatever the reason, I have some sausage and mash cooking behind me as I write this - to hell with tofu!

It is in a spirit of nostalgia that I write this post (nostalgia for something that only happened a couple of weeks ago), as I looked back at the photos I had taken over the feastive period.  (That typo is intentional by the way.)  There is something luxurious about cooking at Christmas, if you have the time and inclination, both of which I was lucky to have.  I started the day before Christmas Eve with this:

Inside that gold wrapping lies 180g of solid, pure cacao.  Not chocolate, so it tastes very bitter when you try it by itself without any dairy element or sugar added.  Also, without the wrapping, it just looks like a lump of brown stuff, hence the shinier version depicted.

After twenty minutes of grating (which is a really long time to be grating, it's lucky the rest of the recipe is easy, I was shattered), you get a chopping board full of chocolate:

Mix with some heated cream and sugar, chill it in the fridge, roll it into balls and boom:

Chocolate truffles, easy to make, ages to prepare.  Ergo, something to be made at Christmas.

If you're short on time though and want to bring on some meat sweats, you could do what I did for Christmas Eve dinner and marinade some pork ribs in whisky, honey and some other stuff that I can't remember in the fridge for a day and then roast them in the oven:

Phwoar.  Makes you drool, non?  

After bubbling up the marinade to create a glossy sauce and a gesture at health in the form of a spinach salad, I give you the finished item:

I believe that recipe was intended for 6-8 people, my mother and I ate it ALL.  Yeah, baby.  AND we had a mince pie afterwards.

Sometimes a mince pie is not enough for pudding though.  It's more of a snack really, isn't it?  Definitely not big enough to count as pudding, no way.  What you need to count as pudding at this time of year needs to be big, in a dish, out of the oven and either contains cream or you can pour some on it.  Now, this next picture shows a whisky and marmalade bread and butter pudding in the assembly process - I thought it looked too nice not to take a picture of it:

Ideally, I would have taken another one upon its exit from the oven, all golden and puffed up, but I forgot as I was so focussed on getting it dished up and in my mouth.  So, ahem, this is it the next morning:

Now, either you can think that two people ate all that the night before while it was still hot OR you can think that two people ate some the night before and then sneaked some cold spoonfuls the next morning.  Your choice.

So yes, maybe it is a bit weird that I am writing about Christmas food in January.  Maybe it is a bit weird that I haven't taken down my Christmas banner yet.  But hey, not half as weird as the mincemeat crumble that I am about to make - yep, there's still some left...