The back garden is water-logged following some heavy rains, so indoor play is the order of the day. 

 Piper’s your girl for peeling brussels sprouts.

I’ve only recently discovered butternut, in the sense that I’ve always avoided it for some reason, until now, that is.  Perhaps my tastes are changing and I’m learning to like sweeter vegetables as I get older.  Anyway, I was looking for some good butternut recipes online, and these look truly scrumptious indeed.

Vegetarian Roast Dinner from bean-sprouts 

Boerewors and Butternut Risotto from Cook Sister! 

We took delivery of a large, 330 litre compost bin today.  It’s to be "installed" beside a smaller cousin in the back garden to cope with our ever multiplying (it seems) green waste.  We are now a two compost-bin family (and that’s not counting the other two at the allotment).  Yee-haa!

Yesterday was "Day 1" of Christmas preparation in our house.  I decided to start baking some Stollen to freeze for eating when the "season" hits us.  My mom’s terrific Stollen recipe calls for 500g of cake mix (mixed fruit for fruit cakes and the like) and so I duly headed off to Waitrose to see what I could get.  Always conscious of what goes into our mouths, I read the ingredients on the back of the bag.  Currants, raisins, sultanas, candied peel (all sounds fine so far), and hydrogenated vegetable oil.  What is the point of adding that to some dried fruit?  I just don’t get it.  Needless to say, the bag of fruit mix was unceremoniously dumped back on the shelf, and I bought a selection of raisins, sultanas, dried cherries and prunes to make up my own, better, fruit cake mix.  None of these contain hydrogenated vegetable oil, of course.

My fruit mix has been soaking in armagnac overnight, and the baking will start today.  Stand by for the recipe and pictures!

Piper and I walked down to the allotment yesterday afternoon to pick some leeks for our supper, and came back home to fetch Pete because we’d seen other plot-holders burning bonfires and wanted to do the same.  We scurried back down there with a number of newspapers under our arms to start our fire, but alas, even I, a seasoned African girl with many braais (BBQs) and campfires under my belt, was defeated by the slightly damp, still very green vegetation that required disposing of.  The kindly allotment society chairman, Gordon, even tried to help things along a little with his weed-killing blowtorch, but to no avail.  Our heap stubborly refused to become a bonfire!

I now realise that we took the wrong approach to bonfiring.  Number one rule: be prepared!  We should have taken kindling (lots of it) with us, and folded lots of longer lasting firelighters out of newspaper before heading off to plot.  Rest assured, next year will be a different experience entirely.  We’ll be prepared, oh yes we will! 

What would you like first, the good news or the bad news?  I always like the bad news first, so here goes…  It doesn’t look like our Christmas potatoes are happening.  With all this warm weather we’ve been having I expected to have lots of growth and have added at least another two tyres to our potato tyre tower.  But alas NO!  There is only one little potato-ey leafy bit sticking out above the straw, the straw on the other hand is doing well and sprouting lots of green bits.

But, directly on to the good news… I don’t mind all that much about the potatoes not working out for Christmas, because if we did have a bumper crop, that would mean I would have to eat them.  Let me explain.  I am on a no-nightshades diet.  That means no tomatoes, no potatoes, no peppers of any kind, and no aubergines.  This diet is going to stop the dreadful pain in the knuckle-joints and wrist of my right hand, oh yes it is, I have no doubt at all.