Dear Santa
Thank you for a wonderful Christmas, all the lovely the presents, the delicious dinner . . . hang on, that was all down to me. Next year could you send the Christmas fairy to take care of all that so I can just put my feet up and enjoy it? Oh, and could I have Christmas Eve off rather than spending it stood in a shop being shouted at?
While you're at it, could you also make me worry less about other folk, take more time for myself and make people feel obligued to shower me in gifts in thanks for the hard work I put in all year making every other f**ker on the planet happy.
Other than that, booze and pyjamas would be fine.
Yours sincerely
Sharon
xxx
Sunday, 25 December 2011
Sunday, 18 December 2011
Festive Food
It seems as soon as there is a sniff of Christmas in the air, the celebrity chefs crawl out of the woodwork and start telling us how to par-boil a sprout. Granted they must film these Christmas specials in July, but that is no consolation when you're being patronised by some tubby arsehole in a festive jumper (but enough about Anthony Worrall Thompson)
The fever spreads like measles with the likes of Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith promoting supermarkets they don't shop at, while Lorraine Pascal does her best to look convincing while taking a tiny bite of something you know she won't swallow. There are so many chefs (chefs mind you not cooks) who think we have nothing else better to do than to comfit our duck legs and the likes of Gary Rhodes and the Hairy Bikers who think we should all eat more butter and lard.
Well at least these guys look as if they eat and enjoy what they make, poor old Gary wouldn't last the winter in my neck of the woods.
Then there's Nigella; curvacious, vivacious, voluptious, Nigella. Mistress of temptation. She appears before us in her silk dressing gown and slippers, licking her lips and whispering her secrets of domestic goddesshood and we can't fail to be impressed. I have seen her drinking cocktails in a low cut evening dress, rolling out a black cab in killer heels, stumbling into the kitchen as she removes her elbow length gloves and dons her marigolds and then . . . she preheats the oven.
Anyone else would be found in a drunken stupor by the firebridgade among the ashes of what was once the entire street, but not Nigella. Even pissed as a fart, she is able to set something away marinading before she falls into bed with her makeup still plastered to her face and her marigolds still on her hands.
Don't get me wrong, I love to cook and bake and make Christmas food that demonstrates how much people mean to me (nothing says I love you like homemade chocolate fudge) But I have a life and aspiring to the perfect foody Christmas presented on these shows is a meltdown waiting to happen.
I love Christmas food, but I also love shortcuts and cheating. Things come in jars and packets for a reason, so some other poor buggar can spend weeks perfecting the recipe and everyone else can just buy a jar of it. I would love to have the time to make mince pies with little stars on top, dusted with icing sugar, or a mammoth chestnut and mushroom pie just in case the one vegetarian I know comes round but I don't.
I don't have their huge, cavenous houses and cosmopolitan friends either.
Our modest little Christmas will be as it always has been, full of good cheer, good people and tried and tested favourites that might not make an impression on Masterchef, but grace my table year after year.
The fever spreads like measles with the likes of Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith promoting supermarkets they don't shop at, while Lorraine Pascal does her best to look convincing while taking a tiny bite of something you know she won't swallow. There are so many chefs (chefs mind you not cooks) who think we have nothing else better to do than to comfit our duck legs and the likes of Gary Rhodes and the Hairy Bikers who think we should all eat more butter and lard.
Well at least these guys look as if they eat and enjoy what they make, poor old Gary wouldn't last the winter in my neck of the woods.
Then there's Nigella; curvacious, vivacious, voluptious, Nigella. Mistress of temptation. She appears before us in her silk dressing gown and slippers, licking her lips and whispering her secrets of domestic goddesshood and we can't fail to be impressed. I have seen her drinking cocktails in a low cut evening dress, rolling out a black cab in killer heels, stumbling into the kitchen as she removes her elbow length gloves and dons her marigolds and then . . . she preheats the oven.
Anyone else would be found in a drunken stupor by the firebridgade among the ashes of what was once the entire street, but not Nigella. Even pissed as a fart, she is able to set something away marinading before she falls into bed with her makeup still plastered to her face and her marigolds still on her hands.
Don't get me wrong, I love to cook and bake and make Christmas food that demonstrates how much people mean to me (nothing says I love you like homemade chocolate fudge) But I have a life and aspiring to the perfect foody Christmas presented on these shows is a meltdown waiting to happen.
I love Christmas food, but I also love shortcuts and cheating. Things come in jars and packets for a reason, so some other poor buggar can spend weeks perfecting the recipe and everyone else can just buy a jar of it. I would love to have the time to make mince pies with little stars on top, dusted with icing sugar, or a mammoth chestnut and mushroom pie just in case the one vegetarian I know comes round but I don't.
I don't have their huge, cavenous houses and cosmopolitan friends either.
Our modest little Christmas will be as it always has been, full of good cheer, good people and tried and tested favourites that might not make an impression on Masterchef, but grace my table year after year.
Sunday, 11 December 2011
Frozen Planet
A fantastic series, make a cuppa and pop you're dressing gown on, you're going to feel the cold.
Monday, 5 December 2011
Comfort and Joy
Here we are again, my friends, another year drawing to a close. That paranoid and panicky season when we feel compelled to rush out and spend money we do not have on crap we do not need.
We agonise over gifts for people we don't even like and for what? A badly spelled and grudging thank you? (By email, the ability and desire to use a pen slowly dimishes with each generation)
Add to this the current economic climate (a phrase I hate, considering I am in no position to predict or change the weather patterns) 2011 brought with it a recession, financial crisis in Europe and pay freezes across the public sector. We will have to pay more into our pensions in order to get less out and everyone working in retail will be made to feel grateful to still be employed rather than mourn the demise of the Christmas bonus.
Is it a Tesco value chicken and oven chips for dinner this year?
And yet as Christmas approaches, the footfall increases, the queues lengthen and the patient tempers fray as they have in previous years. The snow has held off another month later than last year, giving people a wild eyed look as seige mentality overtakes them. They won't be caught out this year, they will have a fridge and larder stocked to apocalyptic levels and they will trample or trolley barge anyone who comes between them and their emergency turkey.
And once again I shake my head at the madness.
We have a new addition to the family this year, a little sister for our princess who will be eleven months come Christmas and these girls, these two glorious, happy, healthy girls are all the Christmas cheer I will ever need. Their grins on Christmas morning when they open what, by today's standards,will be a modest amount of gifts will lift my spirits for the coming year.
I don't care that I've pulled the Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve shifts this year (someone has to work them) I don't care that hubby and I don't have the spare cash for gifts for each other. I wouldn't care if it was oven chips for dinner (be less washing up - don't put the idea in my head)
I am certain my Christmas will be full to the brim with joy.
We agonise over gifts for people we don't even like and for what? A badly spelled and grudging thank you? (By email, the ability and desire to use a pen slowly dimishes with each generation)
Add to this the current economic climate (a phrase I hate, considering I am in no position to predict or change the weather patterns) 2011 brought with it a recession, financial crisis in Europe and pay freezes across the public sector. We will have to pay more into our pensions in order to get less out and everyone working in retail will be made to feel grateful to still be employed rather than mourn the demise of the Christmas bonus.
Is it a Tesco value chicken and oven chips for dinner this year?
And yet as Christmas approaches, the footfall increases, the queues lengthen and the patient tempers fray as they have in previous years. The snow has held off another month later than last year, giving people a wild eyed look as seige mentality overtakes them. They won't be caught out this year, they will have a fridge and larder stocked to apocalyptic levels and they will trample or trolley barge anyone who comes between them and their emergency turkey.
And once again I shake my head at the madness.
We have a new addition to the family this year, a little sister for our princess who will be eleven months come Christmas and these girls, these two glorious, happy, healthy girls are all the Christmas cheer I will ever need. Their grins on Christmas morning when they open what, by today's standards,will be a modest amount of gifts will lift my spirits for the coming year.
I don't care that I've pulled the Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve shifts this year (someone has to work them) I don't care that hubby and I don't have the spare cash for gifts for each other. I wouldn't care if it was oven chips for dinner (be less washing up - don't put the idea in my head)
I am certain my Christmas will be full to the brim with joy.
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