Happy Christmas!

My mother used to say that Christmas is only one day, though to look at my shopping trolley - or trolleys, as I went on three separate expeditions yesterday to Asda, Asda again and Tesco - you would think I was laying in enough food for the Siege of Leningrad, a nuclear winter...or a very long caravan holiday, certainly. Instead of which it is pretty mild weather here at the moment and the supermarkets are all open again on Boxing Day.

But in my defence I have been away three weeks out of the last four, so the cupboard truly was bare. If a recipe calls for "fresh thyme" I am hardly going to have that in - a small bag of flour that hadn't already expired 12 months ago would be as far as my pantry staples might run to usually. So I was chuffed to note this year that I do - most remarkably - have a jar of fresh nutmeg, still in date. And a Christmas pudding that we didn't get to last year. My friend Clare said that they last for "years", which is good as she is coming to us and may be eating it...

In past years I have got myself into a right tizz worrying about the correct way to cook the turkey, as the advice on the Interwebs is so very contradictory, from the temperature you cook it at to whether or not to brine, erect a foil tent, stuff it, lay it on its tummy, buy a ready-cooked chicken, give up and have a bag of crisps down the pub instead etc.

But after years of angst-ridden experimentation, I think I have got the method more or less down to - not a fine art exactly - but a way that is more likely to work than not, say. Which doesn't meant that I shan't be taking other precautions, like laying in some emergency gravy and an emergency vegetarian alternative in case my nut loaf for the veggie guests is a little "slack".

Well, I guess I ought to sally forth again in search of said gravy (before it is gone!) and some other bits that I couldn't find yesterday, as you do. I always find myself in this headless chicken mode in the run up to Christmas, but I guess it is preferable to being a headless turkey at such a time.

And then I will be posting about the rest of the Paris visit (when I followed in the footsteps of Ines and Asali!), my meeting with Olfactoria and her family in Austria, as well as featuring the usual round up of silly travel-related nonsense, but for now, for anyone who missed it, here is a link to my Christmas post on Cafleurebon last year, a topic of perennial relevance, I sense!

Boxing Day 'BAH HUMBUG'! and A Glut Of Gift Giving Gaffes



Happy Christmas to everyone in Perfumeland and may all your fragrant gifts be lemmings, not turkeys!


Photo of red perfume bottle from 100christmastrees.blogspot.com, photo of green perfume bottle from giveawayshow.com, photo of fallen Christmas tree from Google images