Traditions

We  made 2 new Christmas traditions this year! The first was Jigsaw puzzles! When my sister was looking after me with my leg I started doing Puzzles again, but I wouldn't let my sister do a single piece! So for Christmas I bought 2 jigsaws that we could do together! We did the 12 Days of Christmas first - more difficult than we expected but such a lovely design. The next puzzle was The Christmas Library which my sister did all by herself! I was busy doing other things and she made such a great start I didn't feel it was right to join her! I still have another puzzle left to do by myself!
The next tradition was Christmas Baking! We watched  Nigel Slater and Nigella in Amsterdam, I have several of their books as they really do make delicious food!  Nigellas programme was particularly lovely to watch - beautiful scenes and food shops! We were most taken with her Almond Paste recipes and since I had all the ingredients I made the paste. The next day I made these bankets and my sister the muffins. I must say whilst both were delicious the muffins really were special! I hate marzipan because of the almond essence, but these I loved as made fresh without any! Next year my sister will make a stollen using the paste - usually she does a half and half stollen!
The Nigel Slater recipe was sausages with red onions and cranberries and cranberry jelly done in a frying pan so they all went caramalised and sticky - totally yummy! The funniest thing was that we coukdn't find any fresh berries so I thought we'd use redcurrants from the freezer. However what I thought were redcurrants were in fact cranberries! I remembered the previous year we had a hard time finding them so I bought a load and freezed them! 3 large bags! Too funny! 
We needed some new traditions as the weather was appalling on many days and my inability to walk very far made a visit to see the xmas decs at the 2 NT houses close to me  impossible - we never even made it into the village to see the advent windows! I did take her to get the milk from the machine however - like me she was thoroughly delighted with it! We had eggnog flavoured milk!!!