It has, not surprisingly, been an awesome Christmas time with excellent cooking conditions. Christmas is a favourite time of year for me and I usually take the Christmas and New Year's weeks off work just to have time to listen to enough Christmas songs, drink enough mulled wine and fully enjoy this magical time. This year I also definitely needed a break from my new job and hyperactive boss who (beneath a few slightly prickly and roughly edged layers) is a nice and good man, but who has a lot of energy. Perhaps a bit too much energy.

Over the Christmas weeks my favourite thing to do is to stay in my kitchen with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do other than cook. Of course the chance to spend time with husband is also very high on the list, so I invited him to come and sit at the kitchen table for some of the time so we could spend quality time together.

No really - we had a lot of lovely time together, relaxing walks, a couple of visits to our local pub, Netflix by candlelight.

We never do the traditional British turkey, sprouts and pigs in blankets type of Christmas dinner, because it has never been a tradition for either of us. But I don't fully follow the Finnish traditions or just cook some random stuff either.

This year my  Christmas menu which covers the two weeks around Christmas and New Year, not just the Christmas day, why stick with one day when you can do 14, was a result of hours of work. During my very thorough planning process I watched countless hours of Food Network, rifled through pages and pages of recipes online, flicked through my Christmas food magazines and looked back at previous Christmases' menus.

I have a little book, you see. In the book I document all my important menus, not everyday things, but the more special occasions. Like some glamorous people and royalty have a book where they (or their lady's maid) write down what outfits they wore to which event with what jewels. I haven't got lots of events or jewels, but I like to know what I served different people, friends and family, so that I don't keep doing the same stuff for same people all the time. Although I know even without the book that there is someone who pretty much every time gets hummus. But she likes hummus, so she won't hold it against me I trust.

The book

I also document people's dietary requirements, food allergies and specific likes and dislikes. So I know which of our friends hate mushrooms or seafood, who don't eat meat, who wouldn't be ok with reindeer, who love lamb etc. That is the cunning hostess I am. I feel I am slightly wasted as a business woman, this is my true calling. Oh well.

The book also works as great inspiration when putting a menu together. So in the end my Christmas menu (which of course was a detailed excel spreadsheet) ended up featuring a lot of things from previous Christmases. Some are starting to become a part of our very own Christmas tradition.

For this Christmas Eve (which is the main day for us Finns) I drew inspiration from my 2014 Christmas Eve menu which was Coquilles St. Jacques for a starter and stuffed sea bream for main course. I also made a stuffed wild sea bass last year on Christmas day, if anyone is interested. So this year I made these nice seafood thermidors, controversially served in scallop shells although there was no scallop in the mix, but I didn't have any crab shells hanging around. I served them with home-made bread and dill butter.

The main was a wild seabass filled with lemon and herbs, baked with olives, tomatoes and asparagus and served with boiled new potatoes and a salad. As a side I also had my true Christmas love affair - Finnish sweetened potato bake with pickled herring and gravadlax prepared according to my dad's recipe, a true match made in heaven. This year the potato mix didn't even turn green, probably because I had the right type of potato (King Edward). For those who don't know this particular dish, it is not supposed to be green.

Traditional Finnish sweetened potato bake just the right colour

Seafood thermidor with crab and prawns

We kicked off the Christmas day as has become a tradition for us with Prosecco, blinis and fish roe, smoked salmon and gravadlax, and Karelian pies with egg butter.

Salmon roe with sour cream, onion and dill

Karelian pies and egg butter

For our Christmas dinner I cooked the most amazing reindeer tenderloin. This may very well become our Christmas Day go-to meal. I brought the meat with me from Finland in November. It's the softest, most tender cut of meat and has a beautiful flavour. I just simply marinated it for a couple of hours with juniper berries, fresh rosemary and oil. I took it out of the fridge in good time before cooking, then panfried it in a little bit of oil and butter, seasoned with salt and pepper and let it rest. With husband it is always a fine balance of getting the right doneness, he doesn't like meat too raw, but particularly this cut of meat must be left medium, otherwise apparently it will taste like liver. Which definitely was not the flavour I was going for. But it was perfect.

I served the reindeer with herby roasted la ratte potatoes, root vegetables and Finnish funnel chanterelles which turned out to be a bit hard core for husband. They are quite slimy looking and almost black. But everything else went down really well, and I didn't mind having the funnel chanterelles all to myself.

Reindeer tenderloin with root vegetables and funnel chanterelles

I have a Scottish venison tenderloin in the freezer and will try exactly the same thing with it when I get a chance and see if it's as soft and succulent.

Some other favourites reappeared as well. Salmon Coulibiac made it's pompous entrance last year, and was the post-Christmas light Friday night dinner this time around. A couple of things left up my cornucopious sleeve are Ossobucco Milanese (meat is waiting in the freezer) and the aristocratic fish and mash wonder Zander Walewska (zander also brought from Finland in November). They often make an appearance over the festive period and I am planning to get to them this week as well as a tiny little reindeer pizza.

Salmon Coulibiac with home made quark pastry

One Food Network recipe that made it to my Christmas week was Lisa Faulkner's prawn saganaki filo pie. A mix of onion, tomatoes, prawns and feta covered with crunchy filo. It was really lovely.

Food Network's prawn saganaki filo pie by Lisa Faulkner

I am not great with desserts, and don't really like sweet stuff myself, but I wanted to make something sweet for husband who definitely does. My mother always made a beautiful cranberry mousse cake for Christmas, so I attempted a similar one. I didn't have her exact recipe, I will have to search next time I'm over there so I looked online for a similar one. It didn't turn out quite as pretty or delicious as mum's, but it was still very good.

It wasn't quite as flat as it looks

When there was no cooking to be done I baked. This is a crusty granary loaf, tasty and full of goodness.

Seafood thermidor with crab and prawns

Serves 4

Vegetable oil
1 red onion or 2 shallots
400-500g seafood, I had white and brown crab meat and prawns
1 egg yolk
2 tbsp creme fraiche
Dash of tabasco
1tsp dijon mustard
1 tbsp brandy or cognac
Zest of half a lemon
2 tbsp chopped dill
75g grated gruyere cheese
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil in a pan. Finely chop the onion. Fry the onion on low heat until soft. Don't let it brown. Leave to cool.

In a bowl mix the crab meat and chopped prawns. Add the egg yolk, creme fraiche, tabasco, mustard, brandy, lemon zest, dill, the fried onions and 2/3 of the gruyere. Mix well and season with salt and pepper.

Divide into four crab shells if you have or other oven proof vessels, I used scallop shells although my mix doesn't include scallops. Or you can use one larger gratin dish. Sprinkle the rest of the gruyere on top.

Place on a baking sheet - if you are using shells you can prop them up by making little bases of tinfoil to keep them straight. Bake in 200C oven for 12-15 minutes or until they are bubbly and catching some colour.

Serve with freshly baked bread, dill butter and some greens.

My slightly too plump Lavash breads - but they were scrummy.

If you ever feel that time is just flying by and you'd like it to slow down just a bit, I have an immediate solution. Knead. Time will never go slower than when you are kneading. Even running on the treadmill seems like you're just breezing through time, although one treadmill minute equals at least 3 normal life minutes. But kneading happens in a kind of parallel universe where everything stops or even goes backwards, like Matthew McConaughey knocking about behind a bookshelf for 30 years. 

Beetroot hummus with bluecheese and walnuts.

The full 10 minutes is obviously way too much for me and at around the already painful enough 5-6 minure mark I decide I don't care, I will go and run on a treadmill or read a couple of reports from our quality department whilst listening to Ed Sheeran and leave the bloody thing to proof.

But even with the pain of kneading it is still worth it, so I have been baking a bit more lately. I made some really healthy, but possibly a bit dense wholewheat and seed rolls for husband the other night and there may be a French pot loaf happening soon.

This lavash was really lovely served with baked Camembert and some other pretty dips. All light and fluffy, pretty easy to make and 6 minutes of kneading will do!

Top tip: If you'd like your Lavash thinner, make them thinner.

Lavash breads (makes 8 small breads)

2 cups Greek yoghurt
1 tbsp honey
1 tsp salt
1 bag dried yeast
3 1/4 cups strong bread flour
1/4 cup oil

to finish:
1 egg
3 tbsp poppy or sesame seeds

Heat the yoghurt in microwave until lukewarm. Mix in honey, salt and yeast. Add in the flour mixing it in little by little. Add the oil. Tip onto floured table top and knead as long as you can, but until it forms a nice ball that's not sticking everywhere adding flour if necessary. 5-6 minutes should do the trick. If you have a stand mixer, for God's sakes use it.

Place back in the bowl and cover with a cloth. Leave to proof for 30 minutes or until it's doubled in size - sometimes it seems to take a lot longer than half an hour.

Devide the dough into 8 pieces. Shape the pieces into thin round discs onto baking sheets covered with grease-proof paper. Leave to proof for 30 minutes.

Prick the breads with a fork and brush with eggwash and sprinkle some poppy or sesame seeds on top. Bake in 225 C for 12-15 minutes.

Then we were offered drinks and a proper bag of crisps, not a tiny doll house version. And - wait for this! An actual hot towel - I thought maybe we'd flown through an Einstein-Rosen bridge (yes, I have seen my Thor films, thank you husband for my astrophysics education) or some other kind of time warp wormholey thing and ended up in the 1990s.

After landing (and a landing-sweet) and getting to the terminal there was a lovely gentleman who wanted to carry my bag up a flight of stairs even though I didn't ask. I think he may have heard my "for fuck's sakes" when I spotted the stairs (I have a ham string injury which doesn't add to my perseverance with physical challenges). Anyway, the independent, strong woman that I am, I tried to say that I was ok and that my trolley bag wasn't heavy. He just looked at me, maybe spotted tiny signs of volatility and said "Please let me help you" and I thought it was the most wonderful thing.

Why do we sometimes fight so hard. Accepting a bit of help won't mean they will take away our vote, make us take notes in shorthand and chain us to a cooker (I'd be quite happy actually chained to a cooker and with the politics these day, who do you actually want to vote for anyway, the shorthand would be a problem though). Sometimes maybe it also just makes an individual feel good to help another, and it's not a gender thing. All these wonderful philosophical ponderings were rushing through my brain as I walked out of the Newcastle International Airport.

After that it went downhill. Without going into detail I'll just bullet-point the key issues:
- My mobile died, so it took me a while to find my prebooked cab, because the driver details were on the phone.
- It was raining.
- That's pretty much it.

So once I finally located the taxi driver, I am ashamed to say, I was not the dream customer. Mainly I was cursing my stupid Samsung phone. Which really is by far the shittiest phone I have ever had(company policy to have those), but obviously it is not completely Samsung's fault if I don't charge it and then subsequestly the battery dies. But it is such a stupid phone in most other ways, that I don't feel bad about blaming it for that too. But I felt bad about being a grumpy customer, when the driver had done nothing wrong. So I burst into tears (elegantly and silently and not snottily and hiccuppily) in the back seat of the cab feeling awful for not being nice to this man who was after all just doing a late Monday evening job in rainy Newcastle. So after calming down a bit I apologised to the him, and thank God he just laughed and told me not to worry about it.

But of course I do because I don't want to be an awful person to innocent people just because my job is busy and I'm tired and possibly a bit menopausal. At another point of my northern trip this week I nearly burst into tears in the ladies toilets worrying about husband dieing while I was away and how I could face the happy Christmas polar bear and our other Christmas decorations, and I started thinking who I would need to get to come and take them down and pack them all up. Then obviously I had to stop myself before I got too hysterical and get some kind of a grip because I had to return to the meeting to listen to the quarterly Quality Update which is almost as riveting as the Health and Safety Update that followed. But we did get a good lunch with cheese and crackers for dessert which cheered me up remarkably. I think cheese is important element of looking after one's mental health. Cheese and crackers both.

Anyway enough of moaning, just wanted to make a point that in these dark months let's look after ourselves and our loved ones. That's what I have been doing this weekend. We've made sure to sleep well and relax. We had a lovely Saturday afternoon nap, a nice walk and fresh air by the river and even some gym time. But mainly I've made sure to cook lovely food for husband and me.

Friday I cooked a beautiful Ghormeh Sabzi, a Persian lamb and herb stew with dill and saffron rice, a true comfort meal. Saturday morning I made a Persian inspired breakfast with a very tasty tomato omelette with some onions and a hint of turmeric, sabzi khordan herb, nut nut cheese plate and barbari bread, Saturaday dinner was a gorgeous flame smoked salmon and mussel pasta. And sometimes it just has to be pizza, so reindeer pizza it was for our Sunday treat.


Smoked reindeer pizza

Cold-smoked reindeer meat
Reindeer popperoni (You can replace the meat with normal salami and chorizo and/or other meat)
Red onion
Mushrooms
Tomato
Bell pepper
Grated Parmesan
Grated cheese (mozzarella, cheddar, emmenthal)
Chopped fresh or dried rosemary, basil, thyme and oregano

Slice the smoked reindeer meat and the salami. Slice the vegetables finely and grate the cheese.

Heat some vegetable oil in a frying pan. Add the mushroom in the pan, season with salt and pepper. Fry for five minutes on medium heat and then add the onion, bell pepper and the herbs. Add more salt and pepper if needed and fry on medium heat until the vegetables have lost some of the moisture and softened a bit. Don't overcook.

Heat your oven to pretty much as hot as is goes, 220 - 240C.

The dough will make two round pizzas or a big baking sheet square pizza. Flatten your dough either just by hand or using a rolling pin to the desired shape and place on the baking sheet or pizza trays (you could preheat these or use a pizza stone for better effect).

Spread the tomato sauce on the pizza base. Add the vegetables, reindeer salami and smoked reindeer. Top with tomato slices, parmesan and grated cheese.

Bake until cheese is bubbling (12-15 minutes) and the edges start to colour.

Texas style bone-in ribeye steak

If you don't like dill, you'd better stay clear of my house when I'm in a Nordic summer cooking mood. There is dill in everything, including the drinks and dessert and possibly my hair. Definitely in my teeth.

I have been working very hard in the new job for the past 2 weeks, so an extra day off and a chance to cook for a friend was just the ticket. The shock of hard work has been exacerbated by the most amazing couple of months prior to the start. I have been on what is officially called a gardening or garden leave, which is basically just paid leave with no obligation to work.

You get one of these by:

a. taking a new job with a competitor company
b. being "open and honest" about reasons that made you resign
c. helpfully sharing your views about the leadership of the company
d. just generally being a bit of a pain in the ass
e. combination of any of the above (the more you manage to combine the quicker the exit)

Or like a friend from work put it:



Husband was bemused and amused in equal measure and kept telling people: "Wife got sacked."

But it is the best kind of holiday, full pay for the entire notice period which in my case was a luxurious 3 months. You have no responsibilities other than committing to not entering your place of work or starting in a new job. Can you imagine, someone pays you for not working! I can thoroughly recommend it. These opportunities are somewhat difficult to orchestrate, but worth the trouble.

It's total relaxation. You can't stress about your old job because you have resigned and you can't stress about the new job because you haven't started yet and don't really know what to stress about. In a way I suppose this is how retirement will feel, but just with added joint pain and a more depressing end point.

Some people always say that they can't just be, can't not do something, and go around ironing every ironable object in the house, clearing cupboards, weeding and cleaning like maniacs. I'm not like that. My accomplishments during my gardening leave were:

• Cupboards cleared - 0 
• Epidodes of Downton Abbey watched - 43
• Episodes of Pride and Prejudice watched - 6 + the film
• Episodes of Mystery Diners and Jamie at home watched - Countless
• Prosecco breakfasts - 2 (a shockingly low number)
• Gardens gardened - 1 (by Izabela the gardener)
• Long lost friends reconnected with - 1
• Delicious meals cooked for husband - very many
• Naps - > 30
• Neighbours' cats fed daily - 2
• Holidays within a holiday - 2 
• Purgings of negative energy from previous job by burning sage in bedroom - 1 
• Flummoxed husbands - 1

So to celebrate the little window of freedom and the summer that is here I cooked a very Finnish menu of lovely seafood and lots of dill. Funnily enough I miss my homeland a lot more during the summer than winter (the winters are a bit gruelling in case you didn't know, that might have something to do with it).

And also we did just win the Ice-Hockey world championships, which is a big deal. It's a proper mans game, a bit like rugby in terms of the number of teeth left in the players' mouths, but on skates. Anyway, that was a big thing and any patriotic Finn would now be swimming in a fountain in the 7 degree Helsinki, because that is what we do when we are very happy apparently. I chose not to this time, much as I love my homeland, but instead I decided to honour my Finnishness with this menu:

• Crayfish Skagen in cups
• Finn-Crisp and smoked salmon rolls
• Lemon and dill hummus
• Smokerbag salmon
• Dill and vinegar cucumbers
• New potato salad
• Strawberry and goat cheese salad
• Blueberry tart and custard

Feel free to use the full fat versions of mayonnaise and creme fraiche, but it is really delicious with the lower fat options also.

200g crayfish tails
1/4 cup low fat mayonnaise
1/4 cup low fat creme fraiche
1 bunch of dill chopped
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Salt
Lemon pepper
2 tsp salmon roe and some dill for garnish


Mix all the ingredients and serve as a starter on toast or rye bread, or as I did in little crispy cups decorated with  some fish eggs and fresh dill. The classic way is to fry slices of toast in butter and serve the Skagenrora on top.

This is my new breakfast favourite, soft buttery scrambled eggs with fresh tomatoes, onion, a hint of garlic and a touch of turmeric. A healthy and tasty start to a day and a very popular breakfast dish in Iran, as I recently discovered.



I had my first taste of this tomato and egg dish a couple of weeks a go at the Chamran Grand Hotel in Shiraz. I was visiting Iran for the first time in my life and this dish seems to be a staple in every hotel's breakfast buffet. We were also served this when we stayed with husband's family in the beautiful southern province of Hormozgan by the Gulf of Oman. Some seem to make this with more finely chopped tomatoes, but our Hormozgan hostess, the lovely Noori, left the tomatoes a bit chunkier. And since hers was the best version of this dish anyway, I decided to follow in her dainty and glamorous footsteps.

I never saw Noori other than immaculate in her sparkly scarfs and flowing colourful dresses, whatever the time of the day. Not sure what she thought of my appearance when we first bumped into each other early the first morning after our late arrival the night before when she had already gone to bed. Presumably lying neatly on her back, wearing a fluffy pink eye mask and cotton gloves over moisturised hands and whatever else well-groomed ladies do overnight. No sweaty tossing and turning and waking up with the imprint of your pillow on your face.

I thought everybody was still sleeping and decided to sneak to the bathroom wearing my husband's pyjama pants, my hair a total mess and part of yesterday's make up spread across my left cheek. I wasn't wearing my glasses so it was difficult to gauge the level of shock on her face.  Or maybe she just thought that I was a bit exotic. But still, from then on, I tried to at least brush my hair and wear my own clothes around the house even if I could never aspire to her dizzy levels of feminine elegance.

Sabzi khordan - a combination of fresh herbs, lighvan cheese (or feta), walnuts and radishes

The food during our holiday was just amazing. For most of the two weeks we stayed with husband's family and were treated to lavish lunches and abundant dinners by various members of his family. On most of the meals there was a large group joining us. One evening for some reason I had got the (frankly deluded) idea that it was going to be an intimate dinner with just the two of us and two other couples. Not quite so intimate, as it turned out. I counted 13 children and 17 adults, but it could have been more because people don't just sit in one place all evening but keep bobbing up and coming and going and running around the room chasing each other (mainly the children) so it's hard to keep count.

One of the most memorable meals was a large family picnic in the desert. And when I say large, I mean about twice the size of our wedding in terms of attendee numbers. Leaving the house in the morning, I saw two beautiful black goats tied to a tree in the courtyard. I thought this was a bit peculiar since goats normally roam free on the little streets between the houses and aren't usually allowed to the gated courtyards, because despite their gentle ways they jump on cars, eat the laundry and cause all kinds of  havoc. So I wondered if these two might be bookmarked as our dinner. I asked husband, but he fluently launched into a very convincing story of how these two were the owners favourites and there for their own safety while we were gone. A neighbour apparently had been tasked to look after them until we returned. Gullible as ever I completely believed the story, but later found out that those two indeed were the main ingredient for the excellent abgoosht we had that evening.

As sad as it is to actually see the live animal you are about to eat, I suppose these two had a happier and freer life and a more humane death than even their most organic counterparts I buy in the supermarkets here. I am going a bit more vegetarian or at least pescatarian again, but more of that at another point.

We spent the afternoon preparing the dinner on the dunes. In one area, near a shell of a little house that used to belong to the patriarch of the family, the goat stew was being prepared in two massive pots that would each house a grown man and a tall one at that. We know, because husband has sat in one of the pots. And in another area, on rolling sand dunes among konar trees, bread was being made in the age-old desert fashion, which no one of course really does nowadays, but they did it to show us and I loved it.

Women sat on rugs placed on the sand in a shade of a tree and started mixing and kneading the dough while men gathered wood for a massive bonfire.


Once most of the wood had burned into charcoal it was all flattened to form a smooth area of coals on top of the now very hot sand. This was hot work and there weren't many volunteers. The dough was now ready and was formed into flat discs. I helped with this part of the process, but my knees and hips wouldn't allow me to get through too many before I had to get up and stretch my aching joints whilst the locals happily sat on the ground throughout the whole exercise.

Coals were pushed aside to create spaces for the breads on the sand, the discs were placed one by one directly onto the hot sand and the coals where gathered with sticks again to cover the breads. Once one side was cooked, the breads were then flipped over expertly with the same sticks and covered again with coals. Once cooked through the sand and ash was brushed off the breads with towels. And unbelievably, there was no (or very little) sand anywhere in the finished breads.




The whole process of preparing the bread took at least 4 hours. Which in European time equals approximately 30 minutes.  The sense of time and distance is very different, which - once you get used to it - is lovely and relaxing. But it is good to know that if you expect to be somewhere at 5 pm it is more likely to be around 9 or 10 o'clock. And if they tell you something is "just here" it could in reality be 250 miles away. I very soon decided not to stress about things taking a bit longer (or at least not to show I was stressed) and ask for distances in kilometres instead of verbal definitions like "not far", "just here", "around the corner", just to manage my expectations. An expression "it's just like from the table to mouth" with a corresponding hand gesture was used for a "neighbouring" town three hours drive away.

Once everything was ready about three hours later than I would have expected, the "table" was set. Several rugs were placed in a long row on the ground. A long sheet of plastic tablecloth was then placed in the middle. Bowls of salad, fresh fruit and bottles of soft drinks, water and fermented milk were distributed along the table cloth. Everyone grabbed a bowl and tore some of the freshly sand baked bread into the bowls. The bread chunks were then covered with the spicy stew of tomatoes, potatoes and goat meat and we all sat down on the rugs to eat as the sun went down.


Or all except husband and I, whose European joints can't take the sitting on the ground for any longer period of time. We found a trunk of a tree that made a great bench for us, dragged it next to the rug and joined the party. As the sun was setting and the evening getting darker around us, I was thinking how happy and proud the original owner of the piece of this now dry and deserted land, a man who died before his time and I never got to meet, would be seeing our group, his descendants and their families, coming together to share one day and this meal with each other.

Somewhat distracting me from my misty-eyed romantic reveries, one of my newly found relatives decided to focus on our inability to sit on the ground. I mean, of course we can sit on the ground, we just get really uncomfortable really quickly. She was calling me "sister" which was lovely although technically we obviously aren't sisters and with definite sadness and maybe some disbelief in her voice she lamented: "My sister can't sit". Apparently sitting with the aid of furniture or tree trunks doesn't count. It's like needing crutches to stand. I get it.



I have so many lovely food and other kinds of memories to share, but this will do for now.

Husband stayed behind to spend a couple of more weeks with his family so to ease my longing for him and the wonderful Hormozgan, I prepared a Persian breakfast for myself today. I popped in the local Middle-Eastern supermarket first thing in the morning and got the ingredients including Lighvan cheese and fresh herbs for my sabzi khordan and freshly baked barbari bread.

Persian omelette - scrambled eggs with onion, garlic, tomatoes and turmeric

Serves 1

vegetable oil
butter (optional)
1/2 small yellow onion
2 small tomatoes
1/2 tsp  turmeric
2 eggs
salt and pepper

Heat some oil in a frying pan. Chop the onions fairly finely and grate the garlic. Chop the onion into chunks. Add the onion onto the pan and sauté on low heat until the onion has softened a bit. It's a matter of taste, but you can leave it more al dente if you like a stronger onion taste and texture or sauté until it is very soft. Then add the garlic and sauté for another minute or two before adding the tomato.

Add the turmeric and season the onion and tomato mix with salt and pepper. Continue cooking until tomatoes soften, about 5-7 minutes. Add a knob of butter on the pan and crack the eggs into a bowl, season with salt and pepper and whisk lightly. Add to the pan and scramble.

Serve with fresh, warm flatbread and a salad or sabzi khordan.

It's the dreaded time after Christmas. In Finland we call the bleak weeks after Epiphany the Oxweeks, presumably because we go back to working like oxen instead of forever lying on our backs eating nuts and watching Love Actually.

You can get all pretentious with your layers, but I think this looks pretty good. And bottom is not soggy in case the dirty old Hollywood would like to give it a little pat.

I hate working like an ox OBVIOUSLY and not eating nuts and all kinds of goodies all the time. And not having at least one nap a day. Sometimes two, one in the AM if I accidentally got up too early (excited that it was Christmas) and one in the afternoon. But at least one in the afternoon. It's a basic human right.

The other nigh I had a box of ham and pickle flavoured luxury Yorkshire crisps for dinner. They were left over from a Christmas hamper I won in the charity raffle at work. And it was all going so well, healthy lunch at work and only one Thornton's chocolate. So much for the couscous and rocket salad that was the original dinner plan. I wonder what else is left in the hamper.

And there is the added emotional turmoil because the jolly inflatable polar bear has been shoved back into its box and Christmas lights have come down. The last hyacinth is slowly dying on the mantelpiece, there's very little food and a funny whiff in the fridge and husband has found and emptied all the chocolate hidey-holes.

We had a wonderful Christmas time though, must count blessings and not moan like some miserable ungrateful misery gut. Lots of lovely foods, some traditional Christmas stuff but mainly really just things that we love. We had lots of long nature walks inspired by husband's new iWatch and activity tracker. While walking we had deep conversations about love, life and such like. I would ask husband if he could even believe how much he actually loved me and if he loved me more every day, and so on. On one of our walks we saw a big flock of Egyptian geese on a field. My eyesight is not great, I first thought they were deer. Husband asked, what they were, why they were there and how people were supposed to play football with all of them crowding the place. I told him they were Egyptian geese, and that they'd just flown in to eat some worms or something, or maybe just grass and roots and stuff, if they were vegetarian, and then they would fly back out. "What? Back to Egypt?" marvelled husband the ornithologist.