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.