Christmas has now been and gone and we are now all waiting to see what the New Year will bring.

It’s been a very soggy Christmas with almost wall-to-wall rain and strong winds. 

We didn’t manage to get to the allotment but fortunately, we had enough vegetables stored at home to fulfill our needs. We are hoping that the allotment hasn’t been battered too badly by the constant storms.

One gardening activity that we did manage to carry out was the ordering of seeds for next year. Being members of the National Allotment Society we buy most of our seeds from Kings Seeds at a discounted price. They didn’t have all the varieties that we wanted so Martyn searched the internet and found Premier Seeds Direct. They seem really good value with most seeds priced at under £2 a packet with packs containing a large number of seeds. The pack of impatiens contains 180 seeds for £1.39.  We’re giving a few things a try to see how they go.

There is a dearth of photos in this post as we haven’t ventured out much and when we have the conditions haven’t been conducive to standing around taking photos. We’ve managed to squeeze in some walks with Ruby but nowhere near as many as she would have liked.

She did get to open her Christmas present by way of some compensation.

Boxing day we managed a visit to Temple Newsam which was the busiest that it has been for quite a while.

During other walks, the only other people that we have met have been walking their dogs.

Christmas is a taboo time for us when bad things tend to happen and this year has been no exception. On Christmas day I switched on the oven and the power went off in parts of the house. Martyn reset the switches in the fuse box but when I switched the oven on again the same thing happened so the oven is now out of action. Fortunately, we don’t have turkey at Christmas so plans were changed and our meal was cooked on the hob. Before that, the turntable in the microwave had stopped turning as it should so that was also limited in its use. The microwave has now been replaced so can be used as an oven until we replace the main oven. Gladly, the living beings managed to survive.

I have managed to do some cooking over the last couple of weeks and here are some of the meals that used some of our homegrown vegetables.

I made a spicy root vegetable and lentil casserole using onion, garlic, potato, parsnip and carrot.

A vegetable masala contained potato, carrot,  onion, garlic and, from the freezer peas and green beans. I used stock instead of water.

I made a turkey, pasta and leek dish into which went some of our carrots and leeks. The recipe has disappeared from the internet but was basically cooked pasta, turkey, leeks and carrot mixed in a sauce made using milk and white wine. This was topped with a mix of fresh breadcrumbs, grated cheese and chopped parsley.