Christmas preparations: decking the halls!

Our home is now pretty much decorated for Christmas. I like keeping things simple so there isn't too much of it, but that's how I prefer it. We got the tree last week and I have spent a few evenings making decorations - most things you can see here are home made. The wreath on our front door is made out of twigs I brought from the forest, pine cones and ivy from the garden. Most ornaments on the tree are hand made as well; this year I produced a number of clay decorations in all sorts of shapes and colours. I also have a lovely collection of ribbon and sequin baubles made by my Granny as well as crocheted snowflakes made by my friend's mum. Some of those snowflakes are also adorning our dining room windows :-) 

Snowflakes on the window. The cats love taking them down!

Table decoration

Dining table

Table decoration

Simple decoration made out of baker's twine and rubber Santa's boots

Leftover twigs and baubles in a jug, accompanied by a bowl of scented pine cones

A very simple decoration - pine cones and ribbon

And some of my Christmas tree ornaments:

Edinburgh Christmas

Last Sunday we went to Edinburgh to join my colleagues at a Christmas event at one of the local hotels. It was good fun and amazing food, and afterwards we went to see this year's Edinburgh Christmas Market. It seems to get bigger every year - I remember when it was just a handful of stalls a decade ago, but now it takes up almost all of Princes Gardens. And it seems to start a bit earlier every year, too!

It was huge, colourful and mobbed. I love Christmas markets; despite the crowds and everything being ridiculously overpriced I can't help but feel the magic :-) We didn't buy anything except a portion of churros, but we had a really good time and admired a lot of the items on sale, rides for kids and deliciously smelling foods. It was good! 

Edinburgh looks amazing this time of year, all decked out for Christmas. I normally only commute there for work, so it was really nice to actually have time to walk around rather than rush to the train station. While on one hand I'm against the commercialisation of Christmas, on the other hand I really can't help but get excited about it several weeks ahead. The excitement builds up and then culminates on Christmas Eve - it brightens up the cold, dark winter months in a way nothing else does and I just love it.

Christmas preparations: Making mushroom-filled uszka for the freezer

Uszka, small dumplings filled with wild mushrooms, are a must on my Christmas Eve table. A very traditional dish, they are served with clear beetroot soup as the first course. They freeze beautifully, so I tend to make them in advance an keep in the freezer. I made a batch last weekend and finally got to use some of those wild mushrooms I picked over the autumn months. They are really simple to make and require just a handful of ingredients, but they are quite time consuming. But it's all worth the effort!

Ingredients:
(makes around 50 uszka, depending on how big or small you make them)

For the filling:

- 300 g frozen wild mushrooms (or 30g dried ones, rehydrated in warm water for a few hours, or use the equivalent amount of regular mushrooms if wild are not available)
- 1 large onion
- salt & pepper
- a little oil for frying

For the pastry:

- 2 cups plain flower
- 0.5 cup very warm water
- 2 tbsp oil


Start with the filling.
Roughly chop the onion and place in a large frying pan along with the oil, and fry on low heat until translucent. Add the mushrooms and keep frying until they are fully defrosted, and all the liquid has evaporated. Add salt and pepper. Place the contents of the pan in a food processor and pulse a few times until everything is chopped very small, but before it turns into a completely smooth paste.

Next, make the pastry.
Place all the pastry ingredients in a bowl, mix and knead until smooth and elastic (or use a stand mixer).
Roll it out on a flowered surface quite thinly - about 2mm. Cut into even squares - the smaller the better - 3cm is probably about right. You can also cut out small circles using a cookie cutter or a glass - the final look will be only slightly different.

Start forming your uszka.
Place a teaspoon of the filling in the middle of each square, then fold it in half diagonally, to form a triangular parcel. Seal the sides by pinching them together.
Next, take the two ends on the longest side of your triangle, and join them together, pinching the pastry. All done.

You can now cook them straight away, or freeze them.

To cook, bring a large pan of salted water to a boil and gently drop the uszka in the water. When they come up to the surface, they're ready - you can fish them out. If cooking from frozen, give them an extra minute in the boiling water.

Serve in soup, or on their own with a little bit of melted butter and sour cream.

Quick and cheap kidney bean burgers

For quite some time now we have been trying to include more vegetarian meals in our menu, for both health and budget reasons. These bean burgers are great - we had them for dinner last Tuesday, and even S, who said he hadn't had ever tasted veggie burgers he liked, said these were actually nice.

It was based on a recipe from THIS blog.

Ingredients (makes 6 good size burgers):

2x 400g tins of kidney beans
1 large onion
2 carrots
2 teaspoons cumin
2-3 tablespoons flour
Fresh or dried parsley
Salt and pepper
Oil for frying

Method:

Drain and rinse the beans, then cook them in a pan of water for 10-15min until soft.
Meanwhile, roughly chop the onion, grate the carrot, and fry both in a pan using just a little oil, until soft. Add the cumin and parsley, mix well.
Put the cooked and drained beans, along with the onion/carrot mixture, in a food processor. Mix until it turns into a fairly smooth paste. Transfer into a bowl, add salt and pepper and the flour, mix well.
Optional step: Place the mixture in the fridge for a couple of hours, this will help it firm up. Otherwise you might need to add a bit more flour.
When ready, form six patties out of the mixture, sprinkle both sides with a bit more flour and fry, turning once, until both sides have browned. This doesn't require a long cooking time, as all the ingredients are already cooked.

Enjoy in a hamburger bun with all the trimmings, or with rice and a salad.

Christmas preparations: planning my Christmas Eve menu

Our area got its first snow fall of the season the other day. I couldn't help but think about Christmas... Every year in early November I like to sit down with my cook books and plan my Christmas Eve menu.  And with all the snow outside my window, it felt like the perfect moment to do just that.

I feel like I have the best of both worlds: where I come from, it is Christmas Eve that's celebrated with an elaborate meal. Where I live, it's Christmas Day - and I get to experience both. We usually host the Christmas Eve supper in our house, and then enjoy Christmas Day lunch at my partner's Mum's with my Scottish family.

The traditional Polish Christmas Eve supper, Wigilia, consists of 12 dishes. Each family has their own favorites, there are many options and variations to choose from, however all dishes are either fully vegetarian or fish based. The most traditional things you are almost guaranteed to find on the table are: beetroot soup, herring, carp fish (not in my house though as I'm not a fan!), a dish with cabbage and/or sauerkraut, a dish with wild mushrooms and a dish (most likely a dessert) with poppy seeds (though we won't be having it this year; trying something new instead!). 

Over the years, I have come up with my own list of staples that I cannot do without; some are the dishes I remember from my family home; others I have added out of my own initiative or adapted to suit our tastes. Every year I like to add one or two new things, and if they work, they get to stay for good, or come back every other year. 

So I got out my most trusted cook books and started planning. I have a wonderful book that was given to me several years ago - Swedish Christmas Cooking by Leif Mannerström. While in Sweden they traditionally include a lot of meaty dishes in their menu, the book has a multitude of fish recipes, most importantly salmon and herring, which I love. 

These books, a small chunk of my cook book collection, come out every year to help me with my menu planning.

After nearly 3 hours of planning, I came up with the following menu. It has a number of very traditional dishes in it, but also features a salmon dish which I have only been making for 4 or 5 years, as well as a couple of completely new things.

ROUND I

1. Barszcz

clear beetroot soup

2. Uszka

mini dumplings with wild mushroom filling

ROUND II

3. Grilled salmon fillet

served with fried apples and roast potatoes

ROUND III

4. Gubbröra

Swedish herring salad

5. Gypsy herring 

traditional herring salad with tomato sauce, pickled mushrooms, peppers and gherkins

6. Krokiety

croquettes filled with sauerkraut, wild mushrooms and onion

7. Potato salad

with hard-boiled eggs, peas and carrots

8. Beans with kale

butter beans baked with kale and spices

9. Fried cabbage

with wild mushrooms, cranberries and spices

ROUND IV

10. Yule log

11. Creamy baked cheesecake

12. Coconut macaroons

drizzled with milk chocolate

It is a lot of dishes and it's all made from scratch - but I will be able to make a couple of things in advance and freeze them. The rest will be made the day before or on the day. It's a lot of work but it's also great fun and probably the thing I love the most about Christmas. It always brings back my childhood memories... In my family home, my Dad would make majority of the savory dishes, while my Mum and I made all the desserts and the remaining savory ones. I remember all the peeling, chopping and stirring, for hours and hours, as it wasn't just 12 dishes, but in huge amounts, too. 

My Scottish family (my partner's siblings, parents and grandparents) have always been very gracious about my tradition, and my S has fully embraced it. It's not the first time that I feel blessed to be able to combine my own tradition with his, and experience and celebrate both. 

The salmon recipe in my Swedish Christmas Cooking book.

A number of traditional recipes in my Polish cook book.

***

The first snow fall this season!

Road trip to Mull

Scotland is so beautiful. Last weekend we went on a road trip to Isle of Mull - not our first time; we have friends who live there and visit them a couple of times a year. Almost the entire way from our house up to Oban is incredibly scenic, and this time of the year the views were just breathtaking, especially that the weather was perfect. In Oban we went to an awesome place called The Oban Chocolate Company, for some of the best chocolate treats I have ever tasted. Then we took the ferry to Craignure (Isle of Mull), and spent two nights on the island. Here are some of the pictures I took on our way up, and on Mull. We couldn't help but stop several times on our way to admire the views!

Loch Lomond

Loch Lomond

Loch Long

Loch Long

Loch Fyne

Loch Fyne

Oban

Oban - The Chocolate Company. I had a hazelnut and coconut hot chocolate with double choclate Belgian waffles... It was heaven.

Picturesque shipwrecks on Isle of Mull

I wouldn't be myself if I didn't check out the forests on Mull

Rams watching us curiously

It was a beautiful trip. We got to see a lot of wildlife: seals in Loch Long, three fallow deer in the forest (they were huge!!), a polecat and an otter on the road, and several types of birds.
We planned to go via Glencoe on our way back for even more breathtaking views, but just as we were about to board the 11am ferry on Sunday morning, our car battery went. We eventually got it sorted with the help of kind people, but the next ferry off the island was not until 5pm - by that time it was already dark and there was no point going the Glencoe way as we wouldn't have been able to see anything. Hopefully next time! Glencoe is amazing any time of the year.

Permaculture

I mentioned some time ago that I was getting increasingly interested in the concept of permaculture. Since then, I have read a book on the subject (the wonderful Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway), subscribed to the Permaculture Magazine and watched many, many videos and documentaries on it. It's absolutely fascinating.

The way I understand it, permaculture is creating systems and connections that work together and support each other in a similar way to what can be found in nature. Without going into technical details of the design principles, some of the ideas I found most fascinating and relevant are:

- Nature doesn't like bare, unprotected ground. If we don't cover the ground with something want to grow in our garden, nature will. She will sow weeds to protect the ground from excess heat, moisture loss, help bring nutrients from deep in the soil to the surface and provide food and habitat for micro- and macro organisms. That's why it is important to plant groundcover plants among our main crops. 

- Diversity is key. Rather than rows of a single crop (which you wouldn't find naturally occurring anywhere), it is important to plant several different types of fruit, vegetables, shrubs or trees. They will likely protect one another (companion planting) and create more diverse habitats and microclimates.

- Food is not the only useful yield. The main purpose of my garden is and always will be to grow my own fruit and vegetables, but first of all these plants can have many other functions, and secondly, inedible plants can be useful too. An apple tree, for example, will not only provide apples for me, but also shelter for birds and flowers for pollinators; it will also create microclimate for smaller plants growing directly underneath it, provide shade, act as a wind barrier and provide privacy from neighbours. Comfrey, another example, although inedible, has many uses in the garden. It's a nitrogen fixer, can be used as an excellent liquid fertiliser (''comfrey tea''), nutritious mulch or just added to the compost heap to add nitrogen.

This is just a small handful of concepts from the incredible wealth of knowledge I am slowly discovering.

Source: INTRO TO PERMACULTURE DESIGN COURSE

I am currently doing an online course - Intro to Permaculture Design, delivered by Oregon State University. I cannot recommend it highly enough. First of all, it's completely FREE. But more importantly, it provides loads of practical, usable information, tools and resources to understand permaculture and its principles, and create your own design. I would love to do a full PDC (Permaculture Design Course) one day, but they aren't cheap, so that won't be happening for a few years. This free online course however is a great starting point, and helped me decide that this is definitely something I want to do. The course can be found HERE. 

All Hallows' Eve

Where I come from, there are no carved pumpkins or trick-or-treating on the 31st October. Instead, we get ready for All Saints' Day, the 1st November, which happens to be a bank holiday: we buy bunches of chrysanthemums and multi-packs of grave lanterns. Then, on the 1st November, we visit the graves of our loved ones to leave the flowers and lanterns, think about those who are no longer with us and maybe say a prayer for their souls. Most people do that in the morning, hoping to avoid the biggest crowds and packed car parks, but I like to go after dark. The thousands of lit candles and lanterns give a truly magical, if slightly spooky, effect. If anyone has candles to spare, they put them on the most neglected graves nobody visits, so that every soul has at least one candle burning for it. It's all very beautiful, in a sad way...

Where I live now, the tradition is very different, and I don't have any family graves to visit here if I wanted to. I do like Halloween; I enjoy all the horror films on TV, I like the dressed-up kids touring the neighbourhood, and I absolutely love all the pumpkins. We carved our Jack-o-Lantern last night! Still, I can't help but think of all my loved ones who have passed away. Cherish all the good memories, let go of the bad ones, if any. This memento mori is a good opportunity to slow down and think about the most important things in life. I like the reflective nature of All Saints Day. And I do like that Halloween is a less serious counterweight to it. I feel very lucky to be able to experience both.

Another week gone

View from our back garden

This has been a busy week, at work and otherwise. Autumn in full swing, generously spreading beautiful colours and offering gorgeous views, such as the one above. 

My garlic has finally arrived, but I'm not happy with it at all. The variety is called 'Provence Wight', so I thought it would be sent from somewhere in the UK, but it turned out the seller was based in China. That's why it took 22 days to arrive! The bulbs were wrapped in plastic, got all moist in transit, and started sprouting and growing roots. I had no idea if they were still suitable for autumn planting, but I gave it a try - they're all in the ground. I am not expecting much, I imagine they will die over the winter, but it was better than throwing them away.

Ever since the farmer who owns the field behind our house harvested his barley, we've been getting visitors on the other side of our fence. Lots and lots of cows! They're quite friendly and lovely to look at. 

We've been to Lanark Loch recently - we took a walk around the loch and had a look in the surrounding woods for mushrooms. We didn't find many - maybe 4 or 5 - but one of them was so huge it probably weighed about 350g on its own. I sliced them all and added to the bag of mushrooms in my freezer - it's getting really big!

Lanark Loch's swans

We went to the cinema on Wednesday night to see Inferno, based on Dan Brown's latest book. I absolutely loved the book and was so looking forward to seeing the film! But I have never been more disappointed with a book-to-film adaptation. I had expected minor changes - after all, film is a very different medium so things have to be adjusted - and that was all fine. But they also completely changed the ending! I won't go into details and spoilers, but I had not expected them to turn the ending around like that, and I really did not like it. 

***

Christmas is less than 2 months away. Shops are full of decorations, ''gift ideas'' and Christmas issues of all the magazines. We are planning to shop for presents for all the kids in the family very soon, to avoid the madness closer to the time (and to spread the cost!). I usually start thinking about my Christmas menu in early November - we have a few staples, but I usually try to include something new every year. We expect around 10 people at our table this year. This will be our first Christmas in our new house, and first Christmas ever for our cat Banjo, which worries me a little because he is definitely going to climb the Christmas tree. Our other cat Diuna has never tried that and we've never had any issues, but with Banjo it's pretty much guaranteed. He loves climbing and has already conquered all the spots in our house I thought were out of his reach. And he is definitely going to steal the tree decorations too. This should be fun!