Only two months until Christmas!

I have been frightfully busy these last few weeks, getting ready for Christmas and preparing everything.  Only two months to go!

This year most of my presents will be homemade, so there is a lot to do.  Most of my Friends & Relations have everything, and what they lack they buy themselves, so giving home-made gifts seems a good alternative to the cheap & nasty stuff that passes as generic Christmas presents these days.

Before I start to create my various offerings I needed to assemble the ingredients, and that's what I have been doing.  You might think home-made gifts are easy, but aside from making them you have to get your mitts on suitable containers, and that can be quite labour intensive.

I bought wax for dipping candles, preserving jars and assorted empty jam jars for filling with quince jelly and Rumtopf, small bottles for home-made wine and spirits, cellophane bags for biscuits, and many rolls of wrapping paper.

I also discovered, at Oxfam, small canvas bags, decorated in a christmassy fashion, which will be perfect for filling with a few small gifts.  I am particularly excited about these latter, because I have been meaning to crochet such bags for years.  Of course one is always too busy, so the bags never got made, but these Oxfam ones will stand in until I have made enough of my own.  I did get some green and red acrylic yarn - wool might be too alluring for moths - and have started to crochet my first bag.

The idea of these bags is that they are reusable, so instead of having to buy wrapping paper each year I can just re-fill these bags every Christmas.  'Course, there is a catch - if I give them away I won't get them back, just like I don't get the little jars and bottles back that I give away.  Well, perhaps the lucky recipients will re-use the bags, so at  least they will save on wrapping paper!

So the next two months will be busy ones!  I need to dip two dozen candles, produce a dozen pots of jelly, candy the peel of nine oranges and three lemons and dip them in chocolate (already in progress), bake six to eight different types of cookies, make marshmallows, roll sugarplums, and decant alcoholic concoctions into little bottles.  Plus I need to finish off the Rumtopf; I bought a large bottle of overproof rum yesterday, and also need to add a few more fruit - I am thinking plums and maybe reine claudes, if I can lay my hands on any.

Plus I have to wrap presents, of course!  I do have a little pile of non-home-made things, mainly for myself, to be sure, but my relatives in far off lands also get them, seeing as it is illegal to send home-made alcohol and such like in the post these days.  I have been hoarding things since the last January sales, as usual.  The prices are lower and there is no stress.

One of my favourite past times in the week just before Christmas is to promenade down major shopping streets and watch all the idiots making last minute purchases, wearing a look of smug superiority on my face.  I am never one for last minute anything - half the time the shops are out of what one wants if one waits until the last minute, and instead of buying a really nice present one ends up with whatever leftovers have survived the great shopping craze that dominates the Highstreet from November onwards.

In addition to the above mentioned activities I have also lined up a few nice pre-Christmas get-togethers with friends, visits to shows and other christmassy attractions, like Dennis Severs House, Winter Wonderland, and a show featuring Henning Wehn (German comedian), and of course visits to Paris.

I am in for a few fun-filled, thoroughly enjoyable months!

Lots of posts, too, I expect!

Quince Jelly

Quinces ready to process

You will remember that I recently 'harvested' my quinces, and I have been busy with transmogrifying them into various delicious dishes.  Today I made quince jelly, mainly because a friend - who I had given some quinces - claimed that they didn't 'set'.  My quinces not setting?

I decided to make quince jelly myself and see what happened.  It went well, as usual, and as you can see in the last photos, the set is excellent!

I prefer to make quince jam, since making jelly results in a lot of left over pulp.  Of course one could use it to make quince-cheese (Membrillo), but I think it is nicer to use fresh quinces for that, rather than the exhausted pulp from quince jelly.  I have to say, the jelly has a lovely colour!

They are hard, so you need a sharp knife!

Cover with water and cook until soft

Let pulp drip through muslin into a bowl

Put the dripped juice into a pot, add a pound of sugar for each pint of liquid, and boil for 20 minutes or so.

Prepare jars and drip dry

Decant still liquid jelly into jars

Admire the colour of finished jelly

And make the 'set' test!

Has this jelly set or what?

Cozy comfortable contentment - Hygge & Co

My bedroom in La Bourboule - everything in La Bourboule is top CCC

There was a BBC special report about a Danish phenomenon that is now being taught at a UK university - Hygge!     http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34345791   It seems a mind-set rather like the German 'Gemuetlichkeit' - I would roughly translate it as Cozy Comfortable Contentment.  Apparently this has become so rare that it has to be taught at university.  They should hire me - I have turned CCC into an art form.

The main reason why people don't know how to hygge is, in my opinion, (a) laziness and (b) restlessness engendered by 24/7 media addiction.  The two are related, I think.

You have to invest a certain amount of time and effort into CCC, contradictory as it sounds.  If you laze around all day - checking your social media accounts, as likely as not - you will sooner or later be surrounded by dirt and disorder, which is the opposite of Cozy Contentment and distinctly uncomfortable.  You need to tidy up and clean often enough to make the house livable in.  Similarly with, say, home made food - it takes longer to prepare than ready meals, and you need patience and leisure to achieve good results.  Same goes for sipping mulled wine in front of an open fire - fires are actually a lot of work, and so is mulling wine. If you don't enjoy doing such things they will seem a waste of time, compared to surfing the web. Indeed, from a hygge point of view they are a waste of time, because you are doing them in the wrong spirit!  And hugge or CCC or Gemuetlichkeit is all about doing things in the right spirit.

It's a spirit of getting things done while being laid back, steadily, unhurriedly.  The spirit that takes four hours to make a cake, or an entire Saturday to meet up with friends, or three hours to read a newspaper.  This is different from laziness in that things get done - just more purposefully and, dare I say it, mindfully, than is usually the case.  Cooking a meal from scratch in a hurry, making a mess in the kitchen, burning half your pots, cursing all the while, wishing the people you cooked it for where far away and no where near your kitchen, really is a waste of time - just buy some M&S ready prepared food instead.  At least you won't resent your friends and can enjoy their company!

Buying food at an open market and preparing meals 'from scratch' - another Hugge staple

 If you want to do it the hygge way, you spend Saturday morning shopping for the meal, meandering from shop to market to stall, choosing carefully and leisurely.  In the afternoon you carefully plan the order of your preparations, and when to tackle each dish (some can be kept warm in the oven, some must be prepared at the last minute).  You probably will have at least one dish that requires the addition of wine, and you will sample this wine in tiny sips while you ruminate amongst your cookbooks.  Finally, when you are satisfied with your preliminary arrangements, you start to prepare the meal.  Carefully, slowly, with enough time to fix any little mishap that might occur.  While composing your dishes you may well listen to music, or the wireless, and enjoy the preparations of your evening event as much as the meal with your friends that will follow.

Of course, doing things the hygge way takes time - time more usually spent with TV and social media sites, and other electronic entertainment devices.  Social media addiction is also the enemy of hygge because they try to keep us in a state of constant alerted excitement - a state that is the opposite of the CCC state you need to live your life the hygge way.  How could you possible take four hours to make a cake if you feel the need to check your media accounts every five minutes?  Not only would you end up with cake batter on your smartphone, you would make all sorts of mistakes with the cake because of this lack of attention and probably ruin it.  You need to be calm and unhurried for hygge, and that is a difficult state of mind to achieve if you are in a constant state of anxiety, fearing to miss something.

As I commute on the bus every day, I observe this media addiction.  Almost everyone is at, engrossed in hand-held versions of their media devices, checking e-mails, checking Facebook, checking linked-in, checking twitter, checking bloggs, checking ebay, checking the news websites - checking checking checking, although not all that much is actually happening.  They check while eating, while talking to friends, even while working at their desks!

I don't own such handheld devices, so mainly I just sit quietly and muse about the weirdness of life, or read a little.  I find this very soothing, it is nice to be free, not having to do anything except sit and watch the world go by, and I can't quite understand why all these people around me strain their eyes to read the pointless and inane little messages and news-bites, for hours on end - why don't they just relax and enjoy themselves?   I could understand if they read interesting things, but an occasional reading over their shoulders shows that this is rarely the case.  Mostly it's just pointless chatter - rather like most telephone conversations I am forced to overhear during these journeys.  Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of the internet - but 24/7?

Apparently they are having special internet addict clinics in Korea - I guess we could open some of those if teaching hygge at uni doesn't have the desired effect ...

Stroking your Mouser is of course the highest form of hygge - you are still missed, my little friend!