new(ish) beginnings

I'm hoping everyone has had a good start to the new year. Our Christmas and New Year celebrations were brilliant, we spend Christmas with family and had friends over for New Year's celebrations.

I did a lot of cooking and baking (as we had good friends stay over 4/5 days) and I used my new Veg Everyday book with great success. Definitely a new favourite! For dessert for NYE I made a pavlova topped with cream and passion fruit from my Nigella Lawson's "How to Eat" book. It always gets a big thumbs up from people who eat it. Another thing that worked well were the mince pies I made using Rachel Allen's recipe (just 1 jar left to use up this month!). Note to self, halve recipe as I don't need 5/6 jars of mincemeat! I made another huge batch of them this week and both my husband and I took them into our respective workplaces, and they were eaten pretty quickly!

Yesterday to help usher in spring I bought 2 pots of narcissi bulbs and some tulips from our lovely local florist, Miss Mole's Flower Emporium. I thought they all looked gorgeous lit up last night in these two gorgeous tea light holders that my sister bought for me.

My new(ish) beginning is that I started an Open University degree course in English Literature back in October. It's hard work, and a lot of reading and essay writing. This is my way of an apology for few and far between blog posts since the autumn.

If you want to see some more of me(!) on the web, I've recently opened a pinterest page as a one stop shop to link to all ideas/ recipes/ likes/ inspiration to ideas on the web. It's a great free resource.

Take care for now. xox