Happy New Year!

Here is my greeting to all my blogger friends, courtesy of Jacquie Lawson greeting cards.

Marmite, Vegemite and Natex

Way back in June, Lee posted this picture of the Australian spread Vegemite on his blog A Curate's Egg,
in the section called The Chemist's Cookbook. He also wrote about its history. So I left a comment telling him about Natex, what I believe to be the UK equivalent of Vegemite (which I first heard of many years ago when I first began watching the Australian soap "Neighbours").


If you don't know about Natex, it is a vegetarian yeast extract which is low in salt, contains no saturated fat, and has no artificial colours, flavours or preservatives. It is also somewhat less sharp than Marmite, the spread which is best known in the UK, and that suits me. I buy it at my local health foods shop for £3.35 a 250g jar.


I was interested to see that the UK product Natex, which I suspect postdates the Australian one in it's origin, has produced a label with the same colour scheme, which is also similar to the Marmite label. I wouldn't be surprised if they were all made by the same firm these days. As for Marmite, to quote an Australian commentator I found on a website for Vegemite: "...only 'pommies and wankers' ate marmite". Love you too, mate! ;) xxx

Mother's cooking

My son Ric who was staying with me over Christmas was due to go home today, so last night we were again invited to the home of Andrew, who cooked Christmas dinner, this time for the family's traditional "turkey use-up" meal which some of us almost prefer to the roast on Christmas Day. Turkey and ham vol-au-vents began when my sons were still at home, and I no longer remember if it was my own invention, but it became an absolute "must" every year, before the turkey carcase was finally discarded. We serve it with rice and peas, and the meat in the bechamel sauce is slurped liberally all over the pastry cases, not neatly contained as in this picture here which I found on the web.

As a very reluctant cook who barely got by with feeding her children adequately and healthily, I have been gratified to find that certain of my "regulars" have become necessaries to the next generation - although I suppose there is a certain inevitability about it. For instance, our bread sauce always has chopped onion in it, never mind a polite flavouring from a whole one. And I also earned credit for introducing the idea of spaghetti bolognese made with fresh mince - in those days spaghetti mostly came out of a tin, or at best was made with cooked left-over meat. And the great favourite - Mum's crunchy roast potatoes, which are certainly not an original recipe of mine (boiled first to become a bit fluffy round the edges).

Nowadays I don't have to do any of it, for which I am truly thankful - I'd rather be blogging!

Family picture show

I had an unusual success on Christmas Day - well, I think it was success - as the provider of an entertainment which gave rise to unexpected and unprecedented hilarity. The family party consisted of six adults, and 5 children of both sexes, ranging from 5 to 15.


I was giving my son’s family a portable DVD player, and on Christmas morning, before going to have dinner with them, I suddenly decided to put a whole bunch of family photo files onto a CD, so that they could be run as a slideshow. I didn’t bother with checking through the files to put them in order or cut out duplicates. Well that wouldn’t matter, it was only a rough and ready idea anyway. But perhaps I should have checked them for ‘suitability’!

I could not have imagined that simple pictures of family life would have the audience giggling and screaming and jumping and rolling about in such a way. Celebrations of birthdays and festivals, holidays, dressing up, school photos, the arrival of new babies – all seemed pretty run of the mill pictures to me, of life as it is lived, except possibly one or two of their disgraceful granny’s more senile flights of fancy. Well - there were a couple of pregnant nearly-nude shots in there, and one of a newborn babe sleeping on his tummy, snapped from behind with his naked bottom in the air, and his tackle hanging free for all to see.

The teenage girls were the worst, and probably started it, but before long the entire group was treating my slideshow as though it was a rather vulgar piece of pantomime slapstick, or a couple of comics exchanging jokes in dubious taste. I suppose the powerful champagne cocktails before lunch, and wine freely flowing while we ate, would have had something to do with it – but the girls had only been drinking non-alcoholic Schloer!

The black lamb

Christmas eve

I decided at lunch time today that I wanted to go back to the church where we celebrated Michael's funeral, and be among his friends there again. There was a Crib Service with Carols at four o'clock which would be just the thing, as it is a service for the small children, who dress up and make a nativity tableau. Michael so loved the children.

He loved to sing, and had a voice which would easily rise above everyone else's, sometimes quite embarrassingly! I remembered how much it annoyed him when people did not come in strongly on the first note each verse, but lagged behind the organist. So I did my best to hit these notes on his behalf, though I have no voice at all, and could only reach half of them anyway.

I noticed this morning that most unusually, the holly tree in my garden still had berries on it, so I decided to cut some to decorate the house. When I reached the tree with my secateurs and basket I thought: "I'll leave the ones I can see from the house, I'll cut from round the back". Surprise, surprise, there were no berries at all at the back ! A freak of growth, do you suppose, or a kindly gesture of the birds?

And a retrieval

"That's not how it's going to be" I said to myself eventually - "we can recover something here". After painstakingly removing all the shards of the broken baubles, so that they would cause no injury, I remembered that I had a different kind of ball waiting to be hung. It is a solid blown glass one, a sort of witch's ball, and weighs a good deal more than the broken ones. But I found a way to hang it alongside the remains of the other group, and after contriving some 'special' lighting in my amateurish way, so that they would all shine for the camera, I decided that the newly constituted group was worth photographing.

So here I am sending the seasonal message of renewal and hope, light and celebration, to all my blogging friends. May your lives be full of blessings, and may you recognise them for what they are.