Over the holiday

A Happy New Year! I hope you have had a good holiday. We did despite we both had cold one after another. Mike caught cold on the first day of his holiday and took one week to get rid of. On the first day he fully recovered, I caught cold, and I am still with it.

Happiness is relative though. Last year we have had swine flu. So, common cold seemed to us almost nothing albeit annoying.

In the past years, we would invite people around, and usually a couple of people including one of us, couldn't make it due to flu, or retired during meals. This year, we decided to celebrate by ourselves, instead.

After gruelling six hours of oven cleaning during summer, Mike, understandably,  refused to roast at home. We were thinking to go to Abode for a Christmas meal, but Mike's cold stopped this. So we thought we would go out for a New Year meal. My cold was the hurdle this time. So we spent whole time at home very relaxed with our dogs, parrots and little Mochachino, the last surviving finch.(and Pumpkin, the chicken, in the garden, of course)
 
Over the holiday, we opened a champagne bottle,

Mike decorated,

we baked,

we cooked and drank,

we baked and drank again,

The first galette was sooo delicious. Mike baked it again on the New Year eve.

Mike's colleague, Dave gave us this desert wine that he bought a half case by mistake (he doens't like desert wine), and left them in the garage for a while. Still it was nice with the galette. Thanks, Dave!

we opened another bottle of champagne,

Mike had Parma ham and I had smoked salmon (responsibly resourced wild Alaskan kind...description is getting longer and longer.)

These better shaped parmiers were made by our patisserie chef Mike.

Mike's panettone became so large!

Panettone inside

I found a tub of chicken stock I made two year ago in the freezer. lol About 1.5cm thick fat was on top, to preserve.

A leek from our garden and mushrooms added. It became delicious soup.I hope I could beat my cold with this!

I also cooked Japanese celebratory Azuki bean rice. Beans were about two years-old (too old), and special glutenous rice was one year old (a bit old). Still it turned out delicious. It was nice to clear cupboard too. lol