it's bin a lon time

Suddenly its the middle of january, and the festive season is well and truly over.. i am back in italy, where its pretty much spring, i was wearing a t shirt and sat by the river yesterday. Christmas was very festive, saw all my lovely new nieces and nephews, who are all growing at a steady rate now... had an S over for the whole holidays which was lovely lovely lovely.
Christmas was its usual melange of mince pie making, potato peeling, carol listening, and long luxurious lunches. After a few days of cooking, ithink i ate left overs till new year. The reason i think we dont eat turkey the rest of the year, is because for 6 days straight we eat roast turkey, turkey sandwiches, turkey and pickle, turkey and ham, turkey and chutney.. the list goes on. I was sick of turkey by new year..
Boxing day brought the whole of the family to dad's house for lunch, much to S's astonishment about just howmany people there are in the family.. We had potted pork pate, home made sausage rolls, and crisped up in the over porchetta from italy...It was a good start to what was a gastronomic holiday.
Christmas day brought all of my favourite things together, with bucket fulls of gravy, mounds of cranberry (sauce and jelly) piggies in blankes, crispy, hot, fluffy roast potatoes, sweet chewy parsnips, and my step grandfather's chestnut stuffing. I remeber beginning the meal, but i soon fell into a christmas lunch stupor, which is lovely, but very floaty.
Boxing day was a lovely walk in the cold with the babies, up to a pub, then home for more turkey (crown this time) with bubble and squeak. Until new year the meals were a mixture of the aforementioned. So for new year S and I made a venison stew with slugs of port, gin and red wine. With a roast caramelly sweet potato, eaten next the open fire, i couldn't ahve asked for a nicer new year. We even saw fireworks from the rather tall house, and possibly 3 maybe 4 thousand chinese lanterns heading for liverpool.
Also managed to bake a cake, we baked a ginger chocolate and orange cake, which was moist, spicy and delicious!
Coming back to italy was difficult after such a lovely christmas, so many babies who are changing so fast...
On my first day back in italy, we headed out to Panzano in Chianti for a meat dinner, which was four different cuts of beef, but enough of each one to satisfy anyone's hunger, and there were four of them! Buonissimo, ma troppo!
I bought nigel slater's book toast in the airport and devoured it in days, it was a lovely book and it inspired me to make a lemon meringue pie, whichi have never cooked, and i dont remember ever having eaten.. Anyway, it lasted 12 hours, and it wasn't my best, that was last week, yesterday i made another one, this time, the pastry was crispy, the curd was tart and sweet, and the meringue was fluffy and chewy. It was in other words delightful, and ridiculously easy, pastry-easy, lemon curd-easy, meringue-as long as you only have egg whites, easy! and it looks amazing!
Baking season has begun...