Merry Christmas!

I nearly made it to Christmas Day without falling victim to Whamageddon. I avoided it despite the peril of a long queue in Superdrug with festive music on the radio. And then, on Christmas Eve, they played a snippet of Last Christmas on Radio 4, the last place I was expecting it.

It’s all just fun, though. I don’t mind hearing that song. I quite like it, unlike these miserable grinches.

I finished a big refactor I’ve been working on for a few weeks, just in time for a week off. It’s nice to be able to clear that from my mind.

The shortest day is past. It won’t be this unremittingly dark for another year.

I made some of Alexis Gauthier’s faux gras recipe. It’s not too much hassle to make, it’s tasty and satisfying, and it doesn’t involve rather unpleasant things being done to geese. The recipe does make rather a lot, though. Even after inviting a friend round yesterday, we’re only halfway through one of the three jars I made.

We went out for a Christmas meal on Friday at the Spread Eagle in Homerton. We’d booked a meal there in December 2020, but the government cancelled it. We booked again in December 2021, but the pub cancelled it when they decided to close early for Christmas. This year, we made it.

It was very nice, but reminded me that I can’t comfortably eat the same kind of portion sizes as most people seem able to. I was so full that I didn’t eat anything until mid-afternoon the next day.

I used the 3D printer to improve our kitchen knife holder. We have one of those knife blocks with plastic rods that you just sort of jam the knives into. After a while, they get worn and the knives don’t go in so easily. The final straw came when I cut my finger on an exposed blade. I decided to fix it by making a new insert. It’s a very simple design, just a block with slots and a lip that only took me a few minutes to put together in OpenSCAD, but it looks good, it it works well, and hopefully I won’t cut my finger again in that way.

A bamboo block with a black 3D printed plastic insert in the top. It has a variety of long and short slots into which knives are inserted

My 3D printed knife block insert

I’m sure that I bought a Christmas pudding in Waitrose back in September or so, but I was looking for it today and couldn’t find it. It’s entirely possible that my mind is playing tricks and I bought it in 2021 and we ate it last year. I did, however find an old Christmas pudding at the back of the cupboard. At a glance, it looked like it was best before March next year, but when I went to put it on to cook I noticed that I’d misread the year. It was 2013, not 2023. We must have brought it with us from our old flat, because we only moved into our house in 2021.

I had picked up another Christmas pudding in Lidl last week, so I used that one for today.

They usually have a nominal shelf life of about eighteen months, so the old pudding must be about eleven years old. Is that too old? Evidence suggests not and I fully intend to try this ancient Christmas pudding. Steve1989 definitely would.