Christmas 2013

Christmas and Boxing Day this year was spent at my parents... with a full tree, the sounds of squeals while opening gifts, alot of follow-up Lego building and way too much food.








Christmas Day in Sydney was cool with a bit of rain, perfect for our hot feast of roast pork, turkey and ham with all the trimmings... and the warmer Boxing Day was our new tradition from the last couple of years of seafood lunch with marinated prawns, prawn cocktail and a salmon. I've never made a prawn cocktail before, but I made up a sauce from Taste website and it was delicious (with a change to the cream from the recipe).

Prawn Cocktail Sauce
1/4 cup tomato sauce
1/4 cup thickened cream
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
Dash of tobasco sauce

Just throw all the ingredients together and mix. For the adults we drizzled it over the prawns and shredded iceburg lettece and the kids had it as a dipping sauce.

As a first this year, I didn't make our Christmas Pudding but instead we tried Heston Blumenthal's Hidden Orange Christmas Pudding. Last year it sold out so we grabbed it early this year and it was delicious. We decided to microwave it instead of steaming for 3 hours, which I think dried out the sides a little bit, but it was lovely and moist inside. Not a huge pudding though... well not for my hungry clan!

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas with their family. Our first couple of days are being spent doing a BIG clean-up of our toy room, I am being ruthless in toy culling and in the meanwhile making room for all their new Christmas goodies.

My world right now

My world right now is consumed by the upcoming holidays. I have been gathering supplies, building a big box of craft goodies and activities for the kids for their month of school that starts this afternoon as well as preparing for Christmas at my parents house. I have also been pinning lots of ideas over on my Pinterest boards if anyone else is in search of things to do for the kids.

Our plans for these holidays are to just relax. There are no plans to travel anywhere, no calendar full of activities, just a rough idea of a couple of things we want to visit like the Zoo and Powerhouse Museum and perhaps a movie or two, but mainly to just let the kids sleep in, have lazy afternoons and trips to the beach just down the road.

My little old blog which started as a record of the kids when they were born, has become a bit of a sewing blog which gets left idle when sewing doesn't happen and I don't like that.. there is so much else going on around here, fun things like our new addition Lucy, an 11 week old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel that I want to share. While I do have plans to sew during these holidays, I am going to try blogging more on everything else that comes with living in this crazy home...