Winter's Pleasures

 

What to do with the gingerbread house now that christmas is well and truly over?

A tasty pleasure

First break your gingerbread house into pieces

Then eat it.

And eat it we did.  Quite a lot of it.  The rest of it is in the biscuit tin.

It was a bit soft but not enough to put us off.  K decided he loved it and he's the one now finishing it all. I ate my share and thoroughly enjoyed every gingery, peppery bite.

Thanks to the girls in the office who made it for me. The best gingerbread I've ever eaten

A nightly pleasure

A glass of red wine.  The wine is from the area not far from us called Nemea, known for it's vines and wines.  

We used to buy grape juice in bulk and K then fermented it and made it into wine.  Uusually white wine.

This wine is 2 years old, from a variety of grapes called Agioritiko. It's usually mixed with cabernet sauvignon but this is not. I gave Jan a litre and she found it 'unusual'. Herby. It's described in Wikipedia as being spicy with notes of plum. OK. If they say so. 

Whatever it tastes like we will drink it. We have drunk a lot worse.  40 years ago there was only one wine, served in a metal jug, in every cafe and taverna.  That was a white wine called retsina. Every barrel of wine was flavoured with a lump of pine resin, to kill off any germs. The first glass was a bit rough but the more you drank the easier it slipped down. 

It's out of fashion now and hard to find. 

Simple Sunday pleasure 

For K

A Sunday afternoon ouzo with a friend

Just exactly how K loves to spend his Sundays. A glass or 3 of something with a good friend and a meze.  We had spicy sausage and in the photo is a bowl of rocket from my garden and slices of avgotaraho, salted and pressed fish roe. The spicy sausage was fried and he fried bread in the sausage fat. 

Fishy pleasures 

Kalamari or calamari

Or squid

Tis the season I discovered.  They both told fishy tales about giant squid caught in days gone by.  

We eat them in the summer, frozen. Fried  by Sofia and eaten at her taverna by the sea. Fresh are too expensive

Chestnuts on the wood stove.

I don't like them but K snacks on a couple in the evening