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Ham Soup With Dumplings
This ham soup with dumplings is a great one-pot meal. You could even freeze the cooking water from the ham on Christmas Day and reheat it to make the soup at a later date. NB: Soup mix is a dried mixture of pulses that you can buy in your supermarket. There are 2 types. One requires presoaking, I only buy the ready to use version! You’ll typically find a mixture of barley, wheat, lentils and small beans in the mixture. Very handy for bulking up a soup or stew and adding fibre to your diet.
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Christmas Fruit Parcels
These Christmas Fruit Parcels are a lighter alternative to cakes and puddings and have no suet and very little fat, no eggs and can be prepared quickly. They can easily be adapted for vegans too.
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Dishwasher Vodka
Normally when infusing alcohol with spices or fruit you have to wait a number of months for the best flavour. This is a cheat’s version, called dishwasher vodka, which if made today will be ready for drinking or gifting tomorrow!
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Sweet Mac And Cheese
As a child I always believed that macaroni was a sweet pasta dish. I didn’t realise that the name of a past corresponds to a shape. My childhood macaroni was normally made with penne. Dad used to cook it in a double-boiler, it’s a type of bain marie. The pasta was slowly cooked in a custard sauce and it was rib-stickingly good. This kind of dish was never cooked in the Summer months, but I have great memories of many milk puddings when growing up. Rice, semolina (with a sinful spoon of jam in the middle), tapioca, and this mysterious macaroni. Now I know that macaroni is a type of…
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St Patrick’s Day Pie
St Patrick’s Day Pie is made at a time of the year when the core ingredients are still fresh, seasonal, and local. I accept it’s also a cheesy/corny name for a pie, but with the green, white, and gold colours what else could I call it? Apparently it’s “Pie Week” in the UK. There’s a week for pies now? I just had to redeem myself after the whole Leftovers Pie affair a few weeks ago. You could eat this pie still warm from the oven, or you could wait for it to go completely cold, wrap it in a snug covering of greaseproof paper, then put it in the fridge…
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Savoury Crumble With Mustard
I was recently contacted by Maille, who asked me to review a gift box of their premium mustards. What better way to review a product than to try it in a recipe and see how it stands up to my Savoury Crumble with Mustard?
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Cinnamon Rolls
A few weeks ago my friend Deb posted a picture of some screen-lickable cinnamon rolls she’d baked. Seeing as she’s in Tipperary and I’m just outside of Dublin it’s not as if we can arrange a delivery so I decided to give them a go and bake them myself.
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Turkey Carrot Rice Crackers
This day fortnight (insert shriek of panic here) you will probably get to the point where you don’t want to see another piece of turkey or ham for a month. Yet sitting in front of you is half an uneaten turkey and likewise a ham. Christmas can be a time of excess and you’ll always spot it at the Christmas dinner table.
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Toffee Apple Cake
I’ve been testing this recipe for a while, in fact since Hallowe’en. I know it’s a long time to be playing around with a bake as important as Toffee Apple Cake but it was important that I got it right. My taste-tester-in-chief has declared it the best apple cake he’s ever tasted. He always says that, I think because he’s afraid if he doesn’t flatter me then his steady supply of cake will dry up. No matter, I have plenty of willing volunteers to take his place!
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Last Minute Christmas List
Well I never did get to do all the 12 days of Christmas blogposts.
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Low Sugar Orange and Grapefruit Marmalade
It is, I think, the 10th of my 12 Days of Christmas blogposts. Today I made a batch of our low sugar orange and grapefruit marmalade. It is still sweet but uses far less processed sugars and so theoretically is good for you.
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Red Cabbage Pickle
It’s the 7th day of my 12 Days of Christmas blog series. Today it’s a little something different that you can gift, or keep for yourself for the table. A seasonal red cabbage pickle.
