Finished reading: On Connection by Kae Tempest 📚

Grey and rainy day in Aberdare ☔️

🍞 Preparing bread

⏰ Early morning Bank Holiday of course

⚽ Tottenham Hotspur 0-2 Aston Villa. I enjoyed that.

Trappistes Rochefort 10

by Abbaye Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy

Belgian Quadrupel, 11.3% ABV 🍺

Dark and delicious but taking it slowly…

⚽ New Year’s Day football Tottenham Hotspur v Aston Villa

🎵 My Top weekly artists: Fontaines D.C. (21), LCD Soundsystem (15), alt-J (12), Arctic Monkeys (10) & Ozawa, Boston SO, Zimerman (8) via tweekly.fm

Really!? Pub Wifi password … but I’ve typed it and it works … got a feeling it’s the default and they don’t know how to change it to something that’s easier on the keyboard ⌨️

Otley Oxymoron stout and O-Ho-Ho ESB brewed at the Bunch of Grapes 🍺

Location check in 🗺 — Bunch of Grapes, Pontypridd. Otley beers being brewed here again 🍺

🔎 Zoom in

Came up in my Readwise Daily Review today. Hadn’t realised that the phrase

We live, as we dream — alone

was Conrad’s. I did know it from the Gang of Four song 🎵 📚

Inspired and informed by The Monitor by @maique 🙏 I’ve got @neatnik’s Web Monitor set up and working at nntk.net/status. No real reason, just seemed interesting 😄

Cookery Books: Afro Vegan by Zoe Alakija 📚

Used for our Christmas meal this year 🎄

Xmas Dinner 2022

I know I’m composing this post a few days late, on the morning of New Year’s Eve, 31st December 2022, but for my reference I do want a record of the food I cooked for this year’s Christmas dinner.

Most years I cook Christmas dinner around a specific theme (often a nationality) or from a particular (often new) cookery book. This year our meal was based on Afro Vegan: Family recipes from a British-Nigerian kitchen by Zoe Alakija.

Starters were

• Lebanese-Nigerian Roast Chickpea Shawarma
• Smoky Cashew and Beetroot Dip

and mains

• Classic Jollof Rice
• Groundnut Stew with Sweet Potato
• Efo Riro (Stewed Greens)
• Suya-Battered Vegetable Kebabs
• Eba

The only slight disappointment was the eba - small starchy balls of dough made from garri flour (cassava). I’d never cooked with the flour before and think I got the consistency wrong - too soft and sticky.

Cooking all that was a lot of work for a relaxed family meal for just the four of us. We certainly didn’t eat everything - leftovers were contributed to a much larger Boxing Day family meal at my brother-in-law’s farm.

This was the first time I’d cooked from Afro Vegan - I will certainly be trying out more recipes from it.