This chocolate whisky liqueur is a little piece of Christmas heaven in a glass. Bring it out on Christmas Eve when you’ve finally managed to wrangle the kids into bed, waited patiently until they’re soundly sleeping and are left facing several hours of finishing up the wrapping and assembling of presents to go under the tree before they wake up again, in oh, maybe five hours. Unless of course you live in an alternate universe (quite popular these days) and Santa delivers yours, in which case you can turn on a favourite Christmas movie and relax. This recipe was in,…
Pudding&Mess Posts
I’m something of a minimalist when it comes to decorating for the holidays. Actually I’m a bit of a minimalist all the time, it’s just a little more obvious at this time of year. I have very little in the way of store bought Christmas knickknacks, other than all the ornaments collected over the years which hang on the tree. I tend to feel a little claustrophobic if I have a house brimming with decorations and so much Christmas stuff involves a lot of red. So much red. I don’t like red. I do love Christmas cheer and holiday sparkle…
~Fates and Furies Lauren Groff A story told in two halves. Lotto – 6’6″, privileged and blessed with a charm and charisma that draws people to him, marries Mathilde a mere few weeks after they meet. They move to New York where Lotto struggles to make it as an actor and Mathilde works in an art gallery to make ends meet. They are poor but happy, with a marriage that’s the envy of their friends. The years pass until one New Year’s Eve in a drunken stupor, Lotto writes a play about his family and goes on to become a successful playwright.…
I know summer is just a distant memory at this point with the holidays just around the corner, but I’m finally getting around to posting what I read over the summer. ~Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death M.C.Beaton I had heard rumblings that people who had read this Agatha Raisin series were not happy with the screen version (see my review of that here). Curious, I decided to read the first book, Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death, and make a judgement call for myself. As a self-confessed lover of the so called “cosy” English mystery, I thought this was…
~The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo Taylor Jenkins Reid At 79, Evelyn Hugo has spent her adult life as a Hollywood darling. Now that everyone important to her is dead, she has decided to put a tell-all memoir of her life out into the world… to be published posthumously. Evelyn knows her story will be a hot commodity: after years of her life playing out in the media she then chose to hide herself away in relative anonymity. It is something of a surprise then that she hires an unknown journalist to write the book. Evelyn grew up poor and trades her…
~Killers Of The Flower Moon David Gann A true crime story that makes your blood boil and stuns you into stony silence at the potential for human depravity. In the 1800’s the Osage Indians were run off their reservations several times by the US government, in the end being forced to hand over nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land. In the 1870’s they found land in Kansas that was so hilly and rocky they deemed it of no interest to the white man and decided to purchase it. Then, in an amazing twist of fate, it turned out that…
The Gimlet has a backstory along the lines of the Gin and Tonic. It was created as a way for the navy to incorporate lime juice into its diet to avoid scurvy. These days scurvy may be almost unheard of, but between 1500-1800 roughly two million sailors died of what was a very painful death. In the 1790’s it was discovered that lemons were responsible for holding scurvy at bay, prompting all sailors to be issued a daily dose of the citrus to be consumed in rum. In the 19th century, lemons were switched to limes because they were more…
Should you ever be struck with a sudden inexplicable urge to stand on the northern-most point of the UK you would have to travel to the remote Scottish archipelago, the Shetlands, and it’s tiny rock-island of Muckle Flugga. It features a lighthouse and, well, that’s about it, but its stunning views of rolling Shetland hills and the Atlantic compensate. As far as the most northerly inhabited island, that would be Unst. Unst is a community of about 600 people, lots of cute shetland ponies, a brewery and a distillery. I’m sure the last two are highly vital to remote island…
~Lark Rise To Candleford Think of this show as the BBC version of Little House On the Prairie. It’s all warm and fuzzy and positively bursting at the seams with moral goodness. And I mean that in the nicest possible way because I love both shows. Lark Rise is a hamlet of poorer townsfolk while the market town of Candleford is its wealthier neighbor. Sixteen year old Laura Timmons (Laura Ingalls) is the bridge between the two, her adult voice narrating the stories. She leaves her family in Lark Rise to start a job at the post office with her mother’s…
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley opens with the line “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” which is considered to be one of the best in literature. It is a quintessentially British story, evoking a bygone era with its country house setting and people who spend glorious summer days lounging, swimming and partaking of tea on the lawn. It is a classic coming- of- age story which embodies the confines of class structure and the rules and manners of Edwardian England while also encompassing themes of power, forbidden love, memory, lost innocence and the impact of the past on the future.…