Kids Dish

Today, truly, I am the queen of hausfraus.

2 loads of washing up
3 loads of laundry
1 bag of child’s clothes packed for trip
1 drawer of child’s clothes organised (that is, emptied of clothes that no longer fit and filled with freshly laundered clothes that do)
1 child having actual nap at actual naptime (two hours and counting…)
51 biscuits baked

Yay! It’s so rare for me to have a day of actual housework achievement. I usually snatch bouts of laundry or washin up between all the other things I’m trying today at once. Today, I gave myself a domestic day.

The biscuits are a thank you gift for Little Miss’s daycare workers. She’s moving up to a new room after Christmas, and Friday will be her last day - and as one of her usual carers won’t be in then, I thought she’d better take a card etc. tomorrow.

The bikkies are yet another riff on myBootlegged Mrs Beeton Simple Biscuits Recipe, with a handful of dried sweetened cranberries and two handfuls of moist shredded coconut added for good measure. (that was the recipe. no, really) Both are ingredients I bought several weeks ago to experiment with - evidently because I knew I would have to cook interesting biscuits at short notice, sometime in the future! My shopping brain is good like that.

The cranberries thing cracks me up. Australians have never had cranberries as part of their Christmas traditions - our turkey dinner comes via 1950’s English traditions and tends towards the sage and onion variety. Cranberries were just another of those pop culture references from Friends. Oh, we had cranberry juice in our supermarket, but not the berries. Three years ago when I first read Nigella’s How to Be A Domestic Goddess, i skipped over all her cranberry recipes because I figured I’d never have access to the things.

But last year I noticed the occasional bag of frozen cranberries in a gourmet deli, and this year I spotted tinned cranberries in our local supermarket, and now it’s Christmas and they’re everywhere! Many different varieties, all preserved, all with big holly-and-berry Christmas signs pointing the consumers their way. Almost as if they were here all along.

It’ll be sweet potato casserole with marshmallows next, mark my words.

They sure are pretty, though.