Mercy, Please!!!

Have mercy.

Nine of us for a huge Christmas eve dinner.

Nine of us for a huge Christmas day lunch

Eight of us for a huge Boxing day lunch where everyone bought huge quantities of left-overs (excellent pea soup and honey roast gammon and meringues with fudge sauce definitely worth a mention). Seventeen of us today for a mega huge lunch. Tomorrow a quiet but I’m sure abundant dinner then a no-doubt huge new year dinner too. I am bursting but somehow I’m still hungry. It seems the more I eat the more I would eat. ‘Tis the road to obesity.

Today was walnut bread, wild seed bread, a few antipasti, cheese, boiled salami with sauerkraut (without the sauer), hare in red wine sauce (civet), wild cotton tail rabbit in red wine sauce, a huge roast, guinea fowl with vegetables, roast potatoes and basmati rice. Then a huge apple cake with mascarpone ‘sauce’ i.e. with added sugar, an enormous chocolate fudge-type cake with icing balls on it, cri-cri (a sweet with a hazel nut inside a thick chocolate coating in turn coated with hundreds and thousands… and dipped in the mascarpone sauce). Strain, strain, pop! I mean, how can you not try everything?

Thank god I am not almost totally abstemious (except for some Croatian Juniper grappa) otherwise I think I would have fainted.

When will it end?

I don’t even like food very much. Mind you the company is what counts and this year has been exceptionally good on that front, well, as it is every year come to think about it. It’s hard to be a misanthropist at Christmas but I shall try to revert in January.