Between times & cranberry love

The Christmas and Boxing Day festivities are over and family and friends have been packed off to their respective homes.

We are in the “time between times” as the Celts might have described it. That liminal period between Christmas and New Year where a post-festivities slump slinks in and it’s time for relaxation before it all kicks off again for Hogmanay and New Year. The quality street are down to the last few in the tub that no one likes.

I love Christmas, but it’s exhausting. So much cooking, washing up, trying to keep animals from killing each other, trying to keep relatives from killing each other.. it’s stressful. And a day in the kitchen feels like a gym workout with kettlebells.

So these few days are precious. Husband and I have relaxed, eaten what we like, and in the spirit of using up what we didn’t use for Christmas, eaten lots of leftover beef, turkey, cheese and vegetables.

I made three litres of the most delicious turkey stock with the carcass yesterday, and froze most of it. The rest was turned into a turkey and vegetable soup-stew with orzo, and as there were a handful of fresh cranberries left, in they went too.

This is the time for eating up leftovers, using what you have so that there’s no wastage, and revelling in the new taste combinations that you may discover when you combine unlikely things.

We’ve overdosed on fresh cranberries this year. I was so excited to be able to buy them that I bought three boxes of them, and we’re just finishing them off now.

They’ve gone into cocktails, sausage and cranberry rolls, fresh cranberry sauce, venison and cranberry cottage pie (which has become a bit of a tradition for our Christmas Eve meal since we moved up to Scotland) and lots of other things. That unexpected little sour hit with the richness of a meal is delicious.

I’m tempted to squirrel away a few cranberries in the freezer for use in the new year, as it seems to be impossible to buy fresh here except for a week before Christmas.

I’ve even wondered if it’s possible to grow them here. It should be…

Cranberry love. Is it a curse?