January blues

 January is a pretty depressing month in a normal year, the lights of Christmas have to be taken down, the weather is shit and its still mostly dark. And I think we can all agree this year is even worse being in lockdown number three, post a Christmas that had to be changed at very short notice. Going through last years diary to transfer dates over to my new one and seeing all the things that had been cancelled last year, I'm not exactly the most social person anyway, but it was still sad to see how my little world got smaller. And as things I was looking forward to in the summer are already being cancelled its getting harder to find hope and things to look forward to.

And I don't mean to make this all super depressing, but when my worklife is covidcovidcovid, then my social media is also covidcovidcovid, and there's nothing else going on because covidcovidcovid its hard to see the light.

So I'm trying to celebrate the little holidays. Kind of inspired by The Everyday LoreProject  that I sadly found at the end of last year when the project was into it's final month. For the last few years I've had an Almanac , I funded the first one on Unbounders and find it so interesting I buy one every year. It covers things like celestial events, planting times, seasonal recipes, and each year has had a theme like what goes on in bee hives or hedgerows. This years theme is travelling and has history and events related to the Traveller communities in the UK. This year I also have a Food Almanac which is a great collection of essays and recipes.

Hopefully between these two, and any other high day celebrations I can find, I can fill my diary a little bit. So here's what I managed in January.

Lemon Pig

He's got a very shiny coin

So technically this one isn't for January, but as a New Year tradition its a good way to start the year. Started on twitter a few years ago thanks to @70s_dinnerparty (an account that shares the very worst recipe ideas from 70s cookbooks), this was meant to be a good luck charm for the year. All you need is a lemon, some cocktail sticks, cloves, a bit of silver foil and a shiny coin. The cocktail sticks were a nightmare to find but I did manage it and a month later I still have my lemon pig, although slightly shrivelled and it no longer holds it's shiny 5p.

Quadrantids

This is a meteor shower that is visible at the beginning of January but it's peak is only a couple of hours, much shorter than some of the showers in the year. They were meant to be visible about 5pm so we went out for a night stroll (because 5pm is dark then) to try and see them. I really miss night time walking, it normally means we've been out to the cinema or pub, but at least you don't see many people out after dark. Unfortunately there was a lot of cloud cover so no meteors for us, but at least we tried.

Wassail

Drink weil!

This is celebrated on Old Twelfth night, which was either the 15^th or 17^th Jan, depending on which calendar you use. We opted for 17^th, the date from the Gregorian calendar. Wassailing happens a lot more in the parts of the country that have strong apple connections, like in Kent or the south west in the cider making regions. Not so much in the fens as they don't have a lot of apple orchards. The Wassail is to scare the bad spirits from the trees and give thanks, and hope for a good harvest. My poor lone apple tree has had a rough time in the past, when we moved in it was hidden by weeds and brambles and only produced a single apple. Last year, after managing to keep it bramble free for a few years it decided to have a massive growth spurt and didn't even produce blossom. I was assured this is perfectly normal, but it ended up a really weird shape, and so this winter I had to give it a trim. As a bit of extra encouragement to produce fruit it got it's own wassail. I made a mulled cider for which I had to get cider brandy which was a bit difficult, but really delicious and even my cider adverse husband enjoyed it. We took a shot full for the tree, and a piece of toast (one of the many origin stories of 'toasting') and cheered the tree. I didn't bang any pots, I think we were loud enough to discourage any bad spirits from the tree. I was planning to make these apple and pear muffins to have at the time but didn't check the recipe fully and so made them later in the week. They were still nice, even without the mulled cider to drink with them.

Burns Night

The Food Almanac has an essay by the lovely Signe Johansen about whisky, and drinking whisky. I feel whisky is something I would like to drink, on an aesthetic level. So with this essay, and Burns night, I thought this would be a really good chance to try whisky and learn to appreciate/love it. We went to Edinburgh a few years ago and we didn't get around to doing a whisky tasting, but I found a tasting set which contained a dram from each whisky producing area. If I could learn to like beer and red wine I was sure I could do the same with whisky.

Turns out I couldn't. I didn't get past the first bottle, like not even finishing my half dram. It was very sad. I have the other bottles so maybe this was just a style I don't like and my perfect one is still sitting in the box on the kitchen table waiting for me.

I did cook the traditional haggis though, that was something I did have in Edinburgh and did enjoy. We'd had it stuffed inside chicken breasts at a tiny restaurant so I did something similar but with pork tenderloin. I followed it with some Cranachan, which we'd had in the same place. I misremembered us having some big brand whisky in the house, so ours was a virgin Cranachan, but given how the tasting session went that was probably for the best.

#WinterWatchList

Teeny Tiny Flowers

I love Springwatch, and all the others they host, and I'm so glad they've managed to make the show work, even if everyone is in separate locations. For this show they set a challenge for people to keep an eye out for specific winter migrants and plants. I did try, but as I'm still working I didn't get to see all the items. I did find a medium difficulty item though, the flowers of hazel. I'll be honest, they practically poked me in the eye as I walked into work one morning. I did find some snowdrops as well, but it's the worst photo.

BigGardenBirdwatch

This is the annual bird count run by the RSPB over the last weekend in January. I've not taken part before but now is always a good time to start. I started putting food out for the birds a few weeks ago, mostly to try and stop the bluetits from eating my forsythia buds, but also to encourage the birds in so I'd have something to see. I set myself up with tea, binoculars and reference books in the kitchen, unfortunately I had to stand as the windows are too high to see out of if sat on a chair. There weren't as many birds as the day before, I'm sure they knew I was trying to watch, but I had bluetits, shouty blackbirds, and what may have been some dunnocks but I thought were sparrows. One of the local cats appeared about 20 minutes in and looked like it was going to settle down to eat grass but luckily it didn't stay long and the birds carried on.

Pikelets

This isn't really holiday related but one of the January recipes in the Food Almanac was for Pikelets, a type of welsh cake, and came with the writers memories of them being made, and it bought up my own memories of going to see Aunty Meg (my uncles aunty, not actually related to me) in her little house up the Rhondda and her making these for us on her range which took up a good chunk of the tiny kitchen, and given the age of the house was probably responsible for the heating. Aunty Meg died last year so I can't go and sit in her kitchen any more, but I'll think of her every time I have the tiny round cakes. So I think that is the last thing I'll do for this month; eat cake, drink tea and toast Meg.