We did Hogswatch without you…  Happy Belated Hogswatch!  It’s taken me a while to get ahold of pictures, and recover from eating enough to actually write about, well, eating.

What is it?  Check HERE.  Or just know that, in my family, it involves food.  LOTS of food.

There is nothing quite like the feeling of your house shrinking as the number of people in it doubles for a long weekend.

Considering I spent two days cooking and eating nearly non-stop, I actually got a lot of exercise.  By the time we were done cooking on Sunday night, most of the main floor kitchen had been moved to the basement kitchen, one desperately-needed item at a time.  That’s a lot of stair-sprints.

I am not a food blogger.  I just don’t have the patience or memory to not-eat-right-away, make things pretty, or take pictures along the way.  What we produced was not restaurant-pretty, but it was delicious.  Today I’m giving you the rundown of recipes I can link to actual food-bloggers’ sites.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll give you some recipes.

Chicken

We have a slow cooker.  I’m not honestly sure if it’s ever been used.  My parents have a tendency to buy things in a “OH WOW, how did we live without this thing?  We were practically savages!” kind of way, and then they disappear into the bowels of the house, only to reappear years later as a “What. The. Hell?!  Was this a gift?  From someone who doesn’t like us?  Who would buy this?!”

More to the point, we did a little chicken, carrots and potatoes in the slow cooker, using this recipe from the Crockin Girls.

It’s the first time I’ve ‘crocked’ anything, but it turned out fabulously.  SO tasty, tender, juicy and delicious.  The potatoes didn’t cook as well as everything else, so I’d probably skip them next time.  We  used baby potatoes, and chopped heirloom carrots instead of the vegetables they list.  The other change I made is that I slid slices of lemon and lime (and the spice mixture they use) under the skin of the chicken.  It’s pretty easy to do, and is great for flavoring the meat, rather than flavoring the outside of the skin (which no-one in my family eats, especially not after it was steamed into a kind of mushy meh-ness).

I am SO stalking their site for more crock pot recipes.

Figgy Pudding

When I mentioned that I was making this as part of the dessert, my mum’s response was, “What?  That’s a real thing?  I didn’t think it was a thing!”

The alcohol in it gives it a kind of bitter-sweet taste, and it is so full of dried fruit that you could almost pretend that it’s healthy.  It’s spongy and moist and full of tart pieces of fruit.  The part where you flame it at the end wasn’t exactly successful for us, but I’ll be trying it again next time.

We didn’t change the recipe at all, being kind of unsure about what it was meant to be.  it’s from here.

Key Lime Cupcakes

We used this recipe, and it was delicious.  We decorated them in our own special way, with home-made elephant ears and noses for some, and turtle legs for others.  I swear, the elephant and turtle theme makes sense – you should go read a Discworld novel.

In addition to all this, we also had roast duck (from a mishmash of food network recipes), roasted potatoes and beets, spinach and feta tarts, veggie casserole, Wassail Punch, mulled wine, home-made chocolate rats and skeletons onna stick (seriously, it makes sense!), a cheese platter, salad, and cold borscht.  Some recipes will follow.