Another idea for Ham: Succulent Wine

Another idea for ham is cooking it in wine. It is my dad’s favourite, and my big time triumph every time I cook for him over the holidays.

Ingredients

1 gammon joint

1 bottle of red wine

enough water from the kettle to top up the pan

5 bay leaves

1 tablespoon cloves

1 red onion

1 ginger root, well cleaned and scrubbed

1 green apple

2 red chilli peppers – if you like spicy, otherwise ½ tablespoons paprika

4 tablespoons of melted butter

3 tablespoons of brandy

½ cup brown light sugar

Prop the gammon in a saucepan with the wine and enough water to cover it. Add the onion, quartered, and the ginger root cut into slices. Add all the spices. 

Let boil for 1 and ½ hours at minimum heat. Bu the end it should be plump and soft and smell of mulled wine. 

Then pull the meat out and let it cool on a rack.

Put the boiled onion, the raw apple and a couple of slices of ginger and the chillies in the food processor. Fry it all in a saucepan with the butter, the brandy and the sugar for about 10 minutes o until it starts to caramelise. 

Cut off the fat from the ham, it should melt off straight form the meat. Leave a little bit to maintain the meat juicy and moist. Draw a criss cross pattern on the fat with a knife.

Cover with the glaze and pop in the oven at 180°C for 20 minutes or until it is all caramelised.

This is delicious with mashed potatoes with extra butter and parsnips with pecans and maple syrup. Or simply sprouts and some rice. 

Also, check out my other Christmas ham recipe. 

What is your favourte way to cook ham? Do you go for turkey, ham or both?

Ham Christmas Special

I love ham. It’s my favourite Christmas meat, and I loved cooked in anything, My favourite version is with cider and a cranberry glace.

Ingredients:

1 gammon joint

2l apple cider

1 white onion

1 apple – I like pink apples for this, type Fuji

3 bay leaves

½ teaspoon cloves

1 cinnamon stick

4 tablespoons of melted butter

1 cup cranberries, fresh or dried and soaked in sherry

3 tablespoons of sherry

½ cup brown light sugar

 Prop the gammon in a large saucepan and fill it up with the cider. Add the apple and the onion, quartered and with their skin still on. Add the spices and the cinnamon and bring to boil for 1 up to 2 hours, according to the size of your ham.

Take the meat out and let it cool on a rack, collecting the juices from underneath. Fish out the onion and the apple.

Put the onion and the apple through the food processor, and put the pulp in a saucepan with the butter, sherry and cranberries. Let it brown, then add the sugar and keep on high heat until it starts to caramelise (about 3 minutes).

Cut the fat off the gammon – it should be soft and melt off the meat. Leave as much as you like, I prefer to leave a small slice but you can be fanatical and get rid of every little bit if you like. Draw a criss-cross pattern on the fat with a knife (you can stick some extra cloves in if you like, but I never bother).

Cover with the glaze and prop in the preheated oven at 180°C for 20-25 minutes.

This is perfect with mashed potatoes and roasted leeks, or some boiled carrots and rice. 

Also, check out my other recipe for ham. 

Christmas treats 6: gingerbread snacks

Gingerbread is delicious. I like making the gingerbread house every year, and the little gingerbread people for snaking. It is linked to fantastic childhood memories and it is fantastic if you have kids because they can help out with so much of the fun stuff.

These little treats have a bit of a different twist, but they are still absolutely wonderful and they can be served up at any Christmas party or just kept on the table as a pretty as well as yummy Christmas treat!

 Ingredients:

350g plain flour

175g light sugar

100g butter

1 egg

4 tablespoons of golden syrup or maple syrup

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1½ teaspoon of ground ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

¼ cup cranberry jelly, or other jam

Stir all the ingredients together to obtain a gingerbread doe. Roll it out on a surface covered in flour (don’t forget to coat the rolling pin and your hands in flour, too).

Cut all of your doe into circles. For half of them, cut another circle inside the first one, so to obtain a gingerbread ring.

Spread the jam on the solid circles, and top each one of them with a ring. Put in the heated oven at 180°C for 10 minutes or until uniformly gold and plump.

Bread and Butter Pudding in a Jar

Now, I love bread and butter pudding. Crucially, everyone I know loves my bread and butter pudding too. The problem with it is that it’s not exactly a portable dessert. Bringing it to a friend’s house for a sleep over, on a picnic or as part of a lunchbox for one of the boys – just too complicated. You end up with a horrible mixture of yellowy mush, which might still taste the same but is unappetising, sticky and messy. But then I realised, the thing I love the most in the world are jars. And bread and butter pudding in a jar is great. Especially with my special version of the classic recipe.

Ingredients:

4 croissants

4 eggs

1 cup of melted butter

½ cup of granulated sugar

1 and ½ cups of full fat milk

½ tablespoon vanilla extract

Tear the croissants apart into medium sized chunks and pass through the grill for a minute. Put the pieces in the jars (which should probably be sterilised but you’ll have to eat this quite quickly so it doesn’t really matter).

Whisk all the other ingredients together in a bowl. Pour the mixture in the jars, keeping in mind it will raise and you still want to be able to close the jar.

Close the lids, shake vigorously and leave in the fridge for half an hour or until you are ready to bake – you can leave them for as long as a day, just give them a shake before putting them in the oven.

Take the lids off, cover the top of the jar with tin foil (which you will poke with a fork) and put in the oven at 180°C for about 15 minutes. Check your jars won’t crack in the oven.

Take the puddings out, let them coo then screw the caps off.

My nephew loves to find a small jar of this in his lunchbox as a treat!

Just because you can’t keep these, it doesn’t mean you can’t give them away as presents. I like to fill the space between the pudding and the lid with boozy plums and their vodka, close the whole thing and give it away as a very last minute Christmas gift. If you want to give it a festive feel, you can mix in half a cup of chocolate chips or, for a more deorative effect, 1/4 cup glace red cherries finely chopped and 1/4 cup glace green cherries, also chopped - it will look like Christmas confetti. It is also delicious with half a cup of rum marinated raisins folded in with the batter.

Christmas Prawn Tray

I am a real sucker for prawns. I love them year round, and I never quite understood why they are supposed to be a Christmas treat. Anyway, as the wise man says, who cares and let’s party. This tray takes quite some time and work, but it is totally worth it.

 Ingredients

About 40 king prawns, without their shell.

10 rashers streaky bacon

3 bay leaves

about 10 slices of good quality smoked salmon

dill

½ cup sesame seeds

1 cup of oil

½ cup of chilli jelly

parsley

40 medium sized wooden skewers

¼ cup freshly torn parsley

172 tablespoon freshly chopped garlic

1 cup olive oil

2 egg yolks

Juice of 1 lemon

Salt and pepper

Put a skewer through each prawn, making sure to go through it twice – i.e. to stab it both in the neck and on the tail.

Put the lemon juice and 1 egg yolk in the food processor and blitz, slowly adding the oil in a steady stream for about 5 minutes. Take the mayonnaise out of the processor, adjust its consistency with a little bit of water (it can get a bit too thick) and add the parsley and the garlic. Put the mayonnaise in a small pot, or in a champagne glass, and place it at the centre of a large round platter. Each type of prawn will take up ¼ of the platter and the guests will be able to dip the prawns in the mayo at their liking. Remember to warn them it was raw eggs in it! If you are catering for a group with lots of pregnant women and small children or ill people, it is probably best to use pasteurised eggs or mayo out of a jar.

Put 20 prawns into a pan of hot salty boiling water and let them boil for 2 minutes. Then take them out and let them cool.

Wrap 10 boiled prawns in the salmon slices, adding a little branch of dill inside each wrap. Put them on one quarter of the big plate, with the prawns close to the mayonnaise jar and the free end of the skewer on the outside for your guests to grab.

The remaining 10 boiled prawns, spread them with abundant chilli jelly on both sides. Stick them on a baking tray covered in tinfoil and leave in the preheated oven at 180°C for maximum 10 minutes, until the jelly has caramelised. Set on another quarter of the plate and leave to cool.

Take 10 raw prawns and wrap them carefully in the wet bacon. Take the last 10 prawns, dip them in 1 egg yolk and cover them in sesame seeds. You can set these two aside until your guests arrive.

When your guests arrive, start frying the last two kinds of prawn. Put the bacon wrapped ones in a frying pan with a tablespoon of regular oil and they bay leaves and let it fry on medium-low heat for 5 minutes (2 and a half minutes on each side or until the bacon is all crispy and delicious). Take them out and put them on one quarter of the plate.

Warm up the rest of the regular oil in a frying pan at maximum heat, and deep fry the sesame coated prawns for about 3 minutes or until they are golden. Leave them on kitchen paper to get rid of the excess oil for a minute, then put them on the last quarter of the plate.

These are beautiful to look at and delicious and a great party mixer! With this you only need to scatter some trays of giant green olives around the living room, a couple of baskets with freshly cut baguette and some fruit and nuts in a centrepiece to have a perfectly reasonable Christmas fete. Follow these up with mint chocolate strips or mini Christmas puddings and you will win everybody’s hearts!

Blue Cheese and Cranberry Vol-au-Vents

Savoury treats are always neglected at Christmas. But they are so many exciting things you can do with typically Christmassy ingredients, and a party is not a party without its savoury snacks.

These are perfect for any under-the-tree party and incredibly simple to make!

Ingredients:

20 shop bought small vol-au-vents- or you can make your own if you are so inclined.

1 cup grated extra mature Cheddar

1 cup single cream

1 cup crumbled Roquefort or other strong blue cheese

¾ cup of dried cranberries

1 cup sherry

½ cup fresh basil leaves, torn

parsley and extra cranberries for decoration

Soak the cranberries in the sherry for half an hour. Then put them in a large bowl with all the cheeses, the cream and the basil. Fold it all in gently together until you obtain a somewhat homogeneous cream.

With a teaspoon, fill up the vol-au-vents with the cheese cream. Prop them in the preheated oven at 180°C for 5 minutes, until the top forms a little golden crust and the inside starts to melt. Take them out and garnish each one with a half leaf of parsley and a cranberry. Serve them with celery sticks on the plate to mop up all those flavours, and maybe a couple of Cranberry Martinis. These are a real treat!

If you don’t even have time to whip this up, try making chutney canapés. This is where my chutney-making obsession comes in handy! These aren’t particularly Christmassy, but they are so delicious nobody will care. You just need to spread some shop bought or pre made ingredients onto round crackers, or water crackers or whatever you like. Some of my favourite combinations are:

Hot aubergine chutney and a cube of feta cheese

Tomato confit with a cube of mozzarella and a fresh basil leaf

Chilli jelly and a small dice of pear

Red Onion Chutney and crumbled blue cheese

Christmas treats 5: panettone trifles

Panettone is great. It’s delicious, and there is so much you can do with it. Quite frankly, I like it as it is, maybe with a little mascarpone sauce and rum raisins.

But these Panettone trifles are truly magical. They capture all the essence of the Panettone and they look sophisticated enough to serve at dinner parties of Christmas parties, or bring over to work for the office’s Christmas fete.

They do contain raw eggs, which means you need to make sure your eggs are fresh and possibly organic. Or you can use pasteurised eggs, which might not be as rich in flavour but are completely Salmonellosis-safe!

Ingredients

About 3 thick slices of leftover Panettone. Better if a bit stale.

300g Mascarpone

3/4 cup icing sugar

a couple of drops of vanilla essence

3 egg yolks (or equivalent from pasteurised eggs, check on the box)

3 tablespoons of Bailey’s

2 tablespoons of rum raisins

Sweetened cocoa for decoration, and crystallised violets, blueberries or cut up orange slices.

Cut the Panettone slices horizontally so to obtain several triangles about 3 inches thick. Trim the rounded edge and toast them in the toaster until they are only slightly crunchy on the outside but still moist on the inside: this will prevent the Bailey’s cream from seeping through. Fit each one of the triangles at the bottom of a small container, such as a sherry glass. I use plastic shot glasses when I bring this over to someone else’s party, so I don’t have to worry about collecting all the little glasses at the end of the night.

Mix the Bailey’s, the rum raisins and 3 tablespoons of the sugar to obtain a homogeneous paste. Dose a teaspoon or so of the mixture onto each Panettone slice in the shot glasses and put in the refrigerator for at least half an hour.

In a large bowl, wisK together the rest of the sugar and the egg yolks. Add the vanilla essence (sometimes I substitute the vanilla essence with almond essence or a couple of drops of crème de cacao blanc, which is white chocolate liqueur). Add the mascarpone and whick it all together until you have a smooth, delicious cream. You get extra points here for not sitting on the floor and eating half the batch with your finger.

Pour on top of the refrigerated shot glasses, and cover it all up with a thick blanket of cocoa. On top you can add a single blueberry, a candied violet or a thin stripe cut out of your home-made candied orange slices (if you do that, you might want to add orange essence to your cream instead of vanilla essence).

I love these little trifles. They are so small they don’t even make me feel that guilty (even though I probably eat more of the stuff whilst cooking than when I serve it) and they look very festive under a Christmas tree. 

Chrstmas treats 4: pomegranate jelly

These are a real treat. They are refreshing after all the chocolate and butter and they keep really well in the fridge so you can make them early in December and use them throughout the festive season. Plus they are red and festive and make for a real table decoration.

Ingredients:

4 cups pomegranate juice

1 drop of jelly red food colouring

7 cups pectinated sugar

juice of two lemons

10g of jelly – either powder or in sheets

about 2 cups of raspberries or cubed pineapple

Combine pomegranate and lemon juice with sugar in  big saucepan and bring to a full rolling boil. Boil for one minute, then take off the heat and add the gelatin. Let it dissolve, putting the pan back on the hob if necessary but without allowing it to boil. Add food colouring and pour in the moulds. I like half-sphere moulds, but you can use whichever small moulds you have available: silicon ones are very good for this.

Drop a raspberry (or a cube of pineapple or whatever fruit you like) into each jelly and make sure the jelly encases the piece of fruit completely. Put in the fridge to set overnight before taking the jellies out of the moulds.

Decorate with a light dust of icing sugar and a couple of holly leaves. An alternative is a light spray of whipped cream and a dollop of rum raisins.

Fantastic at parties or at the end of a big festive meal. 

Christmas treats 3: mini Bouches de Noel

The Bouche de Noel is a staple of the Christmas period. Everyone has their recipe, and to everyone that special combination of chocolate and butter tastes like Christmas. My personal favourite is my uncle’s White Chocolate Orange Cranberry Bouche.

These baby ones aren’t as complicated as the big ones, but they are delightful to serve with coffee under the Christmas tree when you have people over for coffee and presents in the Holiday season.

Ingredients:

1 cup all purpose flour

1 cup dark muscovado sugar

½ cup of sultanas soaked in rum

1 tablespoon crystallised orange skins

200g butter

1 cup dark chocolate chips, which you will melt

3 eggs

Mix all the ingredients together into a doe. Put it in a plastic bag, squeeze it all in a corner and cut the corner.

Cover a baking tray with parchment paper and then squeeze little logs onto it – that is small cylinders of about 1 inch diameter and 4 inches length. Space them out enough so they won’t touch each other when they go in the oven and raise.

Prop the baking tray in the oven at 180°C for 15 minutes, then take them out and let them cool. Transfer them on a rack after 10 minutes and wait until they are completely cool.

1 cup milk or white chocolate chips, melted

Christmas sparkles. I like a mix of golden starts and little silver and red dots.

Dip the bouches in the chocolate and put them on the cooling rack for the chocolate to firm up. When it is a bit more firm, you can draw a wood-like pattern on the cylinders with a fork, so it looks like the bark of a tree. Lastly, add some sparkles and ste in the fridge to dry.

These are delicious with eggnog or, for more grown-up parties, with my eggnog Christmas martini.  Drop a tablespoon of eggnog at the bottom of a Martini glass, top it with a shot of coffee liqueur of Bailey’s, a shot of vodka and a shot of cranberry juice. Garnish with a mint leaf or a peppermint stick. 

Christmas treats 2: mint chocolate strips

Chocolate mint is, for me, one of the most Christmassy combinations there is. When i was little a client of my mother’s used to send us a basket full of pine branches and mint brownies. The two smells together are still magical and Christmassy to me. With time, I have also cracked the recipe for the mint brownies and, because I’m a perfectionist, I have evolved it slightly and turned it into my Chocolate Mint strips.

 Ingredients:

1 cup all purpose flour

1 cup sugar

200g butter

1 cup dark chocolate chips, which you will melt

½ cup dark muscovado sugar

3 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Mix all the ingredients together (a food processor is quite handy but you can live without) and pour them into a rectangular baking tray. Bake for about 30 minutes in the oven at 180°c: at the end the surface should be puffed up and dry, showing the moist inside from the cracks.

Take the brownies out of the oven and, when they are cool, put them in the fridge for a couple of hours – you really need a solid base for this to work out prettily.

In the mean time, prepare the two kinds of icing:

1/4 cup melted butter

4 tablespoons of single cream

3 cups icing sugar

2 teaspoons of peppermint extract

a drop of green gel food colouring

Mix all of these together to make the green mint icing.

1 cup dark chocolate chips which you will melt

¼ cup of melted butter

¼ cup of single cream

1 tablespoon of icing sugar

Mix all of these together to make the chocolate icing.

Spread the mint icing on the brownies and put back in the fridge for at least 2 and ½ hours. Then spread the chocolate icing on top to form a drippy pattern, Pollock-like. Let the green icing peep through! Put back in the fridge for a couple of hours to allow the icing to set.

Cut this into thin stripes about 2 inches wide and 5 inches long. They are delicious served with mint tea or coffee or hot chocolate: I always decorate the plate I put these with some pine branches to add some of the fragrance. 

Christmas treats 1: mini Christmas puddings

I once watched an episode of Nigella where she prepared these marvellous Christmas concoctions. I tried them, tweaked them and made up my own version, which is probably a bit more chocolatey and a bit more alcoholic but I'll never apologise for that. They are, however, delicious and adorable and a great gift or something to show off at coffee time. 

 Ingredients:

1 shop bought Christmas pudding, which you should crumble into about 6 packed cups of rubble

1/2 cup of dark chocolate chips

1/2 cup of milk chocolate chips

1 tablespoon of rum

1 tablespoon of Grand Marnier

1 tablespoon cinnamon

3/4 cup of melted butter (about 200 grams)

¾ cup single cream

½ cup of cocoa

½ cup of white chocolate chips

red and green crystallised cherries

Melt the butter and the cream in a pan and add the dark and the milk chocolate and the cinnamon, stirring until you obtain a creamy mixture. Add the pudding and the rum and the Grand Marnier and mix the whole thing until you have a rather firm paste.

With your hands wet, snap walnut-sized portions of the paste and roll it in between your hands until you obtain a ball. Place it on a tray and go through the entire batch of paste. Place the balls in the fridge for an hour at least. Take them out of the fridge, roll them in cocoa and put them back in the fridge for half an hour.

In the meantime, melt the while chocolate. Take the treats out of the fridge and dollop a small amount of melted white chocolate on top of each, making it drip like rum sauce on a real Christmas pudding.

Put back in the fridge for half an hour, in which time you should try and carve little berries out of the red cherries and little leaves out of the green cherries to make it look like holly. What I do is cut slices of green cherries and little cubes of red ones: they are so little it doesn’t really matter.

Place the leaves and berries in a holly-like ashion on the semi-solid chocolate and then put back in the fridge to solidify.

These are glorious treats. I offer them on a tray with a side of coffee in which I slip a good shot of Bailey’s. 

Candied orange slices

These are one of the most festive things I can think of. They are pretty, they are perfect gifts and they are delicious!

Ingredients:

However many oranges you (not blood oranges)

And

1/2 cups water or 1/2 cup of smooth orange juice

1/2 cup granulated sugar

per orange you are using.

Wash the oranges thoroughly, then slice them into half-inch wide slices. Melt the sugar in the water on medium heat, then add the orange slices and cook on moderate heat for about 20 minutes turning the slices every now and again, letting the syrup slightly boil and reduce itself. Then reduce the heat and leave it on for 10 more minutes, until the syrup turns thick and the slices are translucent and tender but still intact.

Transfer the orange slices to a rack to cool and pour the syrup into a small sterilised jar.

The syrup can be heated up and serve, warm onto icecream or crepes. My favourite is hot American style pancakces served with this warm syrup and with a dollop of cream. You can also use it to make orange ice-cream, fold it into cake batter or use to make chocolate orange cake. Buy or make some chocolate sponge, cut it in half horizontally and spread both the top and the inside with royal icing into which you will have mixed a couple of tablespoons of the syrup.

The slices are delicious eaten just like that. They can be used to garnish desserts (for examples the chocolate orange cake described above), dipped in dark chocolate and offered as candy or frozen and then served with ice cream. You can stack them in a jar and give them away as Christmas presents, or you can run a thread of raffia through the empty centres and make Christmas decorations with cinnamon sticks and anice stars. Our neighbours would always decorate their Christmas tree with gingerbread figurines, threads of orange slices and little red balls, and as a child I used to think their tree smelled like Christmas more than anything in the world. 

Super fast Christmas ideas - 3

Calling this cooking is silly. In fact, these little treats have more to do with assembling than cooking, but provided you have jars available and can go to a supermarket, they will provide the best stocking fillers ever with the minimum of effort.

3 - Cake in a jar

This is straight-out silly. It is barely a real present, but with a nice ribbon and a lovely card it has made some people happier than actual presents!

 Choose a pretty glass 250ml jam jar, and pour in there 4 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons of dark sugar, 2 tablespoons cocoa and 1 tablespoon of dark chocolate chips. Mix well until you obtain a homogenous earthy-like mixture. Then add 3 tablespoons of oil and close the jar. On the tag, specify to add 1 tablespoon of milk and 1 egg, to close the jar and shake vigorously. Then take the lid off and pop in the microwave at max power for 3 minutes. Delicious, thick chocolate cake in no time and with minimal ingredients! 

This being the original "cake in a mug" recipe that has pulled me through moments of discomfort and loneliness, it is also a great finishing touch if you are giving someone a mug for Christmas. I love receiving mugs as gifts, and this would really give it a special kick (of course you'd need to seal the end of the mug with some cellophane and an elastic band that you can conceal with the ribbon.  

If it feels to shabby, try and mix it up by giving three different jars together: a classic one, a white chocolate one and a chocolate orange one. For the white chocolate one substitute the dark chocolate chips and the cocoa with two tablespoons of white chocolate chips or white chocolate passed through the food processor. For the chocolate orange one, add a tablespoon of orange marmalade (the kind with pieces of caramelised oranges skin in it) to the oil and mix it well before pouring it in.

You can even give these with a cellophane bag full of crushed meringues or mini meringues to use as topping!

 

Super fast Christmas ideas - 2

Calling this cooking is silly. In fact, these little treats have more to do with assembling than cooking, but provided you have jars available and can go to a supermarket, they will provide the best stocking fillers ever with the minimum of effort.

2 - Popcorn

Popcorn is fun and can be personalised in so many more ways than the classic sweet-or-salty dichotomy. Plus, it’s easy and fun to make so you can get your kids involved (or your inner kid).

Pop about 2 cups of popping corn in a pan to fill about 8 jars, then let it cool. 

You can top it with a wide variety of sweet and savoury combinations, these are some of my favourites:

Chocolate mint popcorn

5 tablespoons oil (if you are planning on eating it straght away, use 4 tablespoons of melted butter instead)

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup corn syrup (golden syrup is fine)

1 teaspoon strong peppermint extract

1 cup dark chocolate chips

you can add green food colouring if you like

Melt the sugar with the oil and the syrup and let it bubble for 5 minutes in the largest saucepan you have, until it becomes a thick caramel. Add the peppermint, take away from the hob and wait for a couple of minutes. Then add the popcorn and stir it all in. Wait until it’s completely cool stirring every now and again, then add the chips (if you don’t wait they’ll melt and the effect will be ruined).

Christmas popcorn

Same ingredients for the syrup.

For the dressing

2 tablespoons cinnamon

2 tablespoons paprika

1 tablespoon ginger or ground chilli

Make syrup like in the previous recipe, then add all the spices and stir the popcorn in. This is gorgeous because of the deep red colour given by the paprika, which makes it very festive.

Lemon popcorn

Same syrup

1 and ½ cup of lemon juice

½ cup shop bought caramelised lemon skin

Make the caramel like in the two previous recipes, then add the lemon juice and let it boil for one extra minute. Add the peopcorn and, when it has cooled down a little, the lemon skins.

This is delicious and a staple from my childhood: my cousins and I used to make it at sleepovers at my auntie’s house, which always happened around Christmas. The smell of buttery and lemony popcorn and pine is one of the most festive memories I have.

 

Super fast Christmas ideas - 1

Calling this cooking is silly. In fact, these little treats have more to do with assembling than cooking, but provided you have jars available and can go to a supermarket, they will provide the best stocking fillers ever with the minimum of effort.

1 - Dried soup mix

You know how you can make soup out of dry beans by washing them, covering them in water with a cup or so of oil and some spices and letting them simmer for about 1 hour before going trough them with an immersion mixer and blitzing them to a soup consistency?

Well, making a mix of dry ingredients which can all be homeogenised into delicious soup, putting into a jar with a lice label and a pretty ribbon is all it takes to make a perfectly interesting stocking filler.

Here are some of my favourite combinations:

Mexican

2 cups dries Mexican black beans

1 cup dried red kidney beans

1 tablespoon dried parsley

1 tablespoon chopped dried red chilli

Eastern

1 cup dried chickpeas

1 cup dried cannellini beans

1 cup dried wide beans

1 tablespoon dried mint

1 tablespoon paprika

Italian

2 cups dried borlotti beans

1 cup small macaroni

1 teaspoon dried chilli

1 tablespoon dried basil

These all go well with some grated cheese on top, so you could add a slice of good parmesan or posh cheddar to the stocking. Remember that with this kind of thing packaging is essential, but doesn't have to be too complicated. A nice piece of material on top (chequered or maybe in theme with the soup), a nice label or tag and a pretty raffia ribbon are all you need.