I smiled at Faye W’s post about putting away the recipe book because of a Thanksgiving trip. Here we are almost totally oblivious to Thanksgiving. Our “Harvest Festival” is a small and solely religious thing that has a church service at its heart, coupled with a bit of charitable giving. There is no big celebration, no bells and whistles and no holiday.

To be honest, even Christmas day in our house is a day much like any other. We probably eat slightly differently from normal but overall it’s a modest, almost frugal affair. We have no heritage of opulent Christmases around here.

Tonight we had my hand-made recipe book out, not for this recipe but for the one on the other side of this page – a recipe for cheese and onion pie. That recipe wasn't as photogenic because it was printed from the internet from the Beeb's website. This recipe was from DM’s own fair hand…and let me tell you, that’s a rare and precious thing. He rarely ever writes anything by hand. Faye – I will send you this recipe for bread. It’s foolproof and I don’t mean to be disparaging about DMs cookery skills but he’s not really much of an expert but the bread is as delicious as any I’ve ever tasted.