My best friend Shelley gave me the Jerusalem cookbook, by Yotam Ottolenghi, for Christmas and I've already made three fab dishes from it: a chicken and cardamom rice casserole, a syrup-laden orange, coconut and semolina cake, and a kick-arse hommus. It's a brilliant inspiration: almost everything in it I'd love to try.
How was your Christmas? We had ours down south on Boxing Day so we could be with eldest son and the grandkids. It was all very merry but the start of the heatwave, and as successive days got hotter and hotter, we felt quite glad – unusually – to leave the bay and head for home and the air-con, where we rode out the worst of it in quiet comfort.
:: Lily's been home for two weeks and I'm already thinking that in just over a week she'll be back on a plane heading for winter and Osaka again. No! Does her mum's heart good to have her here!