A Family New Year's Day

A late morning start in the kitchen, preparing a belated family traditional Christmas Eve meal, as New Year was the first time we were all together.

From the picture, you will note that it includes sausages in a reddish brown sauce. This simple statement hides a cauldron of problems for the UK based cook. Ideally, the meat balloons should be very special white and red sausages from Silesia, following my mother's German family tradition. They are still made by certain butchers in Germany, specifically at Christmas, however, they are currently impossible to obtain in the UK.

Over the years, I have substituted simple pork sausages for the white ones and a variety of different dark sausages for the red ones with varying success. I am still waiting to strike gold - or the wurst equivalent.

The meat however is merely a flavour note in a mysterious thick base, called "Polnische Sosse" (Polish Sauce) in my recipe book. This requires two key ingredients not readily available to me.

The first is "Honigkuchen", translated as honey cake. It's like a mild gingerbread. My solution is to bake my own. The second ingredient is "Malzbier", translating as malt beer. Now, a) I do not like beer of any sort (unless it is cooked) and b) malt seems to be a distinguishing feature of a great many beers. Occasionally a friend has brought some Malzbier over. Other times I have experimented with dark ales. This year I found Supermalt and gave that a go.

As always, I managed to cook a meal that had some resemblance to that childhood taste that has been indelibly imprinted on my brain, but never reached the pinnacle of hitting the mark. Mother's Christmas Eve dinners still always taste the best. Still, after 2.5h slaving away in the kitchen, the food disappeared in record time.

With a sufficiently large group of us, we then passed the time with an amalgamation of two board games - the modern Game of London and the (pre-Beaching?) Great Game Of Britain. Our rules need honing, but good fun nevertheless.

Later, the news would percolate into our cosy space, with tales of the Nightclub shootings in Turkey and 'The Queen's Cold'. Brexit received a scant mention - PM Theresa May entreating us to heal the divisions brought on/revealed by last years referendum.