It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Yesterday morning, I woke up to a beautiful winter wonderland right outside the window. I was surprised to see that it had snowed during the night, but somehow really happy. It is exiting to show Fleur another aspect of nature, even if we were in the snow last year, she understands it so much more this year. Now she already had her first creaky walk through the snow and threw her first snowball. I hope the snow will stay for the next couple of days so that we'll have a white Christmas this year.

A bit of Julehygge

The majority of December was spend being sick. In fact I think at least one person in our household has been sick every day of this month. Still I managed to sneak in a bit of Christmas hygge in those tiny windows of well being.

This year, I decided to try and bake spekulatius cookies and the first batch turned out really well. As always I made lussebullar for Lucia. Christmas and my urge to bake are somehow closely connected and this year I had a little helper by my side. (Wonder if she was trying to draw Santa on the table)

Knitting Craze

It's the time of year, where I start getting down to the K'nitty-gritty. Now that I have someone in the house who needs an ever changing garderobe it's easy to find new cute mini projects, that I can spend my precious evenings on.

This year I almost didn't manage to take a break in the knitting, there has been constant new inspiration and yarn that I want to use. So far I did this read cardigan, a pattern from Hoppestrik and from yarn that I bought last year on the Boxhagener Saturday food market. Turned out that there was not enough yarn, so I ended up having to order some more online and got caught by another interesting yarn on the website, so I thought, "why not?" I have wanted to make this adorable chunky sweater from Knitting for Olive ever since I found it on Pinterest while I was pregnant. Which didn't take long knitting on size 7 needles. And while I was at it and had some extra yarn to spare, I decided to make a small cardigan for Esmeralda as well, so she wouldn't go chilly through the winter.

I though that was it for now, but apparently I am unstoppable this year. I already started another sweater, but this time with many colors for the summer, so there is something to look forward to.

The Tale of an Acorn

Back when we could still wear short sleeved t-shirts outside, we spend some afternoons gathering acorns nearby.

I read that it's possible to make acorn flour and thought, why not? It's been a while since I indulged a completely unnecessary experiment.

When I say we spend a couple afternoons, it was because I made the rookie mistake of picking the green acorns instead of the brown. After we spend some hours de-shelling the acorns we gathered that day, we found out that we needed to use the brown ones and had to with a couple off weeks before we went back.

Acorns need to go through quite a long process before you can actually eat them. They contain a lot of tannin, and I am sure you could get a mean stomach ache, if you ate them unprocessed. First they need to boil, then you need to dry them (I did this in the oven), and to make flour you obviously need to mill the dried acorn pieces (or as I did: use a very good food processor). After all this work, we ended up with around 250 g of flour, which doesn't sound of much, but it was enough to make a couple of batches of acorn cookie during the fall. I used a normal short bread recipe and replaced half the normal flour with our the acorn flour.

I was wondering if the taste would be worth all the work, and even though it is not the best cookie I've ever had in my life, it was really unlike anything I ever tried - not at all bad, but very sweet. So I won't reject that I would go through the same laboursome process when next years fall when the ground once again will fill up with acorn en masse.

Paris 2

Vincent and I also had the opportunity to spend an afternoon alone in sunny Paris. We meet in the south and went through a new neighbourhood where we found a little place to have steak frites. Afterwards we went to a gallery and ended up enjoying the last of the afternoon sun at the busy Tuileries.

Arboretum

As always the Aboretum near Vincent's mum is really beautiful, especially with all the great colours of fall that I love so much. As you might be able to see from the pictures, it sometimes feels like an enchanted forest and other times just like a regular park.

Earlier we noticed a lot of parakeets here, but this time we definitely saw more than hundreds of them painting the sky green. I also manage to get up close to one and take a snap shot while it was busy eating.