My previous post took our super-exuberantly celebratory week as far as Christmas Eve.

For Christmas Day we'd promised ourselves a bubbly breakfast, a proposition that involved several stages of preparation.

Weeks before, we procured the bacon that was going to figure in the breakfast buns, plus the bubbles (which were Spanish, reminding us of the wonderful journey we made when journeys were still possible, and produced with Viura grapes from the Valencia region).

The day before, I made the low-carb buns for Nigel's version of breakfast.

And we made some orange-juice ice cubes. The bubbles bottle suggested serving its content over ice. We don't normally do this (why dilute good alcohol?), but we thought, hey, orange-juice ice cubes will give us a version of Buck's Fizz, and be nice and festive.

The oranges we've been buying lately have been super-juicy. Unfortunately, the one we selected for ice-cubing wasn't, and Nigel got a pretty good workout even squeezing enough for four cubes.

Never mind, we said, we'll icify the first glass, and have the rest plain. No worries.

Christmas Day arrives, we wake up all perky at the idea of a bubbly breakfast, and then Nigel says: "Did anyone remember to put the bubbles in the fridge?"

OK, so that's the kind of question you already know the answer to...

I blame him. He's in charge of drinks. He blames me. I'm in charge of parties.

The whole affair took us back to one notable wedding anniversary, when we still lived in England. It was summer, the evenings were long, and we'd packed up a picnic, complete with a bottle of wine, to enjoy at Maiden Castle (an Iron Age hill fort, with fine views, not far from our house). We toiled up, laden with food and drink; we sat ourselves down on the sheep-mown grass -- and we realized we'd forgotten the corkscrew...

Anyway, back to yesterday. We couldn't put the bottle in the freezer (have you SEEN the stuffed state of our freezer?), so we stuck it in the fridge. We're very poor at delaying breakfast, so we figured we'd have some coffee, and dispatch the cinnamon apples that were supposed to be the second course, and by that time the bottle might be cold.

Well, seven o'clock rolls round, and the sparkling stuff is far from cold. Hell, you could have used the thing as a hot-water bottle.

This is no good, we thought. It cost a reasonable amount of money (nothing alcoholic is cheap in these parts), and we're not going to drink it subpar. So the Christmas Day bubbles were reassigned to be the Boxing Day bubbles.

The bacon-and-egg buns were still awesome, though. When I was a kid, chunky sandwiches used to be called "billwiches" (to distinguish them from samwiches). These were definitely billwiches.



But now we'd run out of stuff with which to make Boxing Day breakfast buns to accompany the delayed bubbly. Luckily, La Boca Ria, the nearby Spanish restaurant that we've mentioned many times before, was on hand to provide not only restorative morning coffee and prune cake but also some Serrano ham.


The rest of the day was low-key, but enjoyable. We never do Christmas in a huge way. But we did a couple of dance sessions to Christmas hits of years gone by (which are still Christmas hits this year, it seems...). We talked to family. We exchanged messages with friends on Facebook. We watched a Christmas-appropriate movie.

And we consumed more good food. Because that's what you do at Christmas, right? You eat stuff.

Below is our evening platter. It was all pretty tasty (I should definitely roast carrots more often), but the highlight for me was the roasted garlic. You may find it hard to believe that I have reached such an advanced age without ever having roasted a garlic bulb. Yet this is, in fact, the case. I'll be making up for lost time, though... Roasted garlic is mild, buttery, and delicious. My only regret was just doing one...


The second course was cheese... Thanks to La Boca Ria, we were able to include two things that are very rare round here: goat's cheese, and blue cheese (to be precise, an Asturian blue cheese, made with milk from cows and sheep, which made me feel nostalgic for our Spanish trip all over again...).

When I was little, Christmas celebrations, as I reminisced last year, involved three generations. When my grandma was leaving at the end of the day, she would always say: "Well, it's as far away now as it will ever be." These words always turned my infant heart cold. It was true, I used to think, glumly... No more Christmas for a whole year...

But I now know the answer to this anti-climax: save the bubbles for Boxing Day...

We woke up this morning, thinking: "Bubbles!"


I constructed the Serrano ham sandwiches. Easy.

The next job was to get the orange-juice ice cubes into the pre-chilled glasses.

Not easy.

Our ice-cube thingummy is a disaster. It looks all smart and swivelly and sophisticated, but it comes all in one piece, so every time you want one cube, all its brethren have to come out of the freezer too. And, worse --  it's a MAJOR undertaking to get the cubes out of it...

In fact, one of my chili-preservation schemes involved entombing them in ice-cube trays, and the reason I returned to making sambal oelek (in itself not an unfaffy business) was that the ice-cube idea is just not practicable if you have to expend 15 minutes and masses of vitriol every time you want to add chili to something...

This morning, the four measly orange-juice ice cubes stuck like barnacles.

The chili ones, on the other hand, were this time all up for volunteering, and had to be restrained. Chili chocolate is one thing, but chili sparkling wine -- maybe not.


Anyway, the things eventually relented; the bubbly was poured; it looked pretty (see the pic at the top); and it tasted good. 

We're going to make this a Boxing Day tradition from now on.

Minus the recalcitrant ice cubes.