Pudding

Boxing Day saw the opening of this year's Christmas pudding, assembled, I think, in November.

Festive tablecloth from a proper market man, who used to trade under the name of 'Dave's Discount'. A man selling a range of discounted, discontinued, stolen and cheap household textiles, a man with a very big mouth, renowned in the area for his rudeness to his customers. But they seemed to love it and I imagine he made a decent living at it.

Accompanied by a wine from New Zealand provided by a correspondent. Preliminary search failed to find any record of our having had the stuff before, but I thought I recognised one of the pictures on the website at reference 1 and persisted. It turns out that we have had it at least once previously, at Chippenham, as noticed at reference 2. Turned up by searching for 'arawines' rather than 'ara', with blog search being a whole word search which does not allow part search, as other products often do.

I was reminded that some of the wine growing country in New Zealand is pretty rugged.

A picture which Google Image Search suggests is available from both Dreamstime and CanStockPhoto,  with the former captured above. Both places are quite careful with their copyrights, which is perhaps why the image cannot be captured directly from the wine website, with the first of the two snaps above being extracted from a screen scrape. Described as Wairau Valley in Southern Alps, South Island, New Zealand. Which is right for the wine. 

Sadly, careful inspection reveals that the images are not the same, not even harvested from the same original, although they might both have been captured from roughly the same spot on the ground. A convenient pull-in on some mountain road? A special deal from the Google Street View people?

Pudding preceded by gammon, taken boiled and hot with boiled vegetables. Very good, and a bit lighter than roast, leaving a bit more room for the pudding to follow.

Pudding in the serving dish, with two sorts of sauce as tradition dictates; custard sauce (yellow) and syllabub (white).

Pudding on the plate.

We did perhaps a third on this first outing.

Thus leaving room for a little something which was even more calorific.

The pudding survived a further three outings, taken with regular custard on the last occasion.

There was some discussion about the year to come. Shall we stick with one large pudding, two small ones or one small one? Opinion settled, for the moment on two small, perhaps one for Christmas and one for Easter - but we shall see: it would be something of a break not to go to the whole hog in the pudding department, now that we have abandoned turkey, mince pies, paper chains, Christmas crackers, Father Christmas and Christmas cake. Although, in fairness, this year we did invent the sprout tree, noticed at reference 3.

PS: licking the ends of the links of what seemed like endless paper chains was a prominent feature of childhood Christmas. Furthermore, we even had real candles on the Christmas tree, held more or less upright with little spring clips to twigs underneath, presumably long banned by the Health & Safety (fire division) people.

References

Reference 1: https://www.arawines.co.nz/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/to-chippenham.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/12/festive-sprout.html.