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Christmas Menus 2023 First Draft

First cut of menus for Christmas 2023. Work in progress. Main meal only. Vegetarian. Christmas Eve dinner to Boxing Day.

Christmas Eve

Food

  • Sugared, chocolate-coated, gilded, and silvered Brazil nuts and almonds
  • Chickpeas and cannellini beans with hispi cabbage and cavolo nero
  • Frangipane
  • Soft cheeses

Drink

  • Sparkling water (eg, Vichy Célestins)
  • Kir Royale with a twist of hibiscus
  • Sparkling white wine (Maybe a Franciacorta)
  • Sweet wine with the desert (Recioto?)
  • Atlantic coastal brandy with the cheese

Christmas Day

Food

  • Friselle with tomato, oregano, basil and rocket, chilli flakes
  • Creamy risotto with butternut squash and Brussels sprouts, sage, dried Senise peppers
  • Mince pies with brandy cream or brandy butter
  • Hard cheeses and blue cheeses, nuts, dried fruit, charcoal crackers

Drink

  • Sparkling water (eg Ferarelle)
  • Negroni
  • White wine (to be decided - or maybe a Puglian orange wine?)
  • Dryish champagne with the mince pies
  • PX or Port with the cheese

Boxing Day

If the weather is bearable, do this as a picnic.

Food

  • Filo parcels with festive vegetables and smoked tofu
  • Soured red cabbage with winter spices and bitter orange
  • Stollen, brandy butter

Drink

  • Sparkling water (eg S. Pellegrino)
  • Mulled wine
  • Brandy

So, last week’s OpenAI chicken coup was a grift to hype their Q* product.

Few things say global Britain more than a freight train of empty FreightLiners trundling to Tilbury.

The OpenAI game of thrones reminds us that in the broösphere you will be replaced by AI, not them.

Interesting that OpenAI’s backers and funders are keen to hang on to insubstantial TED-talker Sam Altman: it suggests that OpenAI in fact have nothing.

I wonder what causes the painful broken glass in the ears treble that I hear when listening to digital music. Is it my ageing ears, crap equipment, or the wrong settings? Or have people got used to sharp but lifeless, shallow and un-nuanced highs in pursuit of thumping bass?

A tugboat pulls a large float advertising pesto (of all things) past the O2.

A float advertising pesto is being pulled up the Thames by a tugboat past the O2 dome on the Greenwich Peninsula as the sun sets.

Britain’s elite institutions appear to be spectacularly incapable of producing a governing class able to run a modern country. Perhaps this explains the dominant reactionary thread that is woven through an establishment that aspires to rule the past.