Vegetarian Christmas

 Aldi always have a few special vegetarian things in their freezers for Christmas. It's handy to have something a bit different for the main part of a meal that can be just popped in the oven. Individual  'bakes' - useful for people on their own. I wouldn't want to eat them everyday - too many strange ingredients, but useful now and again .

This is one of the packs  I bought. Sweet Potato and Butternut Squash Rostis.

I served up with a few Aldi ziggy chips and veg. The rosti was quite tasty with good flavour and plenty big enough. It looks burnt but that was just the 'basil melting centre'.

Then the opposite - a home-made nut roast. I had to search the blog for the recipe used earlier in the year,  as  I'd forgotten to add it to the recipe page and found it from back in February. HERE is the blog post. I had more nuts this time so upped everything else too and made a deeper loaf. Last year I cut into slices and froze in twos, which was a bit too much, this year as the loaf is deeper I've sliced, wrapped and frozen individually. The slices need to be defrosted before re-heating in the microwave. It made 7 good sized slices.

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The weather really was grim yesterday, it was still dark when I got up at quarter to eight, it was gloomy in the church in Stowmarket (tree festival tree photos another day) even though they had all the lights on. It started pouring at home just after midday and it was dark again long before 4pm.

I found a comment from few days ago that I'd not seen, it was from a reader from way up north in  the Faroe Islands! Wow! Included was a link to a collection of Christmas youtubes . I'll be having a look at some later - there are dozens!

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwykVSaCN9CRMr1C37wwT5gOcV0N6hCwa&si=AcAOVoJ4b1_zpuA2