What did you do on FOTCR™ day?

I spent an hour before dinner digging thistles out of the orchard.

This is a job that has to be done while all the grass is short (so, only in winter, as the rest of the year it is uncut wildflower meadow with paths), while the ground is wet but not frozen, while the thistles are still relatively small, and which had been at the top of my ‘To Do’ list for weeks.

There was 5kg, or over 20 litres worth, in total. It’s a pity I don’t have any good recipes for them.
Mr BW was concerned that the brussels sprouts weren’t up to much, but the unseasonably warm weather in the past month brought on just enough for our festive dinner.

As an experiment, he also planted some mange tout in the greenhouse in September, and there were some of those ready too, and a couple of dozen more flowers, so promise of more to come. Who’d have thought that you could grow mange tout for December in England’s most northern county?
Having picked lots of thistles, I considered that I deserved some South African Klein Constantia Estate Red 2017 (“a sophisticated Bordeaux-style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot and, Malbec, known for dark fruit, spice, and oak notes”), probably my favouritest wine still in production, and one of three bottles remaining from those we brought back from our last trip to SA in early 2020. But, I have just discovered it can now be bought in the UK, which is of great joy as previously it could only be sourced via Germany, which made it ‘ridiculously expensive’ rather than just ‘jolly expensive’. However, I note that they currently seem to only have the 2018, which is nowhere near as good as the 2017, and will probably never be, but is still a better red than most of what you can buy in the UK these days.

Because I failed to find the recipe for the nut roast that we enjoyed on 25th December last year (we only eat nut roast once a year), and because it wasn’t in my recipe file, my recipe box, or any of my hundreds of cookery books, or linked in the BW archive from earlier years either, for posterity, the one we had this year was this one (but using fennel rather than celery as Mr BW claims not to like celery, and using brazil and raw cashew nuts).
All the veg were from the garden, including the onions for the onion gravy, except the potatoes, although they could have been, as we do still have some of our own in store, but ours are nice enough to boil rather than roast.

And yes, as we have no-one to please but ourselves, we do eat off 30 year old tin trays, on our laps, in the comfy armchairs that used to belong to Mummy Mr BW, that we saved from the tip as a stopgap and will probably now never change. If you look carefully to the LHS of the photo, on the floor you will see the ‘beach’ coloured blanket that I am currently making.

That is a very strange evening-time picture out of the window of the once-a-conservatory, which should probably now be known as the ‘garden room’ as it now has a solid roof and insulation, but we’ll never remember to call it that.
What did you do on FOTCR™ day?