Ruddle Family Sunday Lunch

Well, we survived. I think. Mostly!

There was only one family flounce, no one murdered anyone and there was just enough food left over to indicate that I had catered enough but not so much that we were gloomily foreseeing leftovers for the rest of the week instead of pub lunches!

We were up fairly early, and The Builder set to, peeling and prepping a positive Everest of potatoes, parsnips, onions, carrots, sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower. We remembered to set aside a small number of vegetables for the boy who will only eat them raw! In the meantime, I made up some stuffing for the chook, sorted out the beef and found some roasting pans.

The Builder went to the supermarket to acquire some forgotten supplies. Such as red wine. And salt. We don't use salt and of course there isn't any in the cottage. Fortunately, I caught sight of a salt shaker while he was still in the supermarket!

I resisted the temptation to put the oven on too early.

And resisted.

And resisted.

Put the oven on.

Nothing happened :-S

Actually, it did. But I had forgotten that I always but always cook in a fan-forced oven. And this one wasn't. It was almost completely silent. And took FOREVER to cook the meat. Shouldn't have resisted quite so hard!!!!!

People started to arrive. Jeanette and Matthew had fortunately remembered to bring the soft drinks! Eventually the food was ready and everyone set to. We followed it up with my second Gordon Ramsey Christmas pudding, and Mr Waitrose's finest apple pie and chocolate roulade. I forgot to put out Gwen's mince pies :-S In fact, I forgot all about them until this morning when I ran across a stray plastic bag, wondered what was in it and looked to see ... :-S

All in all it was quite a good afternoon. Gwen certainly seemed to enjoy herself. Everyone seemed to have a good time until Marie misheard something that Matthew had said to her boys and decided to flounce. But by the time she flounced, it was pretty much time to be going home anyway.

Jeanette and Matthew (who had, by the by, brought Rebecca and Evie with them) stayed on for a very satisfactory postmortem.

Then they went away and we decided that clearing up was a Monday event!

I was cleared up downstairs by 10:00. And was just thinking that we had done very well for there to be no family arguments and nothing more than a minor flounce when Peter rang for The Builder and yelled at him for ringing him twice yesterday and what was all that about, and then yelled at him about something that had happened during the course of yesterday afternoon. The Builder yelled back very loudly and hung up. Odd. I know the Hyde family has its arguments, though not very often any more. But it is almost unheard of for something to carry on to the following day. I don't think we have sufficiently lengthy attention spans to hold grudges for long!

Peter also said that he was horribly sick. I do hope we didn't give him food poisoning! Although - The Builder and I are both in fine fettle and we all ate exactly the same things

We gave a bit of thought to going for a poke around in Chichester and to look at Selsey Bill today. But the queue to get onto the Southampton Road was enormous. And when we came to think about it, we had left it a bit late in the day - we were definitely not up early today. We went and had lunch in Shaftesbury instead and when for a drive around the Dorset countryside and then came back. The Builder is now doing the Christmas jigsaw. I brought down the summer one as well - we got two last summer and only did one.