November Pudding

I was supposed to be in Plymouth today - helping to look after my sweet great niece. But she was ill so we didn't go.

 Instead I cleaned out the food cupboards in the kitchen and sorted out the overflowing baskets of nuts and dried fruit, flour and sugar, rice and pasta and toppling piles of tinned tomatoes and chick peas. I labelled them to help my husband find things when I'm away, forgetting he won't recognise what most of the packets are anyway. I chucked out  two past-their-sell-by-date cans of kidney beans, a bag of gram flour and lost-flavour cinnamon sticks.

At the very back of the top cupboard I discovered a small M&S Christmas Pudding given to me by my sister at the end of last year - now well past its sell-by date. I love Christmas pudding - especially the dark, chunky deeply fragrant one she makes ( see photo above) every year. I've always wanted to eat Christmas pudding more than once a year but somehow it's never happened, never really felt right - in August anyway.

As my husband was out for lunch with his new walking group I decided I'd try the M&S one - if only to see if it was still edible and not mouldy - like a homemade one I'd once kept for more than a year.

So after my hugely healthy egg, avocado and hummus salad I sat down to to slab of crumbly Christmas pudding -  rich and fruity, sticky and spicy - no mould in sight, sloshed with a wave of soya custard.

Not nearly as good as my sister's but Christmas pudding all the same - on a damp, gloomy Tuesday afternoon in November.

But now I know why it's much better to keep it for once a year tradition. It's all too easy to cut another slice, thinking I've got room after my salad when really I haven't at all.

And now I don't want any supper.