For the vegetarians or let’s say for the sweet tooth there will be apple bread: which is 1 whole apple backed in pastry in the oven.

Apple Bread

The true meaning if this ancient old habit has been long replaced by the Christian celebration of the 3 kings that visited Christ the 6th of January… Completely detached from all tradition and culture.

Yet it is said that in the cold winter months after the new years celebration, people collected all the left over meat they found and backed it in a bread, or made a kind of sausage first that ten would be backed in a bread.

Why there is an apple in the bread is then not clear. But knowing how my mother used to store her apples just outside in winter: they started to become dry and wrinkled. Not the ideal apple to consume fresh but for sure ideal to put into pastry, tarts and the kind

Anyway, since our bakery retired as well and the successor is as good in making bread as in making bricks… we made our own sausage breads and apple breads.

Sausage Bread

And since we don’t have a meat shortage these days, we love to put in 2 sausages in stead of 1

Now I always knew my wife was a good cook. Only these days she is even better

Lot’s of festivity meals are being cooked, since I am totally there to help with anything and everything.

I really don’t mind to work a few hours helping preparing yet again another delicious dinner.

And I do think I need to by new trousers… 1 size bigger that is…

Wishing you all a happy new year and see you back in 2009!

What’s even better is they brought some fresh vanilla pods back. Yes, that’s right, for one reason I don’t understand, I always have to travel to Germany to get some fresh vanilla pods. No such thing sold in Belgium.

So I am quite happy with the vanilla pods, especially because they are amazingly cheap compared to the ones we buy in Germany. Unlike Germany that has to import the vanilla pods, Bali grows their own vanilla pods.

It’s well worth the journey as our neighbours stuffed their suitcases with vanilla pods…

Anyway, it was raining today, so we already made fresh pancakes using fresh vanilla pods: yummies!

Fresh Vanilla pod pan cakes

Cooked green lipped mussels in a simple veggie stock added some wine of course…

Ok, delicious is what my wife said, but she tends to be subjective (sometimes…)

She also said that mussels are not that good for your cholesterol, nor is too much wine…

Well, seems it’s not easy to get yourself a balanced diet, but I am working on it Meanwhile I am not taking my stupid Celebrex painkiller. I mean: why subdue your entire body when the arthritis pain is only in your pinky?

Tomorrow I have to go and by that green lipped mussel cream my fish seller told me about in one of my previous posts a few days ago. Life can be so busy when you are retired, and so it should be

So I go to the fish-shop buying my green lipped mussels. The man behind the counter, a few years younger than me, looks at me and says:

- you have arthritis as well? It doesn’t show though, how do you do it?

So I say:

- well, it’s only in my little pinky.

So he says: then you should apply a cream which I use as well.

I wrote down the name on a paper because oh well, my memory tend to have some lapses every now and then and I was in a hurry to start cleaning the mussels and cooking them

Actually it is as if somebody is poking my little finger with a needle INSIDE my finger. That’s the best way I can describe it.

So I went to the doctor and he prescribed me Celebrex, which is a painkiller.

Now I cannot be taking painkillers for the rest of my life.

So in order to get the fluids between my joints running again, I also need to take a food supplement called Glucosamine. Blur when I heard it, my pharmacist wasn’t of course. Seems with 1 out of 2 people, this Glucosamine gives you some extra connective tissue.

Yes: "some extra" only, so when you don’t have it, you cannot get it….

Since I don’t believe in popping pills in my body, I did some Google-ing and found that green lipped mussels for arthritis also contain a high amount of natural Glucosamine. Which means this evening we have mussels on the menu

Why? Because I love the taste of real chocolate,

• add to that real organic butter from the farm,
• real organic eggs from my chicken
• real organic sugar
• and real dark chocolate…

… and you have the best Belgian chocolates ever. For a much cheaper price than what you can buy in the shops…

Belgian homemade chocolate truffles

Meanwhile the chickens are kind of on strike… Well, they are actually changing feathers, which makes that they are not producing much eggs these days. Yet enough for a daily healthy breakfast and some access for the chocolates.