T Stands For Meowy Catmas, FDC Complete, 2025 Reading List, Cheap Veg and Tattie Scones

Hi Friends!

Hope you are all doing well and are enjoying your festivities and time off if you have any. This post is early because I thought yesterday was Tuesday and wrote most of it then, before discovering that it was actually Monday.  It gets like that over the Christmas holidays doesn’t it?  Christmas was quiet, we spent it at my sister’s this year as my niece is having work done in their new house. Of course I forgot to take any photos thought I think someone did.  All the usual Christmas fare was on offer and we always have a lot of vegetables – parsnips in mustard and maple syrup, carrots, red cabbage, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, sage and onion stuffing, and homemade cranberry sauce, and for the meat eaters – turkey, sausage stuffing, chipolata sausages and pigs in blankets.  I eat the veggies and bring my own veggie gravy. My nephew had made Sticky Toffee pudding for dessert, and my niece had made me vegan brownies.  I also made vegan chocolate hazelnut fudge and vegan Scottish tablet with coffee and walnuts.  This is the first time I have been able to make this vegan as it uses condensed milk which is obviously not vegan, but I found some coconut condensed milk and was able to make it with that!  We had no traditional Christmas trifle or Christmas pudding this year although I have a small vegan Christmas pudding that I keep forgetting to cook for myself.  Maybe tonight, with some custard.

I have some festive photos to share today and also further down the post, all 52 cards from the Full Deck Challenge, plus a quick 1 min flip-through video of them if you feel inclined.  We had a very Meowy Catmas here although both kittens decided to start vomiting before and after Christmas day so we have not opened any presents yet because some are treats which they can’t have at the moment and the rest are things that we don’t want them to vomit on!

On the left is one of the new star lights I got from IKEA.  I love these so much I really want to keep them up all year but people might think I’m a bit strange.  They are stars and snowflakes, so I think I would be able to keep them up as winter decor and to banish the dark nights.  On the right is this string of Victorian cats carrying Christmas puddings that I strung up across some of the bookshelves along with the little blue lights.  These are SO old and they are made of paper, so I try to fold them up carefully each year so they don’t get ripped.

I think I am on my last book for 2025, so that will bring the total to 215 books assuming I don’t finish this one tomorrow and start another straight away!  You can see a full list of the books plus ratings and other details on this page, and here is a list of my top favourites for this year: – it was hard to narrow it down to these 21 books, there were a lot of good reads this year!  I did read a lot of books in series, so I limited my choices to one per author or series and nothing that I had read before. As usual, I read a lot of crime fiction/mystery, a bit of sci fi and urban fantasy, a fair bit of Australian crime fiction in particular (I do love that genre!) a little non-fiction and in December, quite a few Christmas themed books.  In the full reading list, there are details about setting and genre, whether they were part of a series etc etc and so on.

MY BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: (one per author, per series, new reads only)

1. Louise Penny – Grey Wolf – Chief Inspector Gamache #19 4.5/5
2. CJ Box – Battle Mountain – Joe Pickett #25 :4.5/5
3. Peter Papathanasiou – The Invisible – Detective Sergeant George Manolis #2 4/5
4. Abir Mukherjee – A Necessary Evil – Sam Wyndham #2 4/5
5. Adrian McKinty – Hang On, St Christopher – Sean Duffy #8 4/5
6. Martha Wells – Network Effect – Murderbot Diaries #5  4/5
7. Gareth Brown – The Book of Doors  4/5
8. Patricia Wolf – Nemesis – DS Walker #4  4.5/5
9. Jeremiah Knight – Hunger – Hunger Trilogy #1 4.5/5
10. Ben Aaronovitch – Stone and Sky – Rivers of London #10  5/5
11. Jeremy Robinson – The Dark – Infinite Timeline #7  4.5/5
12. Jeremy Robinson – The Lost Tribe – Good Boys #1  4/5
13. M W Craven – Black Summer – Washington Poe #2  4/5
14. Mick Herron – Clown Town – Slow Horses #9  4/5
15. Richard Osman – The Impossible Fortune – Thursday Murder Club #5  4.5/5
16. Ambrose Parry – Voices of the Dead – Raven and Fisher #4 4/5
17. Ann Cleeves – The Killing Stones – Jimmy Perez/Shetland #9 4/5
18. Alis Hawkins – The Hunter’s Club – Non & Basil #3  4.5/5
19. Andreina Cordani – A Scrooge Mystery  4.5/5
20. Benjamin Stevenson – Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect – Ernest Cunningham #2 4/5
21. Denzil Meyrick – The Christmas Stocking Murders – Frank Grasby Mystery series #2 4/5

Today’s Art . . .

(prompts: red, orange, yellow, light green, dark green, light blue and be free, dark blue and be freer, purple and white splatter)

Today’s art is a look at the completed Full Deck Challenge for 2025.  Full Deck Challenge is a weekly challenge run by @Shanoukiart who provides weekly prompts to alter 52 playing cards throughout the year.
(prompts: pink and black splatter, vintage and brown splatter, black & white, 1 bright Color, texture paste & stencil, holes and drippy paint, crazy colours & black mark making, turquoise & staples, stack it up, sew)

Did I enjoy this challenge?  Yes and no.  Will I do it again?  Maybe, but definitely not next year due to lack of time.

(prompts: blending, junk, paper weaving, paper doll, puzzle, cut it up (the card) repeat, thread, )

There were some things I enjoyed and some I didn’t (looking at the following list, there are probably more things I didn’t like! Oops).  I didn’t like having to watch a YT video each week to learn what the next prompt was, but that’s how the challenge is run so take it or leave it.  Sometimes the videos were late and a couple of times there wasn’t one because she was too busy (which meant I didn’t know what the next prompt was!)  It would have been nice to be able to work ahead when I had free time so that I wasn’t rushed during busy times but not knowing the prompts in advance prevented that.

(prompts: 2 favourite colours, numbers, wrap, black, photo, doodles, rainbow, bird )

The challenge is run the way it is run and that’s fine – accept that or don’t.  If you were in the Facebook group, there would be more info and interaction but I didn’t want to join a Facebook group so there was no acknowledgement from the host that you were playing along on other platforms outside of the Facebook group. I was posting mine on Instagram and the host didn’t see any of my posts, but that’s probably why you join the Facebook group.  My choice not to join.

(prompts: song lyrics, happy scraps, letters of the alphabet, flowers, coffee, chaos, stars, candy/lollies/sweets)

I did like altering the playing cards based on the prompts and just using mainly random bits and pieces that were lying around on my desk from whatever projects I was working on at the time (eg around Halloween there were a lot of Halloween bits on my desk and so on).

(prompts: zig zag, feathers, circles, window, lace, fairy, under the sea, dangle)

I also liked using all 4 of the criteria suggested (leave one corner open to show the card, carry over something from the previous week, use the weekly prompt and chose one constant to repeat in your weekly cards – mine was butterfly washi tape).  At the very beginning of the challenge she said that the prompts would start off easy and get progressively more difficult and more mixed media, but I didn’t notice them getting harder.

(prompts: mosaic, wonky house, queen of hearts, animal print)

I did have a couple of people I know playing along with me on Instagram so that made it more fun.  Now I have these 52 cards and no idea what to do with them.  Some people punch holes in them and keep them on a ring but I don’t want to do that.  It will take more thought.

T Stands For Tattie Scones

I made some tattie scones on Christmas morning, AKA potato scones.  Are you familiar with these delicacies?  They are very traditionally Scottish, you can find them in all supermarkets and bakeries in Scotland, although homemade is best.  The trick to a good tattie scone is no lumps in your mashed potato and making them thin enough so they can be buttered and rolled up so you can pop them right in your mouth.  I don’t recommend buying them from a supermarket as they tend to be too thick to do this.  They only have four ingredients, the main one being mashed potato, so they are often made with leftovers, and they are cooked on a traditional girdle pan (sometimes called a griddle pan).  They can be eaten as shown below, or with cheese, or fried with a full Scottish breakfast. This is my ticket to tea as you can see my decaf coffee mugs in both photos and also a bottle of Mulled Winter Punch which is a non-alcoholic punch that can be drunk hot or cold.

Part of the reason for making the tattie scones was because the supermarket had some special prices for winter veg the week before Christmas and I really went to town since I eat a lot of veg!  Hopefully you can read the image on the right, but if not let me explain.  Sainsbury’s supermarket had a selection of winter veg all for the special price of £0.15 each.  So 15p for a 2kg bag of potatoes, or 1kg bag of carrots or parsnips or 1/2kg bag of Brussels sprouts, or a whole red or white cabbage or a whole turnip (swede).  You can see the normal prices below (eg potatoes 15p normally £1.32, carrots 15p normally 69p etc).  My fridge is full now. 🙂

The photo on the left is my Candy Kitten Advent calendar.  Candy Kittens are a brand that only makes vegan sweets (candies) so I thought it would be fun to get their advent calendar this year.  It was.  🙂

And last but of course, not least, here’s a December photo of the little darlings.  Miss P, my wild former feral cat is on the left, looking anything but feral, and the kittens are on the right looking right at the Christmas tree and probably plotting its destruction!

Let me know what you think in the comments.   As always, thanks for reading!

Ingredients
various.

Challenges

T Stands For – tattie scones etc