The star arrives

 The snowshoe hare got the elf's attention and showed him where the Star is approaching.

And, on the reading front, I found a mystery writer I'd never heard of.  Turns out she had a lot of Christie's ideas before Christie did, what with impersonation, mutual protection, the amateur sleuth along with the official police, the unknown stranger, the country house, the maids and butlers. The Cosy, in fact.

And since she was writing in the Golden Age, where marketing was king, the Christie machine got ahead of her, and now she's scarcely heard of.  But this is a rattlin' good story, all the same.  About as serious as a Christie, and pretty puzzling, too.  I had several ideas about whodunit, but was wrong in the end. So I recommend this.  My library only has this one, but I managed to get some low cost other ones for my Kindle. Winter afternoon reading.

And I've been thinking about cabbage and leeks, yes, my life is riveting, partly because I had supplies of them in the freezer waiting for me to do something about them.  I love this vegetarian book of Ottolenghi's and even if you never cook from it, it's beautiful to handle and just see the photography.  I remembered having made an elaborate vegetable pie thing out of here ages ago, so I took a look.

And quickly found that since I have neither puff pastry, nor Gorgonzola, nor broccoli, I was a bit stymied with this recipe.  But I recommend it if you have the ingredients.

 I remembered some cabbage pie ideas from YouTube, still held back by a lack of cheese, it's on the grocery list for this week, decided to go to war with the food I had.

Namely, leek whites, red cabbage, cooked pumpkin, white onions, nice addition of capers. 

Three eggs, flour, nutmeg, a spoonful of plain yogurt, Dijon mustard, beaten up as a sauce.

Then all baked at 400 for about 40 minutes, resulting in this interesting stuff

The roast potatoes were just fine, the cabbage mixture lacked a little oomph, so after I sampled it I decided it might work better as a soup.  Sooooooo, a quart of chicken broth and a dash of lemon juice later, simmering and  blender at work, here it comes, with a sprig of lemon balm to decorate it

It's really odd to have a tangy soup, which  tastes pretty good, and looks like dessert.  But if you can get past expecting it to be some fruit deal because of  the color, it's fine.