Curl up this Christmas with bestselling author Cathy Bramley - THE SEASON OF COMFORT AND JOY continues the story of The Village Cookery School and **contains recipes!** It's Christmas Eve and after a busy year for Verity Bloom launching a cookery school, she's ready to celebrate the season with a few relaxing days. Full of good food, friends and family around her - because that's what Christmas is all about! All Verity's friends are full of excitement about the holidays too and cannot wait to launch their annual town's celebrations. It is the perfect recipe for comfort and joy... But the weather has other ideas. Relentless rain leads to a power cut that spells disaster and it's starting to look like the celebrations could be a total washout. With dreams of a perfect Christmas dashed, will the last of the festive cheer be swept away in the downpour? Or can Verity cook up a miracle for everyone she holds dear? The perfect heartwarming story of love, community and hope for the festive season! Perfect for fans of Debbie Macomber, Susan Mallery and Sherryl Woods.
Release date:
November 14, 2019
Publisher:
Orion
Print pages:
84
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It was the end of a joyful and hectic day at Plumberry School of Comfort Food. The teaching kitchen upstairs in our beautiful old stone mill was still warm from the sterling efforts of fourteen festive students, and the scent of Christmas hung in the air – an evocative blend of cloves, cinnamon, caramelized sugar and rum. Quite a lot of rum, actually, because my assistant, Pixie, had spilt the bottle all over her workstation and her Doc Martens and it had seeped into the cracks between the old floorboards. The fumes would probably linger well into next year.
Today’s course had been ‘Edible Christmas Gifts’. We’d had a guest chef from Plumberry Conserves here this morning, leading a seasonal jam- and chutney-making session; Pixie had taught a hand-made truffles class (she’d just been taught it herself at college), and I’d finished off the afternoon by teaching the group how to make Christmas-pudding fudge. Now the students had gone home tired, happy and laden with beautifully gift-wrapped edible parcels to proudly present to their loved ones on Christmas Day. All that remained was the final bit of tidying up and we’d be finished for two whole weeks.
‘Hurray, we’ve done it!’ I said when the last jar of vanilla sugar had been put away and the baking trays were stacked neatly in their racks. ‘Merry Christmas, one and all!’
‘You too, Verity.’ Mags, our gregarious front-of-house manager, put her broom back in the cupboard and pulled first me and then Pixie into her bosom for a hug and a kiss. ‘And congratulations, chuck; the Christmas-themed courses you put on have been brilliant. I don’t think there’s a person left in Plumberry who won’t be making their own mince pies this year.’
‘Yeah, Merry Christmas,’ Pixie added. She extracted herself from the depths of Mags’s chest, simultaneously wiping the cherry-red lipstick mark off her cheek and tugging her T-shirt down over her bottom self-consciously. ‘Although next year, please can someone else teach the “Christmas Titbits and Tipples” course? I’m still having flashbacks to the drinking game that sales director made his staff play with the sloe gin.’
Mags and I laughed; poor Pixie had ended up with twelve drunken sales executives on a team-building day supposedly making little Santas from fresh strawberries and cans of whipped cream. We’d still been finding globules of cream on the ceiling two days later.
‘Who’s for coffee with a dash of whisky before we all go home?’ I said, striding to the office in the corner and flicking on the percolator.
‘Me!’ Pixie piped up. ‘Anything to put off the cycle ride home in this rain.’
‘It’ll have to be a quick one, chuck, I need to get off in a minute,’ said Mags, looking at the delicate gold watch on her plump wrist as she followed me into the office. ‘Dave will be arriving with my mother-in-law soon and I want to get the fire on for her. A bag of bones, she is.’
My heart tweaked at her anxious expression. Mags had only been with her partner Dave for six months. They weren’t married so technically she didn’t have a mother-in-law, but Mags had embraced having a mother figure in her life again. Well into her fifties, she had been quite lonely before they got together and I was so glad that she’d have someone to share her cosy home with over Christmas.
In my book, Christmas was about sharing: our homes, our food and, of course, precious moments that would become treasured memories in future years. Dave, our accountant, was a darling and lived in the next village with his mum Nora who was a feisty old thing but following a stroke a couple of years ago, relied on her son to do the heavy stuff around the house. They came as a package and I sometimes wondered if that ever impinged on Mags and Dave’s relationship. Not that Mags would ever complain.
‘Turkey and the full works at yours tomorrow, is it?’ I asked, spooning coffee into the machine.
‘It would be if I had my way,’ Mags said with a chuckle, leafing through the stack of Christmas cards from customers on my desk which I hadn’t got round to putting up yet. ‘But Nora has insisted she wants to treat us to Christmas lunch out tomorrow; she’s booked a posh restaurant. Still, I’ve done us a nice festive pan of Scouse for dinner tonight.’
‘How can Scouse be festive?’ said Pixie with a derisory snort as she came to join us. She dropped onto a chair and began polishing her glasses on the corner of her apron. ‘It’s the meat stew you make every week.’
‘Yes, but I’ve added chestnuts and Brussels sprouts to the pan,’ said Mags with a hint of smug triumph.
Pixie shuddered. ‘Oh God. The last time my granddad ate a combination like that, he got flatulent fever. Even the neighbours had to wear earplugs.’
Mags and I exchanged glances; Pixie had an infinite supply of anecdotes about her granddad’s bowels.
‘Is that even a thing?’ I asked, not sure I actually wanted an answer.
‘I think so.’ Pixie wrinkled her nose. ‘Anyway, it was awful. He got stuff from the doctor, but I—’
A loud hammering at the front door interrupted her flow.
‘I’ll go,’ Mags almost shouted with relief and darted out of the office and down the stairs with remarkable speed.
‘Let’s take our coffee to the windows to enjoy the view,’ I said, handing Pixie her mug and marching off before she could resume her tale.
‘Are we leaving all the Christmas decorations up while we’re closed?’ she asked as we wandered back through the teaching kitchen.
I cast an eye over the big bushy tree that my boyfriend Tom and I had carried up from the village greengrocer at the beginning of December. We’d had a romantic evening here, swapping Christmas stories while we trimmed the tree with hundreds of white lights and dozens and dozens of pretty red, white and silver decorations. And not just the tree; there were fairy lights wound round almost every wooden beam in the ceiling as well as the Aga kitchen downstairs and even out on the wooden deck that overlooked the river.
And after we’d finished decorating a miniature tree that we’d set out in the most protected corner of the deck, Tom had pulled me into his arms and told me that being in Plumberry with me had made his life complete and that he was so looking forward to our first Christmas together. And I, of course, felt exactly the same.
A warm glow welled up inside me at the thought of waking up next to him on Christmas morning in our new house, just the two of us … A little sigh escaped and took me by surprise, jolting me back to the present.
Pixie was grinning at me. ‘Earth calling Verity Bloom?’
‘Let’s leave them up; the lights are all set on automatic timers so it will give the cookery school a nice festive shine over Christmas,’ I decided. ‘I can’t face that job now anyway. Taking them down can be our first task of the New Year. Besides, we haven’t had chance to decorate at home, so this might be the only tree I get to admire.’
Tom and I had only got the keys to our cottage last week and we’d both been so busy with work – he was. . .
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