Olive and Phil celebrated Shrove Tuesday with mini chocolate pancakes. Olive cracked the eggs and whisked the ingredients, Phil flipped the pancakes.

Leo, who is now crawling, made a beeline for Olive's pancake and had to be wrestled to the floor.

Olive emerges victorious and covered in chocolate.

The Cellar Door, purveyor of New Zealand wine, cheese and other delicious food products, has opened a branch opposite my office in Vivo City mall. This place has a great selection of wines by the glass and bottles to go, a cheese room packed with tasty-looking cheese and, among other things, slabs of honeycomb. I bought some honeycomb on Friday and we've been gorging on it all of Saturday! For breakfast we slapped honeycomb on grilled bread and for dinner we paired it with Stilton blue cheese and a pear and macadamia nut salad. The sinfully sweet honeycomb is devine with the salty blue cheese.

We get to eat lots of weird and wonderful food when mother-in-law is visiting. A couple of days ago she spotted a fruit, which she calls "pigs' titties" in Hokkien, in somebody's garden then cooked it in a dish of sambal udang petai. That dish would translate as "hot and sour prawns with stinky beans and pigs' titties" ... nice. Tonight I got home from work to discover mother-in-law had plucked, cooked and eaten the neighbour's hedge! She cooked the daun kaduk or wild betel in coconut milk with dried shimps, white pepper and chilli. She saved some for the neighbours but I decided to eat the evidence.

It took us ten days to finish the Christmas turkey. We had fried turkey noodles, several rounds of turkey sandwiches, stir-fried turkey with garlic and soy and, pictured above, stuffed turkey and avocado tortillas baked in tomato sauce with a super sprouty salad of alfalfa, mung bean, sunflower, pea shoots and watercress. No more turkey ... next year I'm roasting a quail.

Phil, Sandy, Olive and the bump wish you all the best for 2010. We're very excited about the coming year ... a new member of the family will be joining us in June!

Sandy and I left Olive in the care of mother-in-law, who has been with us since Christmas, and ushered in the new year at a friend's house with a late-night feast of black pepper crab, fried garlic rice, spicy chicken wings and Laurent-Perrier Brut Millésimé 2000 Champagne.

We're now halfway through the turkey. Mother-in-law has already cooked fried turkey noodles with garlic and bird's-eye chillies, Sandy's made turkey stock from the bones and Phil's taking turkey sandwiches to the office for a week.

Olive received a crazy number of presents. I can't wait for her to go to bed so I can start playing with them all.

I slightly misjudged the size of the turkey, or the number of guests, and bought a 7kg turkey to feed five people. That's a lot of turkey. It took six hours to cook but was delicious. Instead of the usual turkey stuffing, we made a wild rice stuffing with pancetta, brandy-soaked cranberries, walnuts and sage, and we served the turkey with mum's homemade crabapple jelly. Sandy did a fantastic job with roast potatoes, parsnips, pumpkin and beetroot, carrots and delicious turkey gravy. My brandy butter contained six times more brandy than Delia asked for and had teetotal father-in-law asking for more.

Obviously we're going to be eating turkey for the next few weeks although we did manage to deliver two plates of Christmas dinner to our neighbours who'd spent the afternoon in A&E with dengue fever!