Mulled whine

Over the last year or so, I've somehow found myself enjoying cooking.  Oh yes, of course the mid-week meal when you don't get in until 8 p.m. can still be something of a slog, but I've found myself in my spare time at weekends scouring the web for recipes, loving my Hummingbird Bakery cookbook, and being amazed that actually, I can produce something that tastes half-decent.  Who knew that having the right ingredients in the right quantities was so important?

So today, I made some Christmassy cookies, then noticed I had two-thirds of a bottle of red wine left over from a stew I made last week.  "Mulled wine!" I thought, fishing out a mulled wine kit that's been sitting in my cupboard for a few weeks  "That will go perfectly with my super-Christmassy cookies.  I am SO Martha Stewart / Nigella / Lorraine Pascale."  (I didn't want to be Delia.  Perhaps it's the haircut.)

"Aha," I thought.  "I shall use my slow cooker for this."  I bought quite an expensive slow cooker about a year ago.  It's one of those fancy ones that has about ninety different functions and promises it can bake you a cake whilst making your soup.  Basically, I'm desperate to use it at pretty much any opportunity.

"A mulled wine kit," you might ask.  "Surely you can make your own mulled wine from scratch?"  Well, you know what, I probably could.  But what kind of person, I ask you, has star anise just sitting in their pantry?  Not me.  I thought I was doing well with home-made vanilla sugar.

The cookies turned out well.  The wine... well, it looks like the lowest setting on my slow cooker is a teeny bit powerful for mulled wine.  After twenty minutes it turned out I'd made a red wine reduction with the consistency of treacle.  Two sips of it gave me a migraine that's lasted for about an hour so far.  The rest of it went down the sink.  I had to fish out all the spices and cinnamon sticks and shit and throw them in the bin.

My kitchen bin now smells like Santa has thrown up in it.

You win some, you lose some.