The big day, I get to make Puerco Pibil for the first time in public. It's a slow roasted pork dish from the Yucatan made popular by the Robert Rodriguez movie "Once Upon A Time In Mexico", and I like it a lot. Plus as previously stated I owe Matt and Ali Kelland big style so I need to make a splash.

I started cooking the meat at about 11.30am and it was ready about 3.30pm. It was wonderful. We had it over rice and drank pear cider from Finland and Gloggi which is a kind of Finnish Christmas Drink. A good time was had by all. I was a bit later putting the meat in the oven because the chunk of pork I bought was so damn big it was really hard to butcher it into 2 inch chunks for the cooking. I basically had to spread out about three mats and cut it on one, store the uncut meat on another and store the chunks ready to go in the sauce in yet another. It was an hour of manhandling 2.5 kilos of slippery meat on a time limit. I was absolutely shagged after I finally got it in the oven.

But the food was great and we had a really nice time. They are inviting me over for New Years Eve tomorrow night, thereby I guess negating all the good work I've done to claw back a few favours I owe them but hey... I might as well get used to the fact I'm never going to pay them back totally. But then what are friends for? They can rely on me to be there for them whenever they have a problem. Maybe I better buy them a Lotto ticket every week so that one day they might win and we'll be all square. :)

I spent the evening watching "Midsomer Murders" my favourite old style whodunnit series, and polishing the first 11 pages of script. Then I stayed up quite late surfing the Internet and wasting a bit of time, because I'd spent too much of the day being productive and working. Had to restore the balance.