Grow orange plants for the leaves, rather than the fruit – and make your best-ever mulled wine
To some people it’s baking mince pies. To others it’s carving the turkey. But to me, cooking up a great big batch of mulled wine is my favourite Christmas food tradition. My recipe is pretty run-of-the-mill really, apart from one unusual botanical ingredient that is a total game changer. It takes the comforting, spicy-sweetness of mulled wine and transforms it with a zesty, citrus lift.
While you will almost certainly never find this exotic spice in even the fanciest UK supermarket, as luck would have it the tree it grows on happens to also be a common houseplant all over Britain. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you orange tree leaves: the Christmas spice that you can grow in your own living room.