The lemon is underneath the cherries
This floated into the kitchen because Jan 23 was National Pie Day*, an event that got a surprising amount of PR, given that every day is pie day in most people’s estimations. It’s probably because good pie is still – compared to say, macarons – in woefully short supply.
Ok. Deciding to bake a pie was easy. Deciding what kind of pie to bake was not, fresh local fruit also being in short supply in the Northeast just now. We’ve gone through all the frozen berries already; we’re eating too much winter squash to make pumpkin appealing, and while apple might seem obvious, it’s not if you breakfast on baked apples with yogurt pretty much every mortal day of the winter.
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There’s probably somebody somewhere who refers to them as “microwave ovens,” but I don’t know this person. Instead, I know several persons, all of them very good cooks, many of them with quite spacious kitchens, who refuse to have a microwave in the house. And I’m not talking about the health nuts. I’m talking about people who insist that microwaves are at worst the end of culinary civilization, at best yet more kitchen clutter, good for nothing except reheating coffee and making popcorn.
Well Pooey on that, as stepdaughter Celia used to say. I wouldn’t be without one and I’m not particularly gadget prone. In fact most of my cooking equipment is either
Vintage:
Bill manning the Strand Universal kitchen stove.
Or primitive
The outdoor clay oven. Beans in the pot, pork roast in the pan, coals banked at the back to boost heat for the first few hours of cooking. The wooden door is lined with flashing to keep it from getting burned.
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My take on King Cake, seasoned with thyme and marjoram, liberally studded with Gruyere, sprinkled with Parmesan instead of sugar but maybe next year I'll dye the cheese in the classic icing colors: green, yellow and purple
The classic King Cake of carnival season has many variations: coffee cake-ish, briochelike, or based on puff pastry. It may or may not include embellishments like candied fruit, frangipane, and colored icing. It may even be chocolate with coconut. But one thing will be for sure: it’ll be sweet.
Not around here. At this time of year I’m still recovering from the holiday cookie binge, and the idea of more of the same doesn’t hold much of a thrill. Yet I’ve always loved the idea of the thing, so our traditional King Cake is basically cheese studded brioche. Traditional tradition is honored in the ring shape and in the hidden token whose finder is the King.
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As a general rule, recycling the tree starts being an issue after the holiday, when a use must be found for a large, suddenly useless dead conifer. But this year we had a large dead conifer well before Christmas, thanks to the Halloween snowstorm that toppled the 15 foot arbor vitae in the southeast corner of the back yard.
Our holiday tree, 2011, aka the top of the former arborvitae. There’s a bucket of water inside the pedestal.
Putting it up was extremely easy; taking it down wasn’t much harder and now we have the same pile of long branches anyone with a regular tree will have as soon as they saw them from the trunk, first step in successful home recycling.
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Or, to put it another way: Stop her before she bakes again.
The decorated dark ones are gingerbread; pale stars are sugar cookies. Little round coconut covered jobs are rum balls; crescents are vanilla crescents (known as Moth cookies in our family). Round ones in the back are two kinds of jumbles and the dark rounds in the middle are Mexican chocolate chocolate chip.
I expect to discuss the Christmas Ham in the very near future, and may also pony up a picture of The Tree.
But first, even without cues from the weather, little miss knee jerk has responded to the usual stimulae in the usual fashion. Five or six pounds of butter, along with a similar weight of nuts but vastly less sugar - one of the reasons home made cookies taste so much better than store bought - have already been put to use and I can tell there’s more to come.
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Winter is finally upon us. Not counting the stubborn grass and a few stalwart edibles, everything green is common evergreen: juniper, arbor vitae, boxwood, rhododendron…
And almost everything deciduous is down to the bare branches, many of them in need of shaping. What all this is reminding me is that I definitely need some snazzy new material for the string of garden beds that will (next spring) finally be unified into a single sweep of Things That Look Good From Inside The House When Inside Is Where We Are Most Of The Time.
Enter Eric’s excellent suggestion:
Corylopsis pauciflora – earlier than forsythia, far more delicate and FAR more fragrant, to say nothing of better behaved.
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Holiday chocolate cookie-candies, everything easy except what to call them.
These classic holiday goodies are almost perfect: Only one (processor) bowl to wash; no cooking; deeply chocolate flavored without calling for obscene amounts of expensive high-end chocolate. Very simple to form and they keep for a long time. Just one small problem: their name.
You can’t really call them Hooch-soaked Crumbs with Chocolate and Nuts, but Bourbon, Rum or Brandy Balls doesn’t exactly do the job either. Maybe they should be called Poor Man’s Truffles. Please consider this an invitation, all suggestions cheerfully considered.
What we need is something that says Small, Rich, Alcoholic* and Chocolate, without getting any more specific. After deliciousness, lack of specificity is the distinguishing merit of let’s temporarily call them SRAC’s; they’re the pasta casserole of cookies. You can make them out of almost any dry sweet you happen to have around.
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Allium christophii, aka A. albopilosum, aka Star of Persia. A prolific self-sower, among its other virtues, though succeeding generations are smaller than the originals. Also a bit less intensely purple than my camera wants you to believe.
Pop Quiz
1) How many spring-blooming bulbs is too many?
2) How many spring-blooming bulbs is there room for?
3) How many spring-blooming bulbs must be planted before there are enough to cut for the house without diminishing the outdoor show?
Around here, the answer to all three questions is “Who knows?” Several hundred into it I’m not there yet, and that’s not counting the little guys (crocus, muscarii, scilla and the like don’t even show up until there are thousands – unless you force them, which I heartily recommend).
Reason for mentioning it now, when even procrastinators – no names please – have usually gotten all of them in: CLEARANCE SALES!!
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A genuine heirloom (i.e. passed down through generations) turkey: my mother’s gravy boat. It has a matching ceramic ladle that broke about 15 years ago and has been in storage awaiting repair ever since. This speaks equally to my tendency to procrastinate and to the fact that said ladle, while cute, does not hold enough gravy to be practical.
In the edible bird department, some givens, about which more below:
1.) Like the proverbial yacht, if you have to ask how much a heritage turkey costs you probably can’t afford it.
2.) Buying a heritage turkey helps keep an endangered gene pool robust, so you get preservation points as well as a delicious dinner (assuming you cook it correctly).
I’m not in the yachting class and am already convinced on the deliciousness front, but I’m cooking two turkeys this year anyway, just for the sake of comparison.
One is a heritage bird from a farm about a half hour north of here, the other is an “organic, free range heirloom,” imported from Pennsylvania (about 5 hours south of here) by a specialty grocery. Although I haven’t cooked them yet, some things are already clear.
Those who simply want kitchen tips can go immediately to Roast Turkey 101.2 for general cooking hints and a recipe for wild mushroom stuffing. Guidance that’s specific to heritage birds is in the second part of Wild Turkeys, Thanks But No Thanks.
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It IS important to clean up, so a certain amount of saw work is inevitable. But it doesn’t hurt to wait a minute on the re-shaping, even though the natural inclination is otherwise.
This is recent experience talking,
We got 22 inches of snow in the infamous October storm. Note that the maple not only has leaves; they haven’t even started to turn.
The loss list keeps expanding as falling leaves expose broken branches we missed earlier, but the general shape of the disaster has been clear for long enough to prompt a bit of family discussion on the subject of remedial pruning.
Casualties:
Somewhere between a third and a half of the magnolia, seen here in happier days.
It’s not too clear through the snow, but you can see it’s the middle that went.
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