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 thousand 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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late autumn color, late autumn flavor: winter squash, chestnuts and wild mushrooms
Must say I do love a soup that tastes rich and creamy without being heavy – or containing cream. Also nice if it doesn’t require an arsenal of seasonings and is easy and quick to make.
The quick part does assume the squash is already baked, and that you know speedy ways to peel chestnuts, but why not? *
As usual, the ingredient list is pretty much the whole recipe, but given that the beauty shot of the main ingredients promised something a bit more extensive, here’s a rough outline, based on the most recent iteration.
“Rough” and “most recent” are definitely the words for it; this is one of those home style soups that’s infinitely variable.
In other words, almost impossible to screw up.
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Ingredients for autumn soup: chestnuts from a farmers market, Lactarius thyinos (no common name), hen of the woods, Queen of Smyrna squash
I took this picture to run with the recipe – not yet written – because I was about to roast the squash and chestnuts, making them less photogenic.
But then I realized the picture itself is a massive seasonal alert. So:
Bill’s detailed hen of the woods hunting advice is here.
The post where I roll all over in delight about the squash, after a timely reminder that the window of specialty squashes is both small and right now, is here.
And really a lot about roasting and peeling chestnuts is here.
Further refinements:
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I would rather show you something that was pleasantly autumnal, so there will be no picture of the equally autumnal Eek. (The link to an easy recipe for old fashioned pumpkin chiffon pie is at the end of the post, should you wish to skip the horror and go semi-directly thence.)
Pumpkin Style Pie Dessert is a mix, brought to you by the folks at Jell-O, aka Kraft Foods, and it came to my attention because my local supermarket featured it on an end cap, exactly at eye level. Boxes and boxes and boxes of it, so it was at everybody’s eye level.
As “Pumpkin Style Pie Dessert” makes clear to the label savvy, there is absolutely no pumpkin – or any other fruit or vegetable (unless you count carrageenan) in it. Whether the non label savvy will be enticed by “flavored with natural cinnamon and ginger” is a near-existential question I don’t feel equipped to answer.
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