Really Ratbaggy Weather and Suitable Distractions
It’s more of the sunny blue/falling wall of water business today, and very annoying it is too. We went on what ought to be one of our favourite hurtles this morning and . . . it was raining when we got there so we sat in the car a little longer while the roar of the meteorological tumult drowned out Radio 3, which didn’t disturb the hellhounds so much but didn’t improve my temper any. When we finally started off anyway it was rain = sulky hellhounds. Then steambath sun = sulky hellhounds. Then more rain = sulky hellhounds. More sunny sauna = sulky hellhounds. AAAAAUGH. The weird visuals included sky so black it really looked like Thor or Odin or someone was about to clap the lid over us alternating with a fuzzy white sun about half the size of the sky—plus the ankle-level theatrics. When the rain was coming down in thwacks if you were on a hard surface you were walking through a tiny geyser-garden as the water-balloons of rain hit and burst upward again. When the sun came out everything did promptly start steaming—probably including myself and the hellhounds, but I wasn’t at a good angle to see this—I can vouch for the steaming sheep however, and steaming sheep are . . . bizarre. Plus the dry-ice boa constrictors of murk coming off the road and the trees, including fallen logs. I was starting to worry about barrow-wights. It was totally possible that some of that wreathing smoke drifting off the bigger logs was going to solidify, stand up and come after us. Maybe the hellhounds really had our best interests at heart. They didn’t give the impression of having our best interests at heart. They gave the impression of having gone more or less limp in their harnesses and requiring me to frelling carry them. *
Of course I have been thinking of Ajlr’s bees. I hope the weather has been better where they are and they are not already telling each other the story of their origins in a bright and beautiful place from which they were evicted without warning for displeasing their gods . . . in some manner they wot not of, which is usually the way with displeased gods. Despairingly they wonder, what can they do to regain their gods’ favour? Pssst—make honey. Make lots and lots of honey.
This recipe began life using milk and maple syrup. I stopped using milk a long time ago and then when I moved over here maple syrup became gold dust and the Fountain of Youth**. Which is when I started using tea and honey. Yes, tea. I make it STRONG, but even so you’re getting comparatively little per muffin and unless you’re very susceptible to caffeine I wouldn’t have thought it would buzz you. One of the pleasures, to me, of these muffins is that they’re different every time because both tea and honey vary so immensely. Well, okay, I like messing about with teas of character† . . . and there are teas that are good with honey and teas that, in my capricious opinion, are not. But then I like honey with character too, and when you get two assertive entities together you have to be a little careful. So if you’re going to go down this route, you’re going to want to do your own experimenting. Which is part of the fun. I will point out however, before you decide instead to pop round to the corner shop and buy some doughnuts, that the fact that there’s flour and so on involved in the actual muffins means that the match between the tea and the honey does not have to be perfect.
Mettlesome Muffins
1 egg
3 T butter
¾ c strong tea
1/3 to ½ c honey: this is going to vary both with how sweet you want your muffins and how runny your honey is. I’m always going on in my recipes about how individual ingredients vary††. Honey more so than most. Honey is actually fairly tricky to bake with, but muffins are pretty accommodating.
Melt the butter, let cool; beat the egg, add the honey, then the tea, then the melted butter.
1-2 c wholemeal/wholewheat flour. You want about 1 ½ c flour total, but if you want to use some white flour to lighten it, use up to ½ c.
½ c (dry) oatmeal
1 T baking powder
If you like cinnamon (I often put cinnamon in my tea), you can add 1 tsp ground
Mix all this dry stuff together, then stir in quickly to the wet. I recommend using a whisk. It’s true that lumps will (probably) bake out, but they make me nervous.†††
Plop in about 12 muffin cups, which you’ve either buttered first or put paper muffin cups in.‡ About 20 minutes at 400°F. They should puff up beautifully, and the tops should be pretty hard. And if you wanted to brush them, when they come out of the oven, with a little honey thinned with a little water, that would be good too. If you want to you can run them back in the oven again for just about a minute more, to get a nice crackly effect from the honey wash.
And you want a good book to read while you eat your muffins, right? And what more suitable . . . Look what a friend in Cambridge (. . . Massachusetts) sent me‡‡:
* * *
* Speaking of not being at a good angle to see if they were steaming. My eyeballs were probably steaming.
** Yes, all right, you can buy it in the shops here. At £100/thimble. And you can only get the pale polite grade A, not the darker more interesting ones.
*** For example, the following. I’ve been a teaholic for forty years, but the serious fannying around began about twenty years ago when a friend living in Paris came to visit us at the old house bringing several tins from Palais des Thes. Wow. My world changed.
http://www.palaisdesthes.com/en/
http://www.bristolteacompany.co.uk/
† And let us not forget one of my favourite Wondermarks: http://wondermark.com/557/
†† And that it makes me furious that cookbooks rarely acknowledge this. I wonder how many nascent cooks and bakers had their nerve wrecked early on by recipes that were a disaster despite having been followed exactly, down to the last basilisk eyelash. In the real world there is no exact. There’s only a general principle applied to your basilisk.
††† I personally think the whole ‘don’t overbeat your muffin batter’ is kind of a bugbear. But it’s true you beat only minimally, unlike a cake batter, say, where you want to see the batter change colour.
‡ Hint: I think paper muffin cups are one of the great discoveries of modern science.
‡‡ And yes, if you’re having trouble reading it on your monitor, that does say Harvard Book Store.
Teeth, chocolate and bells
I’ve been to the dentist again. He has many children to put through college.* This time however I came home with TEETH. Well, more teeth. Oh, all right, one more tooth. But it’s one of the big fat chewing ones. Plus a recap (so to speak) of the one behind that.** The truly horrifying thing however is the Next Phase which involves a phoenix egg and a sliver of bark from Yggdrasil and a drop of water from Charon’s bow-wave and one or two other things that . . . well, I really could buy a new car for what the Next Phase is going to cost. But ordinary dentists won’t look at my teeth*** Would it be so bad living on porridge for the rest of my life? Porridge and cake. I tweeted when I got home, numbed to the eyeballs barring the distant precognitive throb, that I was looking at my nice healthy green salad in dismay because it required chewing and would it be so bad to have cake for lunch? —And was promptly encouraged by several responding tweeters. Twitter is dangerous. In a lot of ways that don’t make it onto the stats.
Cake may have been somewhat more prominently than sometimes on my mind today however because last night I made:
Leftover-Christmas-Chocolate Bars
I realise that the concept of leftover chocolate is foreign to many of us, and once upon a time it would have been foreign to me too and at least mildly implausible to Peter. But that was Then. This is Now. Peter has mouth trouble and I have Post Menopausal Zero Metabolism. Meanwhile, however, we are notorious for loving chocolate, so people tend to give it to us. I do not wish to discourage this excellent habit. And furthermore now that I’ve invented Leftover-Christmas-Chocolate Bars I may have to arrange for leftover chocolate henceforth.†
Preheat your oven to 350°F. Butter a 13 x 9” pan
¾ c butter
1 ¾ c sugar
2 large eggs, room temp
1 ½ tsp REAL vanilla††
1 ½ c all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder††
½ c unsweetened cocoa powder
1 c chopped-up Leftover Chocolate. The point here is that it should be lots of different kinds. I had four or five different sorts plus some ginger fudge. Don’t chop too small or it’ll disappear in the baking.
Cream butter and sugar. I scrape with the spoon in my right hand and knead with my left. Better results sooner. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Then the dry stuff. Be sure everything is THOROUGHLY mixed. Then finally stir in the chopped-up chocolate.
Bake about half an hour. I started checking after about twenty minutes because there’s kind of a lot of chocolate involved and I wanted to make sure nothing untoward happened. It’ll still be slightly squidgy when you take it out, and I assume it’ll fall a little—mine did, but I was expecting it to. This is a sign of excellent chewy-squidginess-with-crunch-around-the-edges to come. I also wasn’t sure what the ginger fudge would do if it was baked so I sprinkled it over the top and put the pan back in the oven for five minutes, just to melt it enough to stick.
From a health and safety standpoint I have to admit these are not a great deal better than pure chocolate, but they are fearfully good. And they give you something to pass around during your handbell tea break.†††
* * *
* Not to mention the horses. I was going to say that I didn’t think they went to college . . . but in fact one of them does. And horse college costs as much as human college. Maybe more.
** Was I just In Denial or, thirty years ago, did dentists lead you to believe that once crowned, your tooth or teeth will stay crowned? This is I think the third refit I’ve had. At vast, three-years-undergrad-at-Cambridge prices, of course. And that doesn’t count the disintegrated root canals, which were another thing that thirty years ago were supposed to be for life. Pardon me, but first-world life expectancy for women has been well over fifty for longer than the last thirty years. Teeth: design FAIL.
*** At least not any longer than it takes to scream and run away.
† I’m aware that this is not an original idea. I’ve done something like it before myself. But this is probably the first time I’ve thought ‘why don’t I sweep up all the bits and pieces from not-quite-as-indulgent-a-Christmas-as-in-years-past and do something egregious?’
†† Maybe. I was making them at the mews and Peter doesn’t seem to have a set of measuring spoons. I know he made me take the fourteen or twenty-six spare sets of measuring spoons^ away with me but I hadn’t realised he didn’t have any. This Will Be Rectified. Meanwhile after forty-odd years of baking I probably know what a measuring-tsp quantity looks like.
^ When I was first over here, it was hard to find measuring cups and spoons in standard American sizes so I got . . . kind of paranoid. And would come back from a visit to the States with my suitcases not merely full of All Stars and black jeans but measuring cups and spoons. Glass jugs—which I prefer—have a built in population control mechanism, but metal measuring spoons live forever. I may have got a little carried away with the reserve measuring spoon sets.
††† I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s a way to mention this on the blog that won’t just bore you all to death. I need to gloat here, okay? You might give me the benefit of remembering that I had a brain full of dental anaesthesia this afternoon, and in fact when I’d tried to practise on Pooka before real people showed up with real handbells it had been so awful I’d considered that perhaps it wasn’t the anaesthesia at all, I really had lost my mind. So I was feeling pretty cowed when Niall came in, started unwrapping handbells^, and said that we were going do an exercise that James had had the Saturday handbell group doing last weekend, which you might call Merry Go Round Plain Hunt. Plain Hunt is the pattern-before-the-pattern to all bell ringing: it’s the first thing you learn after you can more or less handle your bell, and it gives you a dreadful clue^^ of what is to come.^^^ Merry Go Round Handbell Plain Hunt is that after you have rung however many ordinary ‘courses’ as they’re called of plain hunt you pass one bell to the person on your left. And then you ring normal plain hunt again. On whatever weird pair of bells you’re now holding. This is not how you ring handbells: you ring the trebles, which are the one and the two, or the three and the four, the five and the six, or the tenors (if you’re ringing on eight), the seven and eight. This is what you learn; this is what you’re used to. This is what you can COPE WITH. But for merry-go-round, after the first pass you’re holding the one and the eight, or the two and the three, the four and the five, the six and the seven. Which means that diabolical SHAPE of what you’re ringing is blown to pieces. I can’t do this! I wailed—I can’t do anything unless I’ve thought about it and practised it first. I can’t think handbells on the spot like this.
But I did. It just about killed me, but I did it. I got it. I got all of the weird pairs: the 2-3, the 4-5, the 6-7, the 8-1. Yaay me. Gloat.
^ And yes, I agree, one of the reasons I need my own set of handbells is so I can knit little storage bags for them.
^^ Although not nearly dreadful enough
^^^ ARRRGH. Have just wasted half an hour trying to persuade either Google or any of my three bell-ringing simulators to produce a diagram of plain hunt major. It can’t be this hard. So, here. I’ve just written it out. Make that scrawled. The point is just to look at the shape of what you’re ringing if you’re ringing two bells. The method line is the same for everybody: you go straight out to the back, strike twice in last place, go straight down to the front, strike two blows in first place, and go out to the back again till someone says ‘that’s all’. The only trick when you’re ringing it in the tower is where you’re starting in this very straight in and out pattern. If you’re the two (or any even-numbered bell) you go down to the front first; if you’re the three (or any odd-numbered bell) you start by heading out to the back. Easy peasy. Now get your head around it if you’re ringing two bells. The front and back pairs are still pretty simple; they stay pretty parallel, one ‘blow’ as it’s called apart, and they only have to remember to cross at the front and the back. (The treble is in red, and the two is in blue. I should have done them both in the same colour, but bell ringers are trained to think of the treble by itself, because it usually is.)
But look at the shape of what the 3-4 rings (both in green). This is what I mean about the inside pairs. The 5-6 is like this only mirror-image. (I will spare you why the 5-6 is worse than the 3-4 in bob major.)
Yes, I should have used a straightedge to draw the lines.
Happy New Year*
Roll on 2011. I like the look of ‘2011’. A very nice collection of numbers nicely arranged. May it be a Year of Multifaceted Wonderfulness.**
I think we need a sticky celebratory pudding. A little late for tonight, but it’ll be excellent tomorrow too. If you’re not too the-day-after-the-night-before-ish for getting your eyes to focus on a recipe.
Spicy cranberry gingerbread pudding
The original recipe wants you to make eight individual puddings. You must be frelling joking. You’re already going to have to make the sauce as well as the pudding. Life is way too short to spend that much time buttering pudding basins, not to mention cleaning the suckers afterward, since in my experience putting them through the dishwasher is pretty futile. I don’t know, are there Miniature Pudding Basin Liners like there are paper muffin cups? The latter entirely revolutionised my baking half a million years ago when I discovered them, or someone started making them, which I think is what happened—some muffin-eating industrialist’s wife told him that paper muffin cup liners would not only mean he could have fresh muffins every day but that they would thereby be made wealthy***.
Anyway. In the absence of miniature pudding basin liners, you can make it in an 8” square pan, although a 6-cup Bundt is ideal because it looks pretty without being nearly so much work.†
1 ¾ c all-purpose flour
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp (ground) ginger
¼ tsp allspice
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
2 medium/large eggs, room temp
5 T soft butter
¼ c blackstrap molasses
¼ c dark brown sugar. If you’re a wimp you can use white sugar
1 heaped teaspoon freshly grated ginger root
4 oz preserved ginger in syrup, finely chopped, with its syrup
about 1 c water
Sift the dry stuff together. Squash the butter and sugar together thoroughly, then add molasses, then eggs. Beat well. Then start adding flour alternately with water, and mixing each time, starting with flour: half the flour, then half the water, then half the flour . . . then stop. At this point add the two gingers (the ground went in with the spices in the dry), so you can judge how much water you’re going to need to make a good batter. I have found I need slightly less than the full 1c. Beat well again. If you are an electric-mixer person, use it. The batter should get very homogenous and very slightly paler.
Pour in your chosen WELL BUTTERED pan, and bake about half an hour at 350°F/moderate. It should look done like a cake looks done. Use a toothpick if you’re nervous. If it’s a Bundt, you’ll want to let it cool a bit and then turn it out; if it’s in a boring old brownie pan, you can just serve it from there.
Sweet Cranberry-Cider Sauce
1 lb cranberries
16 fluid oz British cider. Which is to say, alcoholic. If you can get British/hard cider, use whatever kind you like to drink, which is to say this is not the time to go cheap. If you can’t get hard cider, use about 1 ½ c ordinary cider and ½ c port, Madeira, sherry, or whatever of that kind of thing you have around. You ought to have something of this sort because it’s great for enlivening dull food. You could certainly use Calvados or some such but I think that’s getting on for apple overkill myself.
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp (ground) cloves
¼ tsp nutmeg
about ¼ c, somewhat depending on how dry your cider/etc is and how sweet you like your sauce, dark brown sugar
2 oz preserved ginger in syrup, finely chopped, with its syrup
Put the cider in a pan with everything else except the preserved ginger. Bring to boil, boil gently till cranberries pop. Take off the heat, add the ginger. Let cool. Reheat just to warm to serve. You can warm the pudding too. I generally don’t, but you don’t want it cold from the refrigerator.
It’s five minutes to midnight as I write this. Tick . . . tick . . . tick. . . . ††
* * *
* We had ringing practise tonight. How sad is that? New Year’s Eve and we’re all in the bell tower making horrible crashing noises.^ There were even enough of us tonight to make a wide variety of horrible crashing noises. But I think possibly some of us had got a head start on celebrating.^^
^ Niall did suggest that if anyone wanted to ring in the New Year it could probably be arranged . . . but not by him.
^^ Which is to say that my Cambridge was perhaps more accurate than some others of those present.
** In the immediate future however . . . I have had a long detailed email from a professional photo geek, who says in essence:
(a) Yes, the Canons are too slow.
(b) Yes, the Panasonics’ jpeg handling isn’t good enough.
At present my choices seem to be:
(a) Learn photo editing after all and shoot in RAW mode.
(b) Give up on the compact idea and go for a full DSLR.
(c) Learn to draw.
How’s progress on cloning coming? I need two of me, whatever I decide. I need hours for photo editing and I need hours to write more books to pay for my renovated, upgraded and expanded camera habit. Or I need hours with my sketchbook. Hours and hours and hours and HOURS AND HOURS. And possibly a gene-splice from JMW Turner or James Whistler or John Everett Millais or Edward Burne-Jones.
*** And she could hire someone to make muffins while she got on with writing her great novel. He probably wanted a bigger car or a string of polo ponies or a castle in Spain. Men.^
^ Although I’ve always wanted my castle in Scotland which is manifestly insane. Winter? Darkness? Rising damp? Cold? I think the top ten most uncomfortable places on earth must include at least one paradigmatic Scottish castle.
† Although they don’t go too effectively through the dishwasher either. Butter it really well.
†† And I’m listening to Handel’s MESSIAH. Well, it’s festive. They’ve got the last night of the Proms running on Radio Three and I cannot take the blurky self-congratulation. It’s stickier than the above pudding, which is not appropriate on the radio. Get a grip, guys.
Pumpkin, winter, etc
This weather is starting to make me CLAUSTROPHOBIC. It rained last night, and walking home as a result was unspeakably delightful and I spent most of it murmuring paeans to the gallant yaktrax, or possibly begging them not to self destruct at this moment as I waded through ice-bottomed brooks.* Today has been a degree or two above freezing so the wet stuff falling from the sky is almost but not quite sleet. And it’s supposed to snow hard tonight which on top of today’s antics by tomorrow should be . . . whatever the next stage after unspeakably delightful is.
So to cheer myself up I thought I’d respond to some of the forum comments which I have been neglecting shamefully.** And of course the comments I’m the most drawn to concern food.
Tinned pumpkin varies, like so many things in this world. In years when I couldn’t face the whole roasting and scooping/peeling thing—to my mind the worst part of dealing with fresh pumpkin is the seeds: they don’t come loose when they’re raw, they still don’t come loose even after they’re cooked, and while they come looser, since the pumpkin itself is now all squishy it doesn’t give you any purchase—there is or used to be a French tinned, or rather jarred, pumpkin that was excellent. Not to mention seedless. I preferred dealing with a single too-large pumpkin, because the equivalent amount of seed-grappling produced a much higher yield of usable pumpkin than piffling around with the correct number of small pumpkins with their individual minefields of seeds. I could afford this attitude because at the old house we had a monster chest freezer and I could freeze the surplus pulp—in premeasured glomps. I always made pies from fresh, but frozen pulp works just fine for bread, cookies and muffins.
And you always, always, always have to look at what’s in your mixing bowl and make executive decisions about texture and runniness.
When I was laying on Thanksgiving, or some other megaspread, for more people than I had space for, I used to put a tablecloth on the piano. This habit pursued me through several house moves but reached a kind of apotheosis in Maine. That was where I had a baby grand piano in a sitting room that was . . . approximately the size of a baby grand piano. Have I told you this story? When I had overnight guests—for example, for Thanksgiving—and put them on my Beautiful Blue Velvet Fold Out Double-Sized Sofabed, which had been my first real piece of grown-up furniture and which I therefore adored irrationally***—their feet went under the piano. The sofa itself was wedged under the window. You had to take kind of a flying leap from the door: a bit like my bedroom now, although my bed is complicated by the fact that it’s an old four-poster and if you miss and hit a post. . . .
Grah. I keep meaning to look for my old apple butter recipe, and keep forgetting. However. You don’t really need a recipe: Take your apples. Core, peel and chop them—and you don’t have to chop them fine, just chop them—put them in a large, heavy, wide-bottomed pan with as little water as you can get away with—or better yet, apple juice—and boil, gently, till they go mushy. At this point use a potato masher on them. I personally find this a lot less effort than all that chopping-small stuff. Depending on the tartness of your apples and how sweet you want your butter you’ll need somewhere around ¼ to ½ c sugar (brown or white: I like brown) per cup of apple pulp, and if you mix it in with a whisk you’ll get the last of the lumps out. Again, depending on how spicy you like your butter, you’ll want anywhere from about ¼ to 1 tsp of cinnamon per cup, and about half that of allspice Then turn the heat down to low and let it cook forever. If you want to stand there and stir it you can have the heat a little higher, and it’ll take a little less time but . . . not enough less. Stirring is one of the most boring occupations on the planet.† You should be in the same house with it, however, your large, heavy, wide-bottomed pot with your future apple butter in it, because you need to stir it occasionally and make sure it’s not sticking. It will eventually congeal into . . . apple butter. I don’t remember how long it takes, but it’s one of these put it together before lunch and it’ll be done by dinner things, and then you’ll have fresh apple butter for breakfast tomorrow. As you’d expect with something that slow-cooks and is full of spices, it improves with a little age.
I never bottled it the way you’re supposed to. A couple of big jars of apple butter in the back of the fridge didn’t last long enough to be a nuisance. And the way I make it—without stirring—if you made it in a big batch it would take FOREVER to cook down to sludge. My way it’s simple enough that doing it again is not a big deal.
One more warning: you lose a lot of pectin—the stuff that stiffens the applesauce it into something you can spread—by peeling and coring. The first time I made it I’d automatically peeled and cored, because that’s what you do before you cook apples, and then I reread the recipe and thought, oh, frell . . . and besides, sieving the muck to get the peels and cores out is again to me way too much like work, like endless stirring. So I did it my way and it still came out butter, and has always come out butter†† every other time I’ve made it my way. I don’t know if I’ve been extremely lucky in my apples, or what. So you might want to follow a proper recipe.
. . . I’m interested by the crock-pot version of apple butter that a couple of people mention. That certainly solves the stirring problem. And apple butter is a good way to use up all those windfalls or cheap from the farmers’ market damaged apples—I have used any and all apples. You just adjust the sugar and the spices. If the apples are old and losing their flavour you can also add a little sherry or Madeira.
The chief thing I remember about making crustless pie with your standard pie filling is be sure you butter the baking dish.
I love squash and sweet potatoes, in or out of pies. Although I tend to think that pumpkin makes the best pies—stronger flavour—but I’m sure you could fool me if you tried. You could just say that you used more/less something-or-other than I’m used to: all these pies are very spicy, and if you’re using molasses or maple syrup or cream cheese or cranberry sauce (or apple butter) or all of the above, the base orange vegetable could be almost anything.††† There are dedicated squash (or sweet potato) pie recipes, although I think the ones I know are regional. What I think of as yams, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got my taxonomy wrong, tend to be sweet without a lot of other flavour; they don’t interest me much, although generally speaking sweet = good in my hierarchy.‡ But sweet potatoes don’t have to be treated as sweet—somebody mentions sweet potatoes and bacon; I also love them roasted, either whole or sliced up in coins or wands, drizzled in olive oil (possibly in company with parsnips, carrots and beets treated the same way) and put in the oven on medium-high till they start to dry out and brown a little. You might want a little salt and a few herbs. (You should turn them over once, if you can stand it. Boring.) They’re also excellent in a stir-fry.
I’ve just finished supper. Why am I hungry?
* * *
* http://www.yaktrax.co.uk/ has restocked so I’ve ordered a spare pair. I cannot face the thought of more of this weather, the ineluctable facts of hellhound responsibility, and a single pair of exploded, fled, or eaten by wolverines yaktrax. I’ve been trying to remember what I did in Maine about walking in winter. Chiefly we had infrastructure. I was complaining to Peter that the mews, the barns and the Big Pink Blot are all a coop, they pay maintenance for stuff like the grounds and the driveway, where is the bloke with the snow plough hung on the front end of his pick up truck (with the bags of sand in the back to keep the rear wheels on the ground) to clear said driveway so we don’t all slew sideways and run slowly but irresistibly into the frelling wall coming in or going out? Peter looked at me as if I’d gone mad and explained loudly and clearly as to someone with suspected brain damage that we don’t have blokes with detachable snow ploughs around here. There’s no call for it. Huh. I predict that by next winter the local Scats^ will be selling bolt-on personal snow ploughs. Meanwhile the twelve miles^^ of frelling driveway is what you’d expect of four inches of unshifted snow being ground into titanium by passing cars and a few hellhounds and yaktrax.
In Maine there were tiny sidewalk/pavement-sized snow ploughs too, and after the plough went through somebody else laid sand. I was also younger. I didn’t worry about falling down as much.
^http://www.first4farming.com/scats/pages/homepage.jhtml
^^ Snow makes it longer. It’s part of the same physics that causes the toast to fall butter-and-marmalade side down.
** You’re glad really. It’s all PEG II time. I wish it were this simple, of course: if giving up the blog meant I would begin producing two novels a year—which is approximately the right word count, I regret to acknowledge—I’d do it so fast I’d break the world land speed record. Unfortunately I’ve not had a visit from the Really Good Bargains Fairy.
*** Yes. It’s in the sitting room at the cottage, which is even smaller than a baby grand piano. And was smaller even before the bookshelves went up.
† Note: why I almost never make risotto. All that stirring? Life’s too short.
†† It’s nothing like butter. It’s a kind of thick jammy gloop.
††† Heavens. I’d almost forgotten carrot pie.
‡ I used to make a fabulous brown sugar and orange juice and sweet potato thing for Thanksgiving. It destroyed lesser mortals.
Morning After Pumpkin Pie
Meanwhile . . . it’s still cold. And you’ll be hustling along after your hellhounds trying to warm up enough to stop your teeth chattering and your fingers burning*, so you’re also breathing shallowly because that air in your nice warm lungs is cold, and sooner or later the imbalance between output and input catches up with you and you are forced to take a long, deep, painful breath and . . . it smells like snow. AAAAUGH. According to the forecast we’re going to have flurries for the next several days, culminating in proper snow which will then turn to sleet this weekend.** So charming. Whoever pissed the weather gods off, can we please stake them outside the village walls for the tigers, Skadi, Boreas, Beira, or whoever, and get on with our lives? I’m not dreaming of a white Christmas, okay? I’m dreaming of hurtling hellhounds without getting knotted up in Chaos’ dranglefabbing slightly-too-small coat*** which will not stay where it’s put, but moseys around like a housefly on a wall.
This disagreeable weather continues to rouse memories of holidays past in regions where snow for Thanksgiving was not unheard-of and snow for Christmas planned for.† And I had a long conversation with Hannah this afternoon including comparative Thanksgiving dinners, and hers wins, since she was catering for the multitudes, and for the American multitudes at that, who have expectations.†† And specifically what I found myself remembering was one or two unsatisfactory Thanksgivings from the dim and distant past, and coming home afterward to a cold house without even any of the right leftovers in the refrigerator because I’d had dinner somewhere else, and feeling out of sorts because however admirable the dinner and enlivening the company, certain specific Thanksgiving cravings had not been slaked. Take pumpkin. I love pumpkin. I realise this is not a universal philosophy. There are people who positively dislike pumpkin. These unnatural creatures have even been known to host Thanksgiving dinner . . . and fail to produce pumpkin pie.
On one of these occasions I came home late Sunday night, tired, cranky, and jonesing like a koala bereft of eucalyptus. Monday morning I went out in a purposeful manner, got a bargain on tinned pumpkin and made the following:
Apple Butter Pumpkin Pie
1 9” unbaked pie crust
1 c mashed cooked or tinned pumpkin (DON’T use so-called ‘pumpkin pie filling’)
1 c apple butter: herewith begins the lecture. It all depends on your apple butter. You want something as thick as possible, and preferably not too sweet, but use what you like
¼ to ½ c dark brown sugar, depending on your apple butter
Again, the amount of spices you use will depend on the spiciness of your apple butter. So, approximately ½ tsp cinnamon, ¼ tsp allspice, ¼ tsp ginger. I like sweet spices and would expect to use 1 tsp cinnamon, but if I’m using apple butter that I also made, this may be overkill
3 eggs
½ c evaporated milk
Probably a tablespoon or two of ordinary milk
Combine pumpkin, apple butter, brown sugar, spices. (Mush up the brown sugar in a little of the pumpkin first, so it’ll beat in smoothly.) Beat eggs together vigorously, then lightly into the pumpkin. Stir in about half the evaporated milk and look at what you’ve got. It should look gloppy but not runny. (It helps if you’re used to what ordinary pumpkin pie filling looks like raw. This will be darker and have more texture because of the apple butter, but it should be about the same consistency.) If it’s already runny, stop now. If it still looks kind of La Brea Tar Pitsy, stir in the rest of the evaporated milk. Now look at it again. If it’ll actually keep its shape in a spoon, that’s too gloppy: add a little milk. If it slowly oozes over the edge of the spoon—perfect.
Pour in the unbaked pie shell. I cover the edges with tin foil so they don’t burn. 400°F for about 10 minutes, then lower to 350° and start checking after about 20 more minutes. You want it set but not shrivelled, and you want to take the tin foil off the edges of the crust about 15 minutes before you take the pie out. I usually figure 45-50 minutes total.
As I recall it took me four days to get through it. It was gone by the weekend—I did have a friend round once for a cup of tea and a slice of pie. That was back in the days when I had a metabolism however . . . and also I lived alone, so if I wanted to have a glass of cranberry juice and a quarter of a pie for supper, it was my business.
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* although the woolly liners in the All Stars are a great success in preventing the “ . . .Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire . . . !” thing, although a lack of wendigoes in southern England is also helpful.
** Penelope and Niall are being punished for leaving the Deputy Ringing Master in feeble and desperate charge for something so mere and frivolous as a holiday.
*** He is also dreaming of this
† Things I have never once been nostalgic for include the set of chains that lived in the boot of your car. Yes, I keep telling you, I am that old.
†† Someone on the forum wanted to know how you go about having Thanksgiving in England. Basically you just roast your fowl of choice, slap a few platters of this and that on the table, line up the pies on the sideboard and shout, Yo! Dinner! The one standard I did officially allow to slip, back when we were at the (large) old house and had things like dinner parties cough cough cough COUGH which is to say feedable people in the vicinity, was to have the Thanksgiving blow-out on the following Saturday, since British employers don’t give you the Thursday and Friday off.