3 posts tagged “2007”
This week is our annual family feast. It will involve the usual things: the altar, food, family, food, music, food, storytelling, oh, and food.
Because it's always such a hit, the appetizer will be a bread cornucopia surrounded by fruits and vegetables hollowed out and filled with dips. The cornucopia itself will be filled with bite-sized cuts of fruits and vegetables to eat with the dips. The beverage will be sparkling apple juice.
Then we'll have the soup course. I don't know yet if we'll have a cream soup or a clear soup. If it's cream, then I'm voting for roasted red pepper and tomato with herbed croutons. If it's the clear soup, then I'm voting for clarified poultry soup with carrot "fish", celery "seaweed", and water chestnut "seashells" and crispy bread "cattails". The beverage will be a light fruited tea - probably a stone fruit blend like apricot and plum.
The main course will be Cornish game hens accompanied by wild and long grain rice with cranberries and pecans, Brussels sprouts and baby carrots in butter sauce, mashed potatoes with gravy, petite peas and pearl onions, and succotash. Feather rolls with herbed butter will be served alongside this, and we'll drink sparkling cranberry juice.
A salad course will clear our palates for dessert. There will be a fruity ambrosia salad, a field greens salad, and a creamy cucumber salad. Mint tea will help clear things and get our tummies ready for the always amazing dessert spread.
We'll have pie row - a narrow table loaded with pies: pumpkin, deep dish apple, cranberry cherry, blackberry cobbler, Mayan chocolate cream, pecan, lemon, and mincemeat. Another table will be set up for the cakes: nutmeg angelfood, a Lady Baltimore, a pannetonne, a dried fruitcake, and a cream cheese pound cake. We have ice cream and sauces to accompany the pies. We have coffee, hot black tea, hot cocoa, and flavored cold milks to go with the desserts.
We don't have cookies for this because as of November 12, we've been fasting from cookies. This will make Cookie Day much more profound, when we gorge on cookies as we box them up for one another and the homeless and people we'd like to thank for their service throughout the year. Cookie Day is a very holy day for us.
My raspberries are now hip high.
The hard freeze wasn't as hard as predicted, so nothing got freeze damaged.
I harvested mints, lemon balm, lavender, roses, basil, rosemary, bay leaves, jasmine flowers, violets, the last of the redbuds, the last of the asparagus, the early baby lettuces, and a swathe of horsetails.
In a week or two, I'll be harvesting spinach, carrots, radishes, lime basil, and maybe some early pea tendrils, in addition to mints, lemon balm, sage, rosemary, basil, lavender, roses, and lettuces.
It will be a couple of weeks before the tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, and potatoes are ready.
And a while longer before the squash and parsnips are up and harvestable.
This year, I seem to have a very good garden, and I am pleased with it. Next year's will be even better.
And when I start gardening in the back yard, there will be even more and better yummies growing.
I use a modified form of the Square Foot Gardening method pioneered and promoted by Mel Bartholomew. His Mel's Mix for soil is unbeatable, and I use it for all my gardening and for repotting indoor plants. But his 4'x4' beds are too big for me. I do 2'x8' beds instead, long and narrow, and I intend to make the ones in the back yard curvy. I also "stack" his beds in short pyramid forms so I can grow on multiple levels. So far, the highest I've gone is 2 levels, but I plan on going up three levels.
This year, I put in a strawberry bed, just a few plants, but I'll expand it next year. Next year, I plan to put in a blackerry bed, and I may grow blueberries, too. If the potatoes do well this year, I want to grow sweet potatoes. I love sweet potatoes.
Last week, a friend asked me out to dinner at Outback, and I ordered the potato soup (which was their "walkabout soup" of the night and a side of baked sweet potato, and shared a half order of cheese fries. It was a yummy meal. Potatoes, potatoes, and potatoes - it appealed to both the Indian and the German in me.
I plan to put in a small outdoor seating area in front, and surround it with these raised beds, of cutting flowers, edible flowers, and more herbs, in the front yard. I may put in a street screen of forsythias with a low carpet of juniper so I don't have to mow along the street anymore.
The backyard, I still plan on putting in an edible labyrinth garden with a gazebo in the center. I will grow grapevines up the gazebo. The Zombie Maple is getting a new dress of wisteria vines. And where my son's current scrapyard exists, I'll put in a mini orchard of apples, apricots, figs, Meyer lemons, and cherries. Of course, that will not happen until I remove all his car, bicycle, wagon, lawnmower, airplane, and motorcycle parts, which means borrowing his truck from his father to haul all of it off to a metal scrap yard. Whatever money I make from that (probably less than $20.00) will start the orchard off.
The only thing I dislike about where I currently live is that we are not allowed to have a compost of any sort. I do cheat by having a small indoor composter, but it's just enough for the indoor plants and not enuogh to support the outdoor gardens.
I ran for mayor last time, in the hopes of being able to loosen some of the home owner restrictions, but the incumbent won. Ah well, maybe next time. It's not as if I spent any money on the campaign, so I didn't lose anything and I gained a lot of new friends. For me, it was a win-win situation.
Except for the compost. I lost out on that issue. This time.
I am baking king cakes for tomorrow's Mardi Gras.
I love Mardi Gras. I love the idea of Mardi Gras.
It is a season of mirth and joy. People gather together to entertain one another with masks and trinkets and music and short skits. There's special, traditional food. It all culminates in a no-holds-barred feast with extravagances in color, costume, food, and community.
It's followed by days of contemplation and quiet, a gestating time, a waiting time, an observing time - as the rest of the world sprouts frantically into spring. How appropriate that we take this time to pause to see life renew itself all around us.
Mardi Gras, for me, is the first day of spring. The dandelions pop yellowly open. The wild violets send up blossom shoots. The plantains and other lawn "weeds" unfurl their leaves. The rose bushes cloak themselves in buds. The squirrels make a massive appearance, daring the cars and the migrating geese. The road repair crews begin to make real road repairs and not the stop-gap repairs of winter. Hot tar reeks the air as roofs are repaired. Building cranes swing back into use.
All of this begins at the end of Carnival, when Mardi Gras bursts across the cities in a riot of color and delicious excess.
We have no Mardi Gras parades in Oklahoma, no wild excess. Oklahoma is a very staid state. Any celebrations we have are subdued. Even Halloween generates only the expected costumes in public, and celebration is discouraged all across non-retail businesses. Office workers are expected to treat the day like any other day in the year. There's a small amount of defiance in the candy dishes and the colors office workers choose to wear.
Mardi Gras is the same way in Oklahoma - frowned upon as "too wild". Rebellion appears in a string of beads, in the candy dishes, in the King Cakes brought to work to share among co-workers.
It doesn't matter if Mardi Gras is the glorious excess of New Orleans or Brazil or the sneakiness of Oklahoma - it still calls to people to celebrate. And celebrate we do.
I do my part by baking King Cakes to share. Richly filled and decorated King Cakes. This year, I fill some with traditional pralines and others with a yoghurt-based cream cheese and honey and apples, spiced with cardamoms and white pepper, and still others with dense dark chocolate, toasted almonds, and the delicate aroma of roses and orange.
I love Mardi Gras.
