In Common with Humans

My dad’s Open House was a fabulous success! The food was a huge hit. Not all the invitees could make it, so we had about forty people altogether–most of them my dad’s friends and therefore a lot older than I am, and I didn’t know most of them very well. But I had an okay time, and it was most gratifying to see how many people attended and how long almost everybody stayed. Mom was always the person who maintained the social connections–as is often the case with couples–and I’m happy to see my dad doing some entertaining. He and mom used to do a holiday open house every year, but I think the last couple of years that mom was alive, she wasn’t feeling up to it.

I made all the devilled eggs in the morning when I got up, piping in the filling with the pastry bag for an agreeably squiggly effect. Of course, the eggs were the one thing that fell sideways and slid all over the place on the ride up, but fortunately they could be repaired. I’m always amazed at how popular devilled eggs are! I make very good ones, with mustard and horseradish and a dash of cayenne pepper and so on, I really put the devil into devilled eggs. 🙂 I like them, but I don’t go nuts about them the way so many people seem to do! We sent leftovers home with anybody who wanted some, and I have some quiches and petits fours packed in the freezer for my sister’s visit. On my way home, I stopped at the Ashby church and left a plate of petits fours and cookies in the parish hall for coffee hour the next morning. I saw two shooting stars as I drove home, which was pretty cool.

On Sunday, I made the most incredible soup from some of the excess party ingredients. I’m a sucker for produce on the “reduced for quck sale” racks, and I’d bought three containers of sliced mushrooms and only used half of one for the quiche, and some little zucchinis that I then decided I didn’t want to eat the way I usually do, and so on. So I made mushroom/turkey/vegetable soup, with mushrooms, zucchini, onion, green pepper, celery, the rest of the packet of onion soup mix from the stuffed celery, and at the very end I tossed in one of the baggies of leftover Thanksgiving turkey from the freezer. WOW is this soup good! Low fat and no carbs, too.

I had one of those minor pleasant surprises on Monday. Last Thursday, when I was shopping at Shaw’s in Nashua for all the party food, I lost one of my canvas shopping bags. I had four when I went into the store but only three when I got to check-out. It was a long day, everything everywhere was very busy and I still had things to do, so I didn’t go back to hunt for it. But I was bummed, because it was a tote bag that had been my mom’s, with the logo of the Monadnock Chorus she used to sing with. I had two of them, and I don’t think they meant all that much to mom, really. She had piles of tote bags, most of which I now have. But you know how it is.

On Monday, I drove my dad to the Manchester airport because he’s out visiting my sister this week, and the route home took me right through Nashua. I stopped to get some cat litter because PetSmart was completely out of stock of the size and kind I buy on Thursday, and I decided to go into Shaw’s just to see if maybe the tote bag had been turned in. I waited patiently in line at the Customer Service desk, and the sales asistant poked around in the lost and found box…and they had it. I couldn’t believe it! I was so delighted, I thanked the sales assistant copiously, which probably made her day. They hear a lot of complaining at the Customer Service Desk. From now on, I’ll be more careful with my shopping bags!

I mailed more than sixty holiday cards last week. So far, I’ve received four. 🙁 I’m still working on my gift shopping–snowstorms and the party left me all discombobulated. It looks like I may be getting a new computer. I’m doing tons of research. I really need something that can handle video authoring, audio editing and graphic design, and I’ve maxed out this computer’s capacity, as amazing as that seems!

I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for–or, I did, but I didn’t think about it. When my dad said that he wanted to host a holiday Open House for the first time since mom passed away, I was delighted. I immediately decided that I wanted to cook for it, and for days I thought about cool delicacies that I wanted to make for the party. I rarely get to cook for other people, and I love to cook. I decided I wanted to make little mini-quiches, baked in muffin tins, and homemade petits fours. Dad wanted stuffed celery and devilled eggs, so I said I’d make those, too.

Then dad sent out the invitations–to more than 50 people. The Open House is 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. today (Saturday).

I have become a very instinctive cook–I tend to make things up as I go along. One disadvantage of this is that I tend to overestimate how much raw material I’ll need–but that’s easy to do when you not only aren’t working from recipes, but you’re suddenly planning for 50+ people! The other disadvantage, obviously, is that some of your creative improvisations refuse to cooperate, cooking being an art, not a science. Sometimes you get Toll House Cookies, and sometimes…*cough* Anyway, I figured out that I would make two kinds of quiche, ham and swiss cheese, and cheddar with veggies, and that the petits fours (which I had never made before) would be pumpkin cake with praline-pecan filling.

Then we had the big snowstorm on the day that I would have done all my shopping. This week has been very disrupted. I spent Tuesday getting my holiday cards out and Wednesday shoveling snow and otherwise housebound. Thursday, I went shopping, along with the rest of the cabin-fevered world, and that took several hours because I also did some gift shopping. I bought tons of food–way too much, as it turned out. Thursday night, I started cooking.

I baked two more layers of pumpkin cake. I made praline-pecan filling. In both cases, I was practically making up the recipes as I went along–the cake recipe I adapted, but it’s a pretty radical adaptation from the original (a carrot cake recipe that I’ve done all kinds of variations on). The pecan-praline filling I literally made up as I went. The cake came out fabulously well. The filling came out fabulously well. The cake went together beautifully.

Then my luck ran out. I had planned to make petits fours glaces with a poured icing, and I screwed up the icing. It was too wet and wouldn’t dry, and the first batch of petits fours was all gloppy. I ended up having to throw some out. But I still had a lot left, because two cakes, cut into 1-inch square petits fours, make a ton of petits fours, and they’re very rich without any icing at all. The cake is dense and moist and the praline filling…well, it’s butter, ground pecans, brown sugar and confectioners’ sugar, you do the math! So the petits fours got a sudden re-design and ended up with a dusting of powdered sugar and a squiggle of colored icing gel (red, green or gold) on their tops.

Then I did the quiches, which started with homemade butter pastry. I was up until almost 5:00 a.m. Thursday night rolling out pastry and fitting it into muffin tins. I had a variety of pans totalling 38 cups, and I wanted to fill them all so I could start baking quiches as soon as I got up. I also cleaned, cooked, drained and wrung out the spinach, and cooked the ham. I missed sunset attunement, I didn’t even do my workout. All I did was cook, and cook, and cook, and cuss out the petits fours because I could see that the icing was a big fat fail.

Yesterday, I made up the quiche filling, tucked it into the pastry shells, poured in the egg/milk mixture, baked them, removed the quiches from the cups and put them into paper baking cups, washed the muffin tins, re-lined them with pastry until I was out of pastry, and baked more quiches. They ended up being ham, swiss and onion, and spinach, mushroom, onion and cheddar, except for a few that are just mushroom, onion and cheddar because I ran out of spinach. When all of those were finally done, I got out the cake and finished the petits fours, which also got tucked into little paper cups before I dusted on the powdered sugar. Then I hard-boiled four dozen eggs. I almost missed my workout again, but I just couldn’t stand it, and got my cycling done late. Finally, I made the stuffed celery, piping seasoned “light” cream cheese into celery stalks with a pastry bag. I’ll make the devilled eggs before I leave for my dad’s house today, you can’t really do those ahead of time.

I’m worn out! I’ve cooked (and washed dishes–every pot and bowl I own, at least twice, it feels like) for three straight days for this party! Dad has apparently decorated the house to within an inch of its life, and I sure hope we get a good turn-out. It should be quite a time. You know what would make me happiest of all? The end of the party and no leftovers! 🙂 We’ll see…!

I was just working too hard–usually multi-tasking–to stop and take pictures, and once everything was done, I was getting it packed. But here’s a picture of the cake in progress. It’s three layers of cake and two layers of filling.

extremely high-calorie cut

Pepperell, at least my neighborhood, got 10 to 11 inches of snow–I measured it. We’re getting a little rain now, not much. I went out and shoveled as soon as the snowflakes stopped. The snow itself is wet and heavy, if this had been light fluffy snow we’d probably have about 20 inches. Fortunately I got it all shoveled before too much rain had fallen to make it lots heavier.

I shoveled the top of the driveway, down about thirty feet or so, and cleared off the car. Then I shoveled around to the wood pile, cleared the wood pile, shoveled out the heating oil intake, and shoveled a path all the way down to the compost pile. Then I hauled in firewood to replenish the wood boxes and then some. My neighbor just came and plowed the rest of my 150-foot-long driveway, so I am now all clear to sally forth…but I don’t think I’ll hit the roads quite yet.

I’m cooking food for my dad’s holiday Open House this weekend and I have Christmas shopping to do, and I had been planning to go up to Nashua today, but…maybe this evening. It’s still precipitating and the winter weather advisory has now been extended to 4:00 p.m. I guess I’ll have to make lists and do some shopping online.

Could be worse, this is almost the anniversary of the “historic” ice storm last year (December 11). I had just finished cutting out fabric for the bathrobe I was making for my niece when the power went off for good at 3:00 a.m.–and it was a week before I could get back to the project! No power problems for me today (yet), although I sure there are outages elsewhere. Oh, and I’d just like to say: these new boots I bought at L.L. Bean this fall are full of win. These are the best boots I have ever owned! I love them! I’m going to write L.L. Bean a fan letter!

Oh-oh, I hear sirens…yeah, maybe I will shop online! Except that I can’t buy the food that way. 🙁

This same storm has clobbered about half the country. It socked my sister and her family, out in Chicago (you guys okay?), and just about everyone I know! I hope all of you are getting cleared out and staying safe!

My tweets from yesterday for non-Twitterers:

• 13:04 It’s election day! And you know what that means…THE ROBO-CALLS STOP!!! Yayyyyyyyy! Off to vote, for the one candidate who didn’t call me! #

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We didn’t get the forecast 3 to 7 inches, by a long shot, but it’s the first “sticky” snow of the season.

And…holiday lights, we haz dem! It’s been years since I put lights up outside my house. Ages and ages ago, I put lights on the bushes in front of the house a few times, but I’ve long since cut those bushes down. In more recent years, I tried putting lights on the insides of the windows a few times, in a kind of “curtain of lights” effect, but I was never really satisfied with the results. In summer, 2008, I cleared the front of the house out even more, but I never got around to putting lights up last year at all, inside or out. This year, rather impulsively (and faciliated by the very good quality, heavy-duty ladder I bought at Lowe’s a couple of seasons ago–I didn’t have that previously) I decided to put lights up around the windows and door. I did that Thanksgiving weekend, and here’s how it looks:

There are blue and white lights around the windows, but the blue lights are not very bright and the white ones completely overwhelm them. I also have blue light bulbs in the kitchen window light and side porch light. The wreath on the door has gold bows. It started out with blue balls, too, but they all fell off and I need to think of a better way to attach them. Blues, silver and gold are my color schemes.

I feel very festive and holiday-spirited! That will last until my next electric bill, *heh*. The lights go on after sunset attunement–and gods, I can hardly believe that I start sunset attunement now before 4:00 p.m.!!–and go off when I go to bed, which these days is around 4:00 a.m. or later.

My tweets from yesterday for non-Twitterers:

• 17:16 Thoughts on Kindle & ebooks from India: is.gd/5e8G6 If ebook mkt takes off in China & India, pubs who are digital will be winners #
• 17:19 “Will 2010 be the breakout year for e-book readers?” is.gd/5elLd Gods, I hope so, because BLUM is ready NOW, in all formats! #
• 01:57 Release date is set for *Krymsin Nocturnes* by Joseph Armstead: April 15, 2010. fb.me/3nDviwQ #

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Earlier this year, I’d gotten a payment for a job, and I thought I’d buy myself some DVDs I’d wanted for a long time. This wouldn’t be a wholly frivolous purchase because almost all of them were titles I have on crappy VHS tapes and use at regular intervals for cycling/workout videos. I made a list and starting filling up a “shopping carts” on Columbia House and Amazon…

…and at the very last minute, my Saturnian conscience kicked in and whispered, “No. You should use this money to buy the projector for your presentations, because that’s a professional need.” So I cancelled the DVD orders and bought the projector. I’m sure Columbia House and Amazon were very disappointed, and I brooded over the woes of a tight budget and obsessive-compulsive frugality.

But I have a hard time passing up a bargain. I made out like a bandit when the video store down the street closed and sold all its stock, as sorry as I was to see that store go out of business. So, when I went up to Nashua on Friday and saw signs that the Blockbuster by Royal Ridge shopping center was closing, and everything was on sale at huge discounts–even the shelves, furniture and equipment–I had to check it out.

The shelves were still almost full, I think the sale had just started. I went around looking for vampire films for my collection, mostly, as well as the very few other movies I wanted on DVD (I have two main criteria for owning films: I can work out to them, or they go into one of my collections, vampire or Johnny Depp. There are exceptions to this but they’re rare). They didn’t have Sweeney Todd, which I hated but need for the JD collection (I just hate to have to pay for it, *grump*). I was surprised, however, to spot one copy of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and nabbed that. I picked up a bunch of vampire films (cleaned them right out of bloodsucking movies, actually! 🙂 ) Some crappy ones I bought “for reference,” but also Shadow of the Vampire (I only have it on VHS), Let the Right One In, Perfect Creature and Day Watch.

But of course, the one vampire movie I was really looking for was Twilight, and I didn’t expect to find it. I figured that the second the word went out about the big fire sale, there was a stampede to snatch up all the copies of Twilight. I looked, very carefully, on every shelf in every section, but no Twilight, not even among the “new” (as opposed to “pre-viewed”) DVDs. I did find the first Underworld movie “new,” which has proven tricky to get, and I was pleased to get that–also discounted.

Then, I went up to the cashier to check out, and…sitting in a single-title display box on the counter, in front of the cash register, all by itself, was…one copy of Twilight.

I think there was a sonic boom, I moved that fast. Edward couldn’t have gotten it first. *g*

So I dropped some money I shouldn’t have, but I got great deals, and hey–I did my workout last night to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. New movies always give me a boost. It’s…a health maintenance investment! That’s right, yeah–preventive health care or business reference expense. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. 🙂

As my friends may recall, I have a violent aversion to nostalgia. I simply don’t look back on the past in general or my past in particular with any longing or idealizing whatsoever. Mostly, I’m glad it’s over and done with, and I embrace the future eagerly. But I’m definitely blissing out on some holiday nostalgia this week.

When I was a teen, my dad worked for Belmont Public Schools, and every year at midwinter break, the departmental secretary gave him a big flat shirt box full of homemade cookies. They were unlike any other holiday cookies I ever made or got from anyplace else. A minor highlight of the Yuletide season was when dad brought home that box of cookies. I didn’t even know quite what they were, but I knew they were something made with almonds, thick crunchy cylinders, not really curved into a “crescent” shape. The box had three kinds of cookie: homemade baklava (well, that I knew), and then the almond cookies with some drenched in the same syrup that was on the baklava and the rest dredged in powdered sugar. Every year I looked forward to those cookies, but I never got the recipes or even found out what the secretary called them.

Then my dad changed jobs, and I never saw those cookies again. That was thirty years ago, and I’ve been pining for them ever since. I deduced that the thick crunchy cylinders were “almond crescents” and a relatively well-known and common kind of cookie, and I found recipes online–but I never saw the actual cookies anywhere, and I was never sure the recipes were really, you know, the ones. Despite how much I love to cook and bake, and how good I am at it, in all this time, I’d never tried to recreate those cookies. Maybe they were just…too special. I didn’t want to try and get it wrong. Or maybe it just wasn’t the same if it wasn’t that certain box of cookies, given as a gift, with all the context that came with it.

But, I’ve been doing a lot of culinary experimentation on this new regimen over the past year, and I had three cans of “natural” whole almonds sitting in my cupboards that I hadn’t touched, and I’m buying ingredients to do food for my dad’s “open house” next weekend, and…something impelled me to give it a shot. I looked up recipes online and picked one that seemed closest to my memory of the almond cookies.

Past midnight on Friday night, I was grinding up almonds in the blender, mixing up dough and hand-molding cookies. I carefully calculated the calorie count–I even figured out how to calculate for the powdered sugar. They didn’t seem to come out coated as thickly with sugar as I recall, but memory may be exaggerating there. The powdered sugared cookies were always my favorites in the box. The cookies seemed to come out well, even though the bottle of almond flavoring I thought I had turned out to be bone dry, and I used double of this gourmet vanilla extract my sister gave me. The fragrance was just incredible–twenty four hours later the whole house still smelled like fresh cookies.

By the time they were done, I was already at my calorie limit for the day, so I didn’t try one until the next afternoon, after I’d had brunch. I took a bite, and…

Oh, yeah. That’s it. Those are the ones. Those are the cookies. Oh, man. They’re just…wonderful. I waited thirty years to taste these again, and it was worth it.

Recipe on request. 🙂

here’s how they came out

My tweets from yesterday for non-Twitterers:

• 13:22 MWA blacklists, er, delists Harlequin from its “approved publisher” list, Harlequin CEO responds at length: is.gd/5dlnV (blog) #
• 13:24 The Atlantic, once a major short fiction market who stopped pubbing fic in 2005, will publish short fiction for Kindle: is.gd/5dloK #
• 14:27 Temperature dropping 2 degrees/hour, snowflakes mixed with rain right from the start #
• 15:13 Dickens’ notes show how much he changed the text of A Christmas Carol for his public readings: is.gd/5doEA #
• 15:49 Bookstore owner’s perspective on aggressive self-published authors who won’t take no for an answer: is.gd/5dpAm (PW) #
• 22:11 Awwww…”Fire guts Cambridge building, cat is saved” is.gd/5dC92 I want to send firefighters cookies. Wish all their jobs wr lk this #

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Miscellaneous updates, for those who are following along…

You might remember when I packed up the non-functioning MyPowerALL(tm) device and shipped it back to the manufacturer, Tekkeon, with a letter which I also published, unlocked in this journal, on October 4th. Here’s the follow-up on that! As soon as the parcel had had time to arrive in California, I missed a phone call from “Chris” at Tekkeon. I wondered what he might have to say, but I tried calling back and we played telephone tag for a couple of days until we connected. Chris said that he’d checked the device I’d shipped back, it was indeed defective, and he offered to send me a replacement. I accepted the offer, and the replacement arrived rather quickly. Chris even included the extra connector that I’d purchased separately to fit one of the Dell computers.

It took me a couple of weeks to get around to unpacking the new replacement, because I had so much else to do. I re-arranged the living room a bit and cleared out space to set up and plug in a lot of devices I wanted to be able to use easily and simultaneously, such as the scanner and the older Dell that it connects to, so I was getting out a lot of things and trying them out or charging them up. I plugged in the new MyPowerALL(tm) and set it to charge…

…and it won’t charge. At least, I can’t figure out how to get it to take the charge! It’s plugged into a power strip that charges everything else, so that’s not the problem. I give up! At least Tekkeon made an effort, and they needn’t have, I waited until long past the warranty period was expired. I just have bad luck with batteries! And that’s all the MyPowerALL(tm) is, a free-standing external battery pack. *sigh*

You might also remember the letters I wrote to Bath and Body Works about the case in Connecticut whereby a Wiccan was called a “devil-worshipper” and fired by her new supervisor. I wrote hard copy letters to the head offices of the parent company, Limited Brands, Inc., and the CEO/founder of the company by name, and I also published the letter, unlocked, in this journal. I really didn’t expect a response–but I got one (proving the power of snail-mail, cc’s, and posting copies to your blog, *heh*). Angie Grant from Customer Relations sent a polite, non-committal letter saying in part, “Thank you for your concern. We can assure you that Limited Brands has a strict policy regarding discrimination. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate against race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, sexual orientation or marital status. We are unable to comment on pending litigation.”

I wonder if she has all that in a template in her word processor or if she cut-and-pasted it? Ah, well. That all sounds just peachy (and they wouldn’t put it in writing unless they thought they meant it). But I notice that Limited Brands is one of the “ten worst companies” recently listed by Air America as places where you might not want to shop if you care about ethical business practices. Good thing I’m not into any of that girly frou-frou stuff, anyway! Now if L.L. Bean is caught pulling any crappy stunts like this, I’ll be devastated!

Thanksgiving with dad and his friend Ty went just fine, although it was kind of like cooking dinner for a couple of bachelors. When I got to the house, my dad was on the computer and Ty was watching TV, and when I said I didn’t need immediate help with anything, they resumed those activities. It was about an hour before I got to have an actual conversation with anybody! I also went and found a tablecloth and set the table with candles and so on. I swear, if I hadn’t, the boys would have been perfectly happy to eat off placemats on the bare table pad. But dinner came out really well and seemed to be enjoyed by all. Ty contributed some wine he’d brought from Chile which was just wonderful–the lightest, most delicate cabernet sauvignon I’ve ever tasted.

I had brought up the screen and projector because I wanted to try an experiment after dinner: watching a movie on streaming video, via Amazon Video on Demand, on my netbook over dad’s wireless network, projected onto the screen with the projector (whew. Yes, I’m a hopeless geek! Your point??). I also brought the external computer speakers that I bought for the room party at Anticipation, and which work so well, people complained that the party music was too loud. I knew this was a lot fussier than just renting a DVD, but I wanted to try it out. My dad was a little baffled as to why we were going through all this, and it took us a while to decide on a film, as our first choices weren’t available to rent yet. But we finally watched Outlander.

My experiment was semi-successful: the movie didn’t stream smoothly although the sound was fine. I’m not sure what caused the drag, but I suspect it was the projector. It’s really not up to the level of a home entertainment center projector, it’s meant for presentations and so on (and that’s what I bought it for). But it worked without a hitch otherwise–no problems interfacing with the netbook, brilliant picture, sharp focus, and so on. It was a good long test for the projector, which I haven’t yet tried out for a presentation or event.

As for the movie…we liked it enough that I don’t feel that I wasted my $3.99 to rent it. Outlander is about what you’d get if you ran Beowulf (the movie), Alien and Dragonslayer through a blender. Set in the 8th century, it has some cringe-worthy anachronisms, but it also has a good cast, strong character focus, and John Hurt who I will forgive for anything, even taking his clothes off in Scandal. It also has the most gut-wrenching solution to the perennial time-travel problem of, “but how can he understand the language?” that I’ve ever seen in a film! But it wasn’t a bad ending to the day. 🙂

That’s follow-up, new stuff in another post!