Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

More comments I posted elsewhere in the last several months: ( relationships to books, bagels, gardening, minimum wage, intersectionality, what we overlook and why, ancestry and the complexities of immigration )

There's a grapevine at one edge of my mother's back garden, and she mentioned this afternoon that there were grapes. I took a look, and then a couple of grapes. Even the ones that are ripe, or close to it, are somewhat sour, as well as juicy and a bit sweet, but there's enough flavor there that I ate a handful, even though we bought grapes, and clementines, blueberries, kiwi berries [sic], and ground cherries (under some other name) at the supermarket this morning. I bought the kiwi berries because I have never had them, nor heard of them, and it was all of £2 for the package.

Today has been the sort of low-key day--grocery shopping with a ride from Mom's upstairs neighbor, lunch, then sitting outside reading the Guardian and doing the crossword, and plenty of conversation--that would have been routine when my mother lived a few miles from me, not a few thousand. Having been to London a few times before means I can relax into 'I'm here to visit my mother' in a way that would have been more difficult without that experience. It's not confidence that the things will be here later, it's that I have already seen Avebury, and the Tower of London, and the Rosetta Stone, and so on.

Twenty-two years ago, I went to Hong Kong to see it before the handover from British to Chinese rule, consciously thinking that New Orleans would be there later. Then Hurricane Katrina happened, and I still haven't been to Louisiana.

Twenty years ago, in Paris for a week, I took the opportunity to climb all the way to the top of Notre Dame Cathedral, because I wasn't sure I'd be capable of it on a future visit (123 steps with no handrail or landing). Another trip to Paris is still on the wish list, with cattitude and adrian_turtle, but that tower is gone. I don't know what if anything this train of thought leads to--I'm not going to jump up and figure out what else to see this week, I'm going to read my email and then take the laundry out of the washer--but I seem to have boarded it.

Cattitude, Adrian, and I just spent a couple of days in New York City, mostly to see my mother. We talked a lot, walked a lot, and ate some good food. Good sushi at a randomly selected restaurant Friday evening, and Ukrainian food for lunch today before we came back to Boston. I had two kinds of pierogi: truffled mushroom, new on Veselka's menu since my last visit, and sweet potato.

I also showed Adrian the Cloisters, and we had dinner last night with my aunt Lea, her husband Dave, and my cousin Janet, as well as Mom.

[I will try to post more later, but want to at least touch on this before falling over. Tonight the cats need my attention.]

Mia Kanner's Linzer Torte

My mother called today and asked if I still have her mother's recipe for linzer torte, because she wanted to share it with some people at her senior citizens' center, and I emailed it to her.

I have that recipe because when I asked Grandma and she said she didn't have it written down, I asked if I could come over, bake with her, and write down what she did, including the quantities of different ingredients. That was in her kitchen on Ocean Parkway, so before Grandpa died—that makes it at least 22 years ago now. I made copies of the recipe and sent them to my mother, brother, aunts, and cousins. Then I mislaid it and had to ask my Aunt Lea to send it to me.

My grandmother's linzer torte is a cake made from a mix of white flour and ground nuts; it resembles the "linzer tart" cookies sold in American bakeries only in the name. The basis of this recipe was probably something from a Viennese cookbook published about a century ago.

I''m posting this recipe in the hopes someone will bake and enjoy it, and to reduce the chances of it getting lost.

This recipe makes two eight- or nine-inch round cakes, and can easily be divided in half.

The cranberry filling:

1 bag cranberries
1 cup sugar
1 cup water

Mix the sugar and water in a saucepan, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Bring to a boil and add the cranberries. Mix well. Return to a boil, then reduce heat and cook ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and set aside.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (180 C). Grease two 8- or 9-inch round baking pans.

The dough:

1 cup bland vegetable oil (corn or canola is good)
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 1/4 cups flour sifted with 3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon rum
8 ounces ground walnuts (this is what I always use), almonds, or filberts)

Beat the oil and eggs together well. Add sugar and beat well. Add the flour slowly, mixing as you go. Add the cinnamon and mix it in. Mix in the rum, then the ground nuts.

Knead until the dough no longer sticks to your hands. Either roll the dough out, or pat it into the baking pans with your hands. You should have some dough left over. Pour in the cranberry filling. Top with a criss-cross pattern of dough. Bake at 350 F for 30 minutes: the cake is done when a toothpick comes out clean.

My aunt said she "always thinks of the rum as the secret ingredient." I don't remember linzer torte tasting of rum, though my aunt says the recipe she sent around was taken directly from my printout, and I am considering omitting it.

This cake is vegetarian and parve, but not vegan.


This post is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.

I am just back from a trip to New York to see my mother; I got far too little sleep, and therefore came home a day earlier than I'd been thinking of, but am glad I got to see people.

cattitude, adrian_turtle and I took a train to New York Tuesday morning. My mother lives in London, and is currently in the US to see us, her sisters, and my brother. I'd hoped Mom would come up here for a few days, but she asked if we could come visit her instead, because she is finding travel more wearing than she used to. (My aunts live in New York; Cattitude, Adrian, and I are here in Arlington; and my brother and his girlfriend just moved to New Orleans.) My aunt Lea didn't want to put four people up for three days, so Mom got a hotel room reasonably close to my aunt's house.

We spent Tuesday afternoon and evening with my aunt and her husband: tea, conversation, and dinner (we had Chinese food delivered, because we wanted to make things as easy as possible for Lea and Dave). My cousin Janet came over near the end of our visit, after saying she didn't think she'd be able to make it because she had a class. (Conveniently, the one dish the rest of us hadn't especially liked was very much to her taste, so everyone was well fed.)

I was pretty worn out by the time we left Lea's (and was thinking that I should have insisted on leaving slightly sooner), but we talked a bit more before bed.

And then everyone else went to sleep, and I just lay there: every time I got close to drifting off, I was interrupted by a siren. (I think most of them were ambulances headed to Bellevue.) By the time that ebbed, the cold front was coming through, and the wind was far too loud for me to sleep. (This isn't usually a problem, but I'm not usually on the 29th floor.)

As far as I can tell, I didn't sleep at all Tuesday night. I got through Wednesday, mostly, on stimulants, protein, and sheer willpower. Since the hotel is near the Second Avenue Deli [which is no longer on Second Avenue], I had matzoh ball soup for lunch; everyone else had sandwiches to go with theirs. From there, we went to the American Museum of Natural History, because I hadn't been there in ages, and it was too cold a day for me to want to walk around the Bronx Zoo.

That was fun: we went to the special exhibit on Cuba (which I think I liked more than Mom, Andy, or Adrian—I spent quite a while looking at various kinds of anoles] and to the Hall of Rocks and Minerals (an old favorite of mine and Catittude's, to the point that when I needed to sit down, I pointed across the hall and told him "I'm going to go sit by the big amethyst" and he knew exactly what I meant. Before that, I helped someone who was using a walker and, when we asked if he needed help, said that he'd been told there were gems and couldn't find them. So I said "I'll show you," led him up the relevant ramp (the hall is broken into lots of different levels, connected by stairs and ramps, not all of them obvious) to the Star of India, a well-known and very fine large star sapphire.

Dinner that night was at a sushi place that had odd ideas of what "chirashi" and "don" meant: in both cases, instead of raw fish on a bowl of rice, they served a platter of fish and rice, and put spicy mayonnaise on the rice. I tasted it, realized the problem, and asked for some plain sushi rice instead, which they brought, but while the fish was reasonably good, I doubt I'd go back there even if I lived in the neighborhood. I think I got between five and six hours of sleep that night: I tried going to bed early, but found it difficult not to listen to the conversation in the next room. (Again, this was nobody's fault, and when I asked them to lower the volume, they did, and came to bed soon after.)

Adrian took a bus home Thursday morning (so she could be back in time to teach), and Cattitude and I had lunch with my mother and then caught an afternoon train. Home in time for dinner and to reassure the cats that we still love them. 42itous very kindly came in to feed them and keep them company, but they seemed a bit agitated when we got home. However, Molly spent most of the night curled between my feet, and both cats were much calmer by morning. I was glad to be back in my own bed, and got about nine and a half hours' sleep, which has helped a lot.

(I realized yesterday that I had cheerfully done one of my balance exercises—standing on a moving subway without holding onto anything—on no sleep the day before, on our way to the museum. Successfully, and on the way back I realized I was more tired and sat down. However, the fact that this worked doesn't mean it was a good idea, and I had known my judgment was not at its best for lack of sleep.)

ETA: Looking at the news this morning, I saw that Amtrak had a "minor derailment" [sic] at Penn Station this morning, which was still affecting train travel to and through the city a few hours later, which made me suddenly and perhaps irrationally more pleased that I came home yesterday.

My mother is visiting for a few days, mostly just to spend time with us. Yesterday adrian_turtle came over in the morning, and we all sat around talking for a while, then went over to Central Square for lunch. (We had been going to head straight out, but it was raining, and we had nowhere we needed to be at any particular time.)

Apparently cattitude and I had each picked one of the best things on Middle East restaurant's lunch menu on our respective first visits. This time I had the lamb shank again, which everyone agreed was excellent; my mother had Cattitude's original choice, the pumpkin kibbe, still excellent; but Cattitude's spinach pie was only okay, and Adrian didn't like her stuffed grape leaves. (They also didn't get the water hot enough for tea this time.) But we had more nice conversation, and shared the particularly tasty things, and then adjourned to Tosci's for tea and ice cream (I'm the only one who had both).

By the time we were done at Tosci's the sun was out, and we took the T over to the Public Garden. We enjoyed the flowers and the big old elm trees (now a rarity, alas), and Adrian showed everyone the ether statue, commemorating the introduction of anesthesia at/by Mass. General Hospital in 1846. It was erected by a "grateful citizen," no name given, the following year: probably either one of the first patients to benefit from anesthesia, or a close relative thereof. (We saw mallards, of course (one reason people visit the Public Garden is Make Way for Ducklings) and a couple of swans, and lots of squirrels and pigeons. Someone was hand-feeding the pigeons (and had a few landing on her arms briefly), and the mallards were trying to get at the food on the ground.

We then had a nice evening at home. Cattitude had stopped at the farmers' market and bought Arctic char for dinner, and baked it with mustard and fresh dill; Adrian made a salad with lettuce and our home-grown cherry tomatoes, and more of the dill in the dressing.

My mother both likes the tomatoes specifically—one of the plants we selected is a fairly sweet yellow-orange variety—and is pleased and impressed that we are growing vegetables, and finds the garden attractive to look at out the window. She missed the best of the cucumber flowers, but the general effect is still green and pleasant, and now includes a volunteer purple-flowered clover plant.

That one tomato plant is doing very well indeed; the other cherry tomato, a red-purple one, is bearing, but those haven't been ripening as quickly, nor has it spread as far.

adrian_turtle came here for Thanksgiving with me and cattitude. She got here after midnight Tuesday; we made the cranberry relish late Wednesday and did all the other cooking and food prep on Thursday. This year not only did we make dinner and enjoy eating it together, everything went smoothly. That's the advantage of both practice and having identified the specific rough spots from previous years; I think this is the ninth time the three of us have made a Thanksgiving dinner together. (One year when roadnotes and baldanders were living in Brooklyn, they had the three of us and her sister over for Thanksgiving at their apartment, but I don't think we did much cooking that year.)

This morning we slept in a little, and I went over to the fitness room and worked out after the morning tea and yogurt. We had leftover turkey and cranberry sandwiches for lunch; my beloveds are making beef-and-sweet-potato dumplings for dinner. I suspect we'll continue to have a low-key weekend before she goes home.

My mother is in town for a few days, basically to visit us (though she has taken a hotel room a few blocks away, rather than sleeping on our couch). There's been plenty of conversation, and today she came with us to the farmer's market (lots of berries), and after lunch we went to the Seattle Aquarium. That was fun: they have multiple touch pools (sea cucumbers were softer than I expected), an octopus that was clinging to the glass tank so what we saw was a broad, flat mass of suckers, and a nice jellyfish exhibit that you can walk under/through. Also seals and sea otters and birds.

I made fresh whipped cream after supper, to have with some of the strawberries; cattitude watched me, since he'd never whipped cream before. That was after a dinner of baked salmon and cherry tomatoes (fresh from the market) and pasta with fresh-grated parmesan cheese, which Mom decided to try, and liked: she'd only had the powdered-in-cans type before.

We haven't settled on plans for the next couple of days; the point of this visit is to see me and Cattitude, not Seattle, so sitting around my apartment drinking tea is entirely valid.

adrian_turtle came to visit me for the weekend, and to go with me to my aunt's seder. It was very good to have Adrian here, and spend a few mostly quiet days together cattitude was at Minicon).

( cut for length )

cattitude and I went to visit his parents over the weekend. A relatively quick overnight trip: up Saturday morning and back Sunday evening, so one night away and no time off from work. But we didn't get home until bedtime last night (we stopped at a diner near Penn Station for supper rather than deal with that when we got home), in part because we spent an hour and a half on the Schenectady railroad platform waiting for a delayed train. It's a risk you take with the Adirondack, but the other trains weren't at anything like convenient times.

( cut for length )

Today I went to the gym after work; a fairly ordinary workout, but reasonably satisfying. Also, I overheard one of the trainers talking a couple of pictures of one of the people she was working with; this suggests I might be able to get Emilie to do the same for me, to replace my now-very-old workout userpic. I've been assuming photography was against gym rules and didn't ask, but they might be more willing to trust their own staff using my camera than a fellow gym member or guest doing so.

( numbers, cut to avoid boredom )