Es Hat Geschneit!

(Family joke. Will explain later).


Babyface has never seen snow before.


Funnyface is acting blasé since he is one and a half and this is his second winter.


Reserve Cat set the record for the thirty-inch dash when I opened the door for him this morning, and refuses to go back outside.



And the Drama Queen of course knows that this is all my fault. Left click for a close-up of that glare.

(For twenty-six years we lived in the same school district and attended the same schools with the same teachers. All of us – at least until my youngest sister kicked over the traces and announced defiantly that she was going to study French – took at least two years of German. The German department at the High School was ruled by a Viennese lady of unknown years and known habits and as sure as God made little green apples, when the first snowflake hit the ground in December, the German II class obediently sat down to write an essay titled “Es hat geschneit!” It has become a family catchphrase).

A Menu for the Last Sunday in November

This is from Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners, published by the Woman’s World Magazine Company of Chicago, Illinois in 1927 and subtitled Being a selection of tested and balanced menus, easily and economically prepared, for every Sunday in the year. I don’t know about the easily, even if Mama had a new-fangled gas stove and a cook, but here is the recommended bill of fare for the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Fruit Cocktail
Roast Goose with Apple-Prune Sauce
Stuffed Olives
Glace Sweet Potatoes, Duchesse Potatoes, and Creamed Celery
Buttered Parker House Rolls
Head Lettuce Salad, Cheese Straws
Brick Ice Cream and Lady Baltimore Cake
Coffee, Salted Almonds, After-Dinner-Mints

And here are some of the recipes.

Fruit Cocktail

Use ½ grapefruit for each portion, take out pulp, remove seeds and pith. Add for every 2 grapefruit (4 portions) the pulp of 1 orange and a dozen skinned and seeded white grapes. Put fruit in a mold which has a close cover. Sprinkle with lemon juice—1 lemon to 4 grapefruit—powdered sugar and a shake of cayenne or paprika. Put mold in ice compartment of refrigerator until ready to serve. Keep grapefruit skins in ice water. When ready, drain and dry skins, fill with the ice-cold fruit, and put in a little of the juice, beating well before adding.

(21st century comment – wait…skin and seed the grapes? Seriously?)

Roast Goose

Select a young goose, weighing 8 or 10 lbs. Scrub well with hot water to which a little washing soda has been added, then rinse well and dry outside and in. Make a stuffing of freshly boiled and mashed potatoes, seasoning with salt, pepper, powdered sage and a very little onion. Stuff but do not pack. Sew up, truss, then put in a steamer and steam for an hour to sweat off the excess fat and make the meat more tender. Some cooks parboil a goose for half an hour before wiping dry and stuffing. Then rub all over with flour seasoned with pepper and salt and roast, putting 1-½ cups boiling water in the pan. Roast 20 minutes to the pound for a young goose, and 30 minutes to the pound if doubtful of its tenderness. Remove from pan to platter when done, turn off all the grease and after stirring in the flour for thickening let it fry a minute or so to get brown before adding the water.

(The pre-steaming sounds like a good idea but I was under the impression that washing soda was poisonous).

Creamed Celery

Clean outside stalks and white leaves of a head of celery, cut in small pieces and cook until tender in 3 cups water. Scald a slice of onion in 2 cups milk in a double boiler. Rub celery when soft through a sieve. Blend 3 tablespoons cornstarch with 3 tablespoons butter, cook for a few minutes until well blended, gradually add the milk, strained, and the celery, season with celery salt and pepper.

(This doesn’t sound too bad except for the cornstarch. Flour yes, but cornstarch?).

Vintage kitchen image from Patricia at Agence Eureka.

Caturday!

(image and caption from the LOLCats).

Quote of the Day

Give, and it shall be given to you. For whatever measure you deal out to others, it will be dealt to you in return. Luke 6:38

(copyright-free clipart image from Dover).

My Annual Question

Can someone explain to me the appeal of a Turducken?

Tatting-Variations on a Theme

Four more motifs for the 25 Motif Challenge, but if you check you will notice that all of them -- except Edda's Violette -- are variations on the same basic 3-3-3-3 rings and 3-3-3 chains. Even the wreath is just a strip of edging joined to make a circle, and the red bookmark (well, it will be a bookmark when I get some ribbon on it) is the same edging joined mirror image.

I have been approached about teaching a needle tatting class at a local shop and Edda has kindly given me permission to use her pattern. Mille grazie, Edda!

Sewing-An Applique Chair Cover

This clipping is one of a bundle I won on eBay, accumulated over a thirty year period by someone who loved needlework. "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" is on the back and from the typeface it is from the early 30's, and it appears to be from a syndicated newspaper column but I haven't been able to find anything about a quilting writer named "Winifred Avery". Left click to enlarge or go to my Flickr account for a larger image.

More Kitty Nonsense

Of Course She Is

Vintage Greeting Card - Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving image from Dover eCards. For more holiday paper projects, visit The Toymaker, who has a bonbon box, a turkey, and a model of the Mayflower, free, to be downloaded from her site.

Rank Injustice

All things chickeny and muttony
Taste better far when served with chutney
This is the mystery eternal
Why didn’t Major Grey make colonel?


The village barber drove by yesterday morning while I was out getting the mail and pulled over to present me with a bag full of pears from the trees in his backyard. They are the kind that stay rock hard for days and then rot overnight. Perfect. I got out the canning jars.

Of course this will not taste just like Major Grey Mango Chutney, but it’s still darn good. Any fruit you use should be pretty firm.

1 dozen pears (six to eight cups of fruit)
2 large onions
1 c golden raisins
1 package dried apricots (12 oz approx)
1 lemon
1 sweet red bell pepper
2 jalapeno peppers
3 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
¼ c. ginger, grated
2 1/2 cups dark brown sugar, packed
2 cups cider vinegar
½ t. ground cloves
½ t. ground allspice
1 cinnamon stick
1 t. salt

Put the sugar, vinegar, ginger, garlic, spices and salt into a non-reactive kettle over low heat. Peel and core the pears, peel and quarter the onion, clean and quarter the red pepper. Quarter the lemon and remove the seeds. Cut the stems off the jalapenos.

Roughly chop the pears, onion, and red pepper into dice, either by hand or in the food processor. Not too fine—a little larger than, say, a dried chickpea. Chop the lemon and jalapeno pretty finely but just short of a puree. Cut each dried apricot into four pieces. Add the fruit and peppers to the vinegar mixture and cook slowly until the mixture thickens. Stir occasionally to prevent sticking and use a flame tamer so that it does not come to a boil and scorch. This will take a couple of hours; you want it to cook down and be thick enough to cling to a spoon when you tip it sideways, so be patient.

Taste; usually the pears and apricots make it sweet enough but if you are using other fruit you may need to add sugar. It should be sweet, tangy, garlicky and hot.

Once it is ready, take out the cinnamon stick. Remove from heat and pour into hot sterilized eight-ounce jars. Process for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.

Miscellaneous notes: the red bell pepper is there “for pretty” and on one occasion when far from a source of fresh peppers, I have used one of those little glass jars of diced pimiento, well rinsed. This is a good foundation recipe for chutney; I’ve made it with green tomatoes and hard old-orchard apples. You could use canned diced pineapple, I suppose, but then you’d really want to cut down on the sugar.

(The title pun and rhyme are not mine but I can't remember where I saw them!)

EDITED 11/29/08 to correct proportions of vinegar and sugar, which were flip-flopped.

Caturday!

more LOLCats

Free Pattern Books from Bernat

Bernat is giving away two free pattern books to anyone who completes an online survey. They will email you the booklets in PDF format, but I don't know for how long. UPDATED TO ADD: These will not be sent immediately, but rather sometime during the first week of December, according to a post on one of my Yahoo! groups.

Quote of the Day

When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist. Archbishop Helder Camara

(Photograph by Jacob Riis).

Our Little Girl Is Growing Up

I guess it's time to explain to her that she's too big to run under the computer desk anymore.

Knitting - a Trio of Dishcloths

Handmade knitted cotton dishcloths are, at least in my not-so-humble opinion, far superior to store-bought woven ones. They are quick to make, inexpensive (cotton yarn is usually less than $2 per skein--edited to add: here in the Midwest. I forget a lot of you don't live here!--and you can get two dishcloths from one skein) and they last a long time. There are a lot of pattern sites with dishcloths on the Internet; the Dishcloth Boutique has a particularly nice selection, and they're free.

But really, any reversible stitch pattern will do for a dishcloth, and gauge is not important. You want to find a needle/stitch/yarn combination that will give you a cloth that is 8 to 8.5 inches square. Because cotton shrinks so drastically, if you are knitting vertically rather than diagonally (as in Grandmother’s Favorite), your finished cloth should be at least one inch longer than it is wide. Otherwise you’ll end up with a rectangular dishcloth the first time it comes out of the dryer.

Slip the first stitch in each row for a neat edge and don't knit too tightly! As modeled with the help of my comely assistant, from left to right are~

Grandmother’s Favorite Dishcloth

This pattern has been around a long time – Lion Brand offers a version, among other sites – and it’s the one I make the most often. Because it is knitted on the diagonal, it shrinks evenly.

Cast on 3 stitches. K1, knit into the front and back of the next stitch, K to end. Repeat this, increasing in the second stitch of each row, until the legs of your triangle are about 8 inches long. You’ll have about 44-50 stitches on the needle, depending on your gauge. Begin decrease rows. K1, s1, K1, psso, K to end. Repeat this row, decreasing one stitch at the second stitch in each row, until you have 4 stitches on the needle. Bind off.

Garter Rib Dishcloth

This is a firm, non-curling, reversible stitch pattern with a little more visual interest than garter stitch. The stitch count is a multiple of 8 plus 4. The Harmony Guide shows 2 and 3 stitch variations, as well.

Cast on 36 stitches. K4, *P4, K4, repeat from * to end. Repeat this row. Make sure your finished dishcloth is about one inch longer than it is wide, and bind off in pattern.

Brioche Rib Dishcloth

Brioche Rib, like its snooty cousin Brioche Stitch, tends to spread out, so cast on only 30 stitches. Stitch count is a multiple of 2. Row 1 – Knit. Row 2 – *K1, K1b(insert needle through th ecenter of the stitch below the next stitch on the needle and knit as usual, slipping the stitch above off the needle at the same time) repeat from *, ending K2. Repeat row 2 until your finished dishcloth is long enough and bind off in garter stitch. Brioche Rib produces a thick, spongy cloth; it’s a great choice for scarves, too.


(I’m ready for my closeup, Mr DeMille!)

Vintage Scrap Art - Harvest Plenty

A set of copyright-free 19th century harvest images from Dover Publications.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Ovens

Christmas cookie makers, I have noticed, tend to fall into two categories; rollers and droppers. The spousal unit lovingly prepares batches of sugar cookies, cut out with our very eclectic cookie cutter selection (sure, we have stars and bells and reindeer, but we also have a pig, a dinosaur and of course, a German Shepherd).

I, on the other hand, seek instant gratification, and can’t be bothered with the rolling, cutting, rerolling, sugar sprinkling, and whatnot. Drop cookies, says I, and when I saw this book last weekend in a Detroit area Sally Ann for ninety-nine cents, I had to buy it.

(It was a great store. I was with my youngest sister and it was on Plymouth and we were heading back to Canton from Dearborn, more than that I cannot tell you. She was driving. I like driving with women. When one shouts, “There’s a thrift store, pull over!” another woman will immediately comply but a husband, unless he is unusually well trained, will not. Particularly if he is three-quarters Scotch).

Here are some of the recipes I want to try. Remember when packing cookies for shipping (say, to Qatar where one of my nephews will be spending the holiday season) that drop cookies and bar cookies travel best.

Brown Sugar Pecan Rounds

1 ¼ cups packed brown sugar
½ c. butter, softened
1 egg
1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
¼ t baking soda
1/8 t salt
½ c. coarsely chopped pecans

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix brown sugar, butter and egg. Stir in remaining ingredients. Drop by teaspoonfuls about 2 inches apart onto ungreased cookie sheet (the dough will flatten and spread). Bake until set, 12 to 15 minutes. Makes about 3 dozen.

The book notes that you can make this with self-rising flour but omit the baking soda and salt. It also mentions margarine instead of butter. Bleah.

Coconut Meringues

4 egg whites
1 ¼ c sugar
½ t vanilla
1/4/t salt
2 ½ c shredded or flaked coconut

Heat oven to 325 degrees. Beat egg whites in large mixer bowl on high speed until foamy. Beat in sugar gradually; continue beating until stiff and glossy. Do not underbeat. Stir in remaining ingredients. Drop by generous teaspoonfuls about 2 inches apart onto waxed paper-lined or lightly greased cookie sheet. Bake until set and delicate brown, about 20 minutes. Immediately remove from waxed paper. About 3 dozen.

Soft Molasses Drops

1 c sugar
1 c shortening
½ c molasses
1 egg
3 c all purpose flour
¾ c dairy sour cream
2 t baking soda
1 t salt
1 t ground ginger
1 t ground cinnamon

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Mix sugar, shortening, molasses and egg. Stir in remaining ingredients. Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls about 2 inches apart onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake about 8 minutes. About 5 dozen.

(if we had any sour cream in the house, I would try these molasses cookies now. For years I have sought my own personal Grail, the Ultimate Soft Molasses-Ginger Drop Cookie, and I am still looking).

Bungalow Heaven

Please check out the gorgeous 1930's interiors at The Daily Bungalow. I want that green kitchen!

Caturday!

(photo from the LOLCats).