Altivo

By request from a few folks. I've been making these occasionally for a couple of decades, and don't remember where the recipe came from. Likely a newspaper or magazine item. Anyway, pretty simple but a bit on the messy side to put together. Click on thumbnail to enlarge image, but alas, you can't smell them.



Orange Muffins

1/3 cup butter or margarine, cut into small pieces or softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
grated peel or zest of one fresh orange
1/2 cup orange juice
1/4 cup milk
2 cups (9 ounces) bleached all purpose flour
2 tsp. double acting baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda (sodium bicarbonate)
1/2 tsp. fine salt

Preheat oven to 450°F. (Not a typo. Muffins rise better if the oven is really hot when they first go in.)

Cream butter and sugar together. Scrape down bowl, and beat in egg, orange peel, juice, and milk.

Sift together dry ingredients and add all at once. Mix just until completely moistened. Do not overbeat.

Fill greased muffin tins (or paper lined if preferred) to two thirds full. This is about 1/4 cup of batter each for standard sized tins or 1/2 cup for the "giant" muffins. Turn oven down to 400°F before baking for 20 to 25 minutes. Tops will be golden brown and an inserted toothpick will come out clean when they are done. The "giant" pans will take a bit longer.

Serve warm, with spreadable cream cheese if desired. Yield 12 standard or 6 "giant" muffins.

No calorie counting here, but with all that butter and sugar do you really want to know?

For over a decade, we printed these little collections of recipes and sent them as Christmas greeting cards. Now my husband has scanned them all and we are happy to release them to everyone who is interested. Use them freely, and share as you wish. Please, no commercial use.

See Google Drive for downloadable PDFs.

A kind and generous neighbor made us a gift of a ten pound sack of pears from her tree. Husband made pear bread with pecans and raisins from about half of them. He also cut some up and froze them. That left about three pounds for me to deal with. These are Asian pears, sometimes called "apple-pears" because they are shaped like apples. Sweet and fragrant, but without much acid or bite. Firm and crunchy like an apple unless allowed to become overly ripe and mushy. What to do?

Well, as serendipity would have it, an ad for a cooking magazine arrived in the mail with a few sample recipes. One was for a pear-cranberry pie, and it sounded interesting, so I revised it a bit. Here's a photo of the result:




And here's the recipe as I revised it:

Pear-cranberry Deep Dish Pie

1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 Tbsp. instant tapioca
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
6 ripe, but still firm, pears, cored and sliced (about 2 lbs.)
1 Tbsp. lemon juice
1 cup fresh or thawed frozen whole cranberries
1 Tbsp. milk
Coarse sugar, for sprinkling

pastry for a double crust pie (best home made, but packaged store-bought is OK)

Preheat oven to 375F. In a large bowl combine sugar, tapioca, ginger and nutmeg. Add pear slices, cranberries, and lemon juice. Stir gently to coat the pears and cranberries.

Divide prepared pastry dough into two parts. Roll one portion into a 13 inch circle. Use this to line a 9 inch deep dish pie plate. (Ease pastry into place, do not stretch.) Spread pear filling in the piecrust.

Roll out second pastry portion into a 12 inch circle, and gently place this on top of the filling. Crimp edges, cut slits in top for steam to escape. Brush top of pie with the milk, and sprinkle with coarse sugar for a little sparkle.

Place pie on a baking sheet or pizza pan to catch any drips. Bake 65 to 70 minutes or until filling is bubbly and crust golden brown. Allow to cool on wire rack, but serve while still slightly warm.

Yield: 8 to 10 servings

Our review: Tasty, but really needs a bit more spice to give it character. Compared to apples or cherries, pears are, well, pretty bland.

Meant to post these yesterday, but stuff got in the way. Like, getting them out of my cell phone to somewhere I could post them from.



This year's vegetable garden is smaller, squeezed in between the barn and the arena. We have not done well with a larger garden out behind the woodlot because it is so far from the house and requires us to run about 400 feet of hose to get water out there for the dry months of July and August. Also, the deer, rabbits, and woodchucks are less reticent to visit out there.

I decided to set up some containers and raised beds in the spot where a gap in the oak canopy allows sunlight for several hours on clear days. In spite of excessive rain until the end of June, it looks promising. In the photo above, from left: cucumbers and miniature sweet peppers in the red "growbox," potatoes in three blue plastic tubs, okra (not easy to see) behind the potatoes, tomatoes (back) and melons and eggplant (front,) and at the extreme right section of the raised beds, more cucumbers, Brussels sprouts, and peppers.



This view shows to the left of the previous, or a bit farther west. These are pole beans that got a late start and are trying to make up for it now. The soil is about 8 inches of aged sheep manure from when the sheep pen was located here. It was spongy and loaded with water until late June, so the beans didn't go in until a month later than usual. If the frost holds off, I still expect a good crop. The purple pods are heavy bearers, and I'm trying a couple of other varieties. The larger leaves at the right end of the trellis are scarlet runners. Not only do those have tasty pods, but they have beautiful red blossoms. Zucchini and butternut squash are between this trellis and the other photo, and the hot frame (uncovered) in the background will get a planting with kale, kohlrabi, and lettuce for the fall. I had lettuce in it for spring but the insects were voracious and devoured it all.



And this bonus photo shows today's baking. I made the peach and blueberry pie using blueberries from out in the old garden. Gary made the sourdough bread with dried sour cherries and chopped pecans.

In other news, after much teeth grinding I have mostly beaten Gentoo into submission. I still haven't managed to create a custom kernel that will boot, but I figured out how to make the generic kernel from the installation CD do my bidding for now. Only the basic command line system is installed, but it's all working and I can even run backups to another drive from the console if I boot into the proper model. I figured out the boot configurations and can boot from either data partition that I created, with or without an intermediate ramdisk image. Next: get X11 installed and working. But I'm taking a break for a day or two to do other things first.

Here is a pie made from an heirloom apple variety, Roxbury Russet:



These are a very old apple variety, noted as being excellent for winter storage and well suited to cider making or baking. By modern orchard standards, they are considered "too ugly" to have any commercial value. That's pretty typical of modern shallow thinking. The flavor and scent of this apple is far more complex and intense than that of any widely grown variety today. The flesh is very hard, and I can easily see that they would keep for a long time under ideal conditions. We haven't sampled the pie just yet, but I expect it to be far from mundane.

In other news, the week drags on. It snowed this afternoon, fairly hard in fact, but melted almost immediately. I won another N scale locomotive off Ebay, this one is a steam engine, a 2-8-2 light Mikado style which was one of the last types in use by DT&I before they abandoned steam completely in the early 1950s. It has a Chicago & Northwestern herald painted on it, but I expect I can either cover or remove that to apply the normal DT&I monogram. I wasn't going to buy more stuff until after Christmas, but this was going for such a cheap price that I couldn't pass it up.

Here are the two cabooses mentioned a couple of days ago:



Neither is quite right for the DT&I, at least not in the target period of 1952-1960, when they used mostly wood sided cabooses with center cupolas. I'll keep looking for one to match that, but these are the right size at least. The Pennsylvania RR was nominally the owner of DT&I during this time period, so a borrowed PRR caboose is not entirely impossible.

Also just won a white tank car for $2.99 on Ebay. This is for Gary, to fit with his plan to make a t-track module with a bee yard on it, and bears harvesting the honey. We'll put his logo on the car, with the words "Pure honey. Consumed globally, produced locally."

Acquired the last needed ingredients for fruitcake and cookie baking, I hope. It got above freezing today and most of the snow melted. The duck is still laying eggs, too. She hit number 70 today. Gary thought she missed yesterday, but tonight we found that egg buried in the snow and frozen. Blizzard casualty!

Haven't bought eggs for several weeks, but picked up a dozen today because Gary goes through so many with the baking projects.

Nothing beats having a half day off (except, of course, having the whole day... duh.)

Thought we'd go pick a few more apples this afternoon, but weather wasn't cooperating. Gloomy, with cold drizzle falling that later turned into a fairly hard rain. So we agreed to go for lunch and some groceries. Needed flour (for apple pies and pancakes, used up all the pastry flour) and Gary wanted some things to throw into a late supper since I've elected to drive a friend to the Audubon meeting tonight. As usual, picked up more supplies than intended, but all stuff we will use. Gary's miscalculation of the number of cans of dog food in the pantry has resulted in an amusing overstock, but I'm sure Red will be happy to take care of that problem soon enough.

Home, unpack and put away the spoils, and then, apple pie. Today's pie is half Empire and half Winesap. Empire is a modern hybrid developed at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station I believe, hence the name from "Empire State." It is a successful cross of Red Delicious with Macintosh, I'm pretty sure. The apples are generally larger than Macs, but have most of the texture and flavor of that parent, with some of the size and firmness of the Red Delicious. Red Delicious has very little flavor to me, but Empire is sweet and rich-tasting. Unfortunately, it doesn't keep very well, and tends to turn mealy like both parents. Winesap, on the other paw, is an old heirloom variety with what some folks call "character" (by which they mean that a lot of people who don't favor old style apples will spit it out after biting it.) Hard fleshed, it combines juicy and tart with a surprising amount of sugar and can be used to make quite a good hard cider. It keeps really well, as do most hard fleshed apples, and develops additional sweetness for a while after picking. I like Winesap to eat plain, and think of it as a "real" apple, but like many of the old 19th century varieties, it is hard to find. Fortunately one nearby orchard has a single row of trees, and we got there in time to rescue a full peck. It was amusing to walk along the row and see the number of apples that had been "sampled" and discarded, with just one or maybe two bites out of them. No, people, this is not Gala or Red Delicious. There are lots of those two rows farther down. Leave these to the real apple lovers and both you and they will be the happier for it.

So, the pie is in the oven, and will come out just before I have to go pick Susan up for the meeting.

Oh, and Red was happy to eat peels from both the Empire and the Winesap. No picky eater he. XD

Apple season began this weekend. We have four varieties of new apples, right from the trees: Ginger Gold, Jonamac, Honeycrisp, and Cortland. And even though there was chocolate zucchini cake left in the house, I just had to make a pie (Jonamac and Cortland, a good combination):



Not bad at all for the first pie of the season. The better apples are yet to come, though. I need to get to Lang's right away for some Ruby Jon, and there should be Empire and (I hope) Melrose in the offing at the very least.

All Easter means to me any more is like Christmas: a massive struggle to prepare most of a huge festival meal, pack it up and haul it to Chicago, where if anyone shows up they don't want to eat it anyway.

Because it somehow helps my mate and his mother try to recapture their memories from half a century ago, I keep doing this twice a year.

We went to three grocery stores today trying to capture all the elusive pieces. I'm particularly disgusted by what Jewel has become. For those not from Chicago, Jewel is (or was) an old local grocery chain that dates back to the 19th century and was noted for delivering goods to your door. Over the years they looked more and more like the conventional supermarket, and reached what I'd consider to be their peak in the 1980s sometime, when they were building new stores that had expansive produce and fresh deli departments, live fish markets, and a really extensive selection of foods both local and imported. Typically they had an associated pharmacy under the same roof, and a liquor department with a very fine selection of wines.

Then this local tradition was bought up by a west coast grocery mega-chain and things changed. Old brand names disappeared, replaced by generics. Prices started creeping up, then shooting up like weeds after a thunderstorm. The prices at Jewel are now nearly double what I pay at the local Centrella (used to be Certified, similar to IGA in other parts of the country--independent grocers who obtain many of their goods through a cooperative warehousing system.) Jewel stores are still attractive looking and have a good selection and variety of products (not what it once was, but still better than many) but the prices are so high that I don't understand why anyone shops there.

Anyway, we did go to Jewel. Their weekly flyer had some special offers in it that made it worth the trip. Of course, in typical Jewel fashion, they had already run out of most of the specials (which were supposed to run through Tuesday) and the substitutes were no bargain at all. They told us we could drive over to McHenry to get what we wanted, which would have canceled out most of the savings just in the cost of the gas consumed. "And that," I said as we left the store, "is why we don't shop at Jewel any more." We used them for years when we actually lived in Chicago. Now they're just too expensive to even consider. We also went to Walmart, specifically to get some things Gary's mom had requested, and almost didn't find them because their shelves, even in the pharmacy, were nearly barren. Not just because of the holiday, but because they are always like that. I guess they're too cheap to reorder until they run out of everything. Or else, they're too cheap to hire anyone to put stock out on the shelves.

Fortunately we'd already been to the Centrella in Marengo, and got most of what we needed. Then Gary went off to sing in church yet another day, while I stayed home to bake the traditional lamb shaped cake that must be served even though no one wants to eat it. We could have bought one at Jewel... at a price of $15 for a cake that weighs well under a pound, closer to eight ounces. If I succeed in frosting and decorating it without its head falling off (a distinct probability) I'll take a photo of it.

Now to bed so I can get up at 5 am and bake the ham. ;p

...in the twinkle of an eye. Well, if it's a slow eye. Takes about 45 minutes in the oven to attain a nicely browned crust. Today's dessert:



Our non-traditional Christmas day dinner consisted of a Cornish hen baked in a clay pot with a curried mixture of pineapple, green pepper, and onion and a little sherry. We added a curried dhal and kidney bean dish, steamed rice, and mango chutney, with a white zinfandel. It was quite good. The dogs were not pleased that we only saved them a little of the stock from the dish. However, I note that they ate it with plenty of relish, displeased or not.

As I promised, we mostly goofed off today except for taking care of the horses and sheep. However, I have what seems like a month's worth of laundry to do, so tomorrow will be busier.

It was a white Christmas in the sense that we have plenty of snow on the ground and up in the trees. Nothing significant fell today, however. Quite an improvement over last year when we had an ice storm and were without electricity for 36 hours, ending just at 9 am on Christmas.

Whatever winter holidays you celebrate, or even if you celebrate none, I wish you joy at the return of longer days and the best new year ever.