One of my Christmas gifts from my daughter this year was a set of creative spice jar labels. She spent an hour or so on Christmas Day affixing the labels to all our spice jars.
I love the creativity of the names: imp skulls, essence of griffin, condiment for a pottle o’ chips, miniature grenades of flavour …
Today I was looking for cinnamon and allspice. It took ages to find the ‘fragrant soil’, and ‘cannonballs of spice’. LOL!
I’m lucky to have only one, relatively self-sufficient teen at home for lockdown, but I feel for parents of young children. Good weekend weather will have been a help, but homeschool fatigue will make the coming week difficult.
Desperation grows
As the
Days
Tick
By.
Worksheets that
The school sent out
Make
The kids
Sigh.
We long for
Normal routines:
Work,
School,
Kai.
Desperation grows
As the
Days
Tick
By.
I find myself pacing the living room floor, gazing out the window at the swirling snow.
Stop. She’ll be fine.
My daughter is snowed into a cabin in the mountains. Porter’s Pass is closed and I cannot reach her by any means. I cannot supply her with the food I know she does not have for the 24-48 hours it will be until she can escape.
She is with friends. I know the cabin they’ve holed up in—it is warm and dry. There is water and even electricity.
She’s probably having a blast. No doubt they’ve pooled their food and are concocting some strange dinner tonight from instant soup packets and half a package of pasta of unknown provenance and indeterminate age left in the cabin by a previous inhabitant. It won’t be enough, but they’ll make do.
I know this because I remember my own adventures as a young adult. A day of hiking fuelled only by a pair of bananas purchased from a family in a small mountain village. A trek across the isthmus of Panama that involved an ill fated bus, hitching a ride in the back of a pickup, sleeping on the concrete floor of the police station in an unknown village, hiring a villager and his canoe, and begging meals and accomodation in another unknown village. Cowering in a tent as tornadoes ripped through the forest nearby. Carrying a chicken to a friend, on foot, three hours distant. … The list is long.
Every one of those adventures involved hardship—hunger, exhaustion, fear, danger. My mother would have freaked out had she known what I was doing.
Just as part of me wants to freak out right now.
But I know what those adventures did for me as a young adult. I can’t imagine having not had them. They’ve woven their way into the fabric that is me today. They are who I am.
My husband and I have taught our children how to prepare for adventure, how to be safe, how to face the inevitable difficulties, how to enjoy the hardships. The most important thing we can do now is trust that we’ve taught them well, and keep our own worries to ourselves so they don’t dim our children’s sense of adventure.
So I will pace the room, but never tell her I did so. I can’t wait to hear all about her adventure when she returns.
Many years ago, I tried to make vegetarian rolled fondant. It was a complete disaster.
So when my daughter asked for an octopus cake for her birthday, I first wondered if I could manage to do it in buttercream frosting. I quickly decided that, no, it was really only going to work in fondant. So …
I spent a couple of hours on Tuesday scouring the city for the ingredients. They were easier to find this time—vegetarianism has become more commonplace, so gelatine substitutes are now available in some mainstream grocery stores. I took it as a good sign. My fondant would work this time.
I baked the cake (chocolate), and made the filling (peanut butter), and on Wednesday sculpted the octopus’s body. After a night in the refrigerator, the cake was ready to cover in fondant. Thursday morning I got to work.
The first batch of fondant was marginal at best. It had little elasticity, and I had to roll it out in pieces, rather than one big sheet to cover the whole cake. No worries. I managed, and the result was only a little bit lumpier than I’d hoped.
But I’d used nearly all my fondant, and I still had eight legs to make.
So, I made another batch. This one would be better, of course, because it was the second try. And it seemed to be going better for a few minutes. But by the time it was finished, it was clear this batch had even less elasticity than the first.
At least I didn’t have to roll it out thin. It worked fine for the legs, as long as I worked slowly and didn’t try to curl the legs too much.
It took quite a long time to smooth all that lousy fondant into what looked like one continuous animal, but eventually I managed. Then I had a fabulous time painting it, watching the octopus colouration take shape.
It took a bit of trial and error to work out how to make zillions of suckers—thinned fondant piped into balls, partly dried, and then shaped before allowing them to harden. Then it took ages to place them all. I finished up just as my husband was putting dinner on the table.
It was a heck of a lot of work for one cake.
But the final octopus looks like it could swim away any moment. And more importantly, I think my daughter is truly impressed—a rare feat.
I was thinking last night, as my husband and daughter were playing ping pong on the dining table, that I am blessed to be in lockdown with those two. I wish our son were also with us; for all the stress of such close quarters, it’s lovely to have the excuse to spend time together.
I hope you are all staying safe and healthy and making the most of the difficult situations we’re all in. Kia kaha!
No pandemic hoarding here, just the usual late season batch of Summer Soup. I’ve written about Summer Soup on numerous occasions (2015, 2016, 2018, and twice in 2019). We’ve been making it annually for at least a decade, and it has always been a family affair. In the early years, the children’s vegetable chopping efforts were more symbolic than helpful, but as their skills improved, their input became critical to the relatively rapid production of vast quantities of soup.
This year, with our upcoming move, the garden output is less than in many years, and there’s so much to do, I wasn’t sure we would have a chance to make Summer Soup. In the end, I did it alone. Starting at 7.30 am, with many interruptions to help move furniture and tools, I began picking and processing vegetables. I pulled the final jars out of the canner shortly before 11 pm.
I listened to music and podcasts while I worked, and I got some brief help from my husband, but it wasn’t the same without the rest of the family there. Neither was the output—13 quarts of soup and 4 quarts of stock.
I’m not disappointed—thirteen meals plus flavouring for four more will be lovely in the coming weeks and months—but I look forward to getting back to the family production of Summer Soup next year. It’s not just soup; it’s a celebration, and not nearly so much fun alone.
My son, the budding architect, has always challenged my cake decorating skills with his annual birthday cake requests. A star destroyer, the city of Dale, Wellington … his requests tend toward angular, built structures difficult to sculpt in cake and icing. This year he asked for ‘a brick’. Just getting the colour right was going to be a challenge. And then I had to make the brick special in some way.
I thought maybe I’d cover it in lichens and moss (easy to fashion from frosting and Mexican paste). But a photo online caught my attention … I came up with a plan that I thought would tax my confectionery skills more than mere decoration would. A little maths, a little measuring, a little cutting, and …
There’s more to this brick than meets the eye.
It’s birthday cake season again! This year, my daughter’s brief for me was a Kura Tawhiti bouldering theme, with ‘maybe a climber and some alpine plants’ done in chocolate and hazelnut flavours.
I think both of us had a vision of a grey boulder or boulders with climber, plants, etc. But as I started in on the cake, the vision changed.
I made one of my favourite devil’s food cake recipes (from Tartine) in a range of round layer sizes. I sliced each layer in half and filled it with my homemade Nutella, stacking the layers in a wonky boulder-like shape.
Then I stood there and contemplated the decoration. My plan had been to make the standard quick icing I use for decorating, but the amazing rich chocolate cake with decadent Nutella filling really needed something better than quick icing. It needed ganache.
So that’s what it got—chocolate ganache covered with ground hazelnuts to get a more appropriate boulder colour.
I added chunks of hazelnut praline for a more rocky appearance, and made some alpine plants and a climber from Mexican paste. A few small final touches with a simple sugar and milk icing, and the cake was finished.
It didn’t look anything like I thought it would when I started, but it tasted absolutely divine! No wonder—it contained over 400 grams of chocolate, two cups of hazelnuts, and a gloriously unhealthy quantity of butter and cream. In the end, no one was paying much attention to the look—we were too busy oohing and aahing over the taste.
This time last year, I wrote a blog post about Christmas trees and our family’s unorthodox take on them. I argued that, while our trees may not look like the traditional pine tree, they embody the spirit of the season.
This year’s tree is no exception. After years of suggesting we build the tree out of LEGO, the kids finally agreed. For over a week, the living room floor was a construction zone, strewn with LEGO bricks, mini-figures and gears. The two-metre-tall central structure took two evenings of negotiation, planning and construction. Then there were the branches—marvels of LEGO engineering.
Then came the whimsy—that took the longest. A combination staircase/ ladder/ escalator/ elevator winds upward from level to level. A waterwheel turns lazily on the eighth floor. Gravity takes a holiday as a kayaker paddles straight up, trailing his pet shark on a lead beside him, and emergency personnel (including the undead) carry an injured person up the side of a column. Mini-figures evoke Escher on a section of staircase. A large ship juts from both sides of the trunk, as though the tree grew into place around it. A man fishes from the ninth floor. Motorised gears turn a fantasy clock, spin a merry-go-round, drive a hammer in a dwarven workshop, and spin a star. Under the lowest branches, a kiosk sells tickets to visit the tree.
And all that is before ornaments were added.
Now, mini-figures greet Santa Claus, and a giant butterfly takes flight from the top of the tree. Snowflakes, baubles, and our eclectic mix of homemade ornaments (including the Christmas tardigrade, quite a few insects, and possibly the only Trichonympha ornament on the planet) add to the seasonal cheer. To the Christmas purist, I’m certain our tree is an abomination.
But … evenings of family fun, laughter and creativity—the Christmas season doesn’t get any better.
See the tree in action:
The family made our annual Summer Soup on Sunday.
I think we definitively proved we have no self-control when it comes to gardening or cooking. In spite of me reducing my garden area this year, and despite the knowledge that our son is leaving home in a week (and won’t be around to eat this year’s soup), we managed to make even more than usual.
We filled all three of our big stock pots, and it took from 7.30 am to 9.00 pm to pick, chop, and process all that soup.
We had soup for dinner, I put a meal’s worth of soup in the fridge, and there are 28 beautiful quart jars full of soup lined up in the cupboard.
Summer Soup is full of potatoes, carrots, soy, green beans, zucchini, tomato, sweet peppers, hot peppers, onions, garlic, sweet corn, beet root, basil, oregano, thyme, rosemary, and celery. The only thing not from the garden is the salt. It’s a burst of summer goodness for the cold days of winter. It’s a quick and delicious meal when we all come home late.
But it’s more than preserved vegetables. It’s a whole-family team building exercise. After a dozen years, it’s a family tradition. Each soup-making session brings back memories of early years, when the kids’ help was more of a hinderance. They took enormous pride in their work those years, reciting the vegetables they’d cut every time we opened a jar.
Now they’re both accomplished cooks, and their help allows us to go way overboard on soup-making. They’re less vocal about it now, but I think they’re still proud of their part in Summer Soup.
As I’ve mentioned before, anyone can make soup, but it takes a family to make Summer Soup.
Robinne Weiss 