My November newsletter includes kids’ books written and recommended by Kiwis! There are some great Christmas gift ideas there. Check it out!
Christmas
A-Z of Thankfulness–#3
Here’s the final instalment, posted on Christmas day, I hope you all find much to be thankful for today and every day.
Sunshine—The counterpoint to rain, and just as necessary for the garden. It’s also critical for my mental health, and I try to make the most of our sunny days.
Teeth—Where would we be without them? I wish I had appreciated them earlier in life and taken better care of them when I was a teen.
Ukuleles—Who can resist smiling while listening to ukulele music?
Vision—Not just my eyesight, though I appreciate that a great deal, but also the ability to look ahead at what could be. I’ve relied on vision the past twelve years, building a business, and then closing it to become a writer. Many days, that vision has been the only thing getting me out of bed in the morning.
Water—I have not truly experienced a lack of water—not as many people in the world have—but after losing our well in the 2010 earthquake, and experiencing a few years of drought, I have an appreciation for the ease with which I obtain water. I am thankful to have access to clean, safe water.
Xenophilia—The love of the unknown. I love the fact we humans don’t understand everything. I love the fact that in my backyard, there may be insects that have yet to be described by science. I love the fact there are discoveries to be made every day. I love that our world is populated by weird and wonderful life.
Yellow admirals—These butterflies, and all the native insects and spiders in my yard are a source of great pleasure to me. They help me tolerate the weeds, because they rely upon many of them for food and shelter.
Zucchini—How many ways can you eat zucchini? I don’t know, but I love them all. I always plant too many zucchini, and I end up wondering what on earth I’m going to do with them, but they are a wonderful summer staple in our kitchen.
Advent List
It’s the silly season, with end-of-the-school-year stuff piling up with Christmas, summer vacation, and garden stuff.
Once again, lists take centre stage for me. The general to-do list gave way to a ‘before Christmas’ to-do list. That list has now been refined into a day-by-day list, a sort of sadistic Advent calendar counting the days to Christmas.
I’m afraid ‘write blog’ didn’t make it onto today’s list. It was bumped off when I failed to complete ‘pick and process peas’ on yesterday’s list, due to the unexpectedly large harvest.
So, I’m off to blanch and freeze peas. Hope you’ve all had a lovely day and completed everything on you to-do list. Just two more weeks, and we’ll get a day off!
The Christmas Season
Twelve years ago, I was facing my first Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere. Everything felt wrong. I tried to carry on the traditions my husband and I had established in the States; I made truffles and cookies, I decorated with fresh greenery, we strung Christmas lights, we planned a big Christmas dinner, we played Christmas music.
The truffles melted, the greenery turned brown, the Christmas lights were invisible in the long summer evenings, the heavy dinner sat like lead on a hot summer day.
I longed for snow, and all the indoor family time of the northern holiday. I wanted long nights, candles and a roaring fire. I wanted hygge. But it was summer—time to be outdoors, on the beach, enjoying the sun.
Slowly our traditions have adapted to this southern holiday. I realised how far I’d come on Sunday morning. Slicing strawberries for breakfast, the smell of berries made it feel so Christmassy, I started humming carols. Then I laughed at the idea that strawberries equal Christmas.
I thought about all the things my kids have grown up associating with Christmas—long days at the beach, gardening, strawberries, cherries, making jam, making sauerkraut (which usually happens about Christmas eve every year), the ‘traditional’ Christmas salad, the first new potatoes, broad beans, backpacking.
We rarely play Christmas carols anymore (who wants to be indoors?). We bake fruit pies, and not many cookies. We use red carnations from the garden for Christmas decorations. Rather than being a time for focusing inward, Christmas is a time for adventuring—traveling, hiking, exploring.
And so, as we start into this Christmas season, I am looking forward to our travel plans. I’m looking forward to many days at the beach. I’m looking forward to the summer bounty from the garden. I’m looking forward to ice cream, roadside stands selling Otago cherries, outdoor dinners, and warm sun.
And that, I think, is the key of the season—to celebrate what is good about the here and now. To celebrate the bounty we’ve been given, whatever form it comes in—love, friendship, snow or strawberries. To be mindful. To be present in the moment.
‘Tis the Season
And So It Begins…
We’ve been watching the berries for weeks, and the signs have been promising. The gooseberry bushes are dripping with fruit. The currants, too, promise a good harvest. In spite of a viral infection, even the strawberries are managing a crop. The raspberries are humming with bees, attracted to a plethora of flowers.
The first harvest was tiny—a handful of berries—but it marks the beginning of my favourite season on the property. The season of fresh fruit. It begins with strawberries and gooseberries, moves on to currants, cherries and raspberries, and ends with apricots and plums. Watermelons, apples, and peaches come late in the year, and they’re lovely, but nothing compares to the early summer fruits. Their season is short, but bountiful. It’s the season of jams, fruit pies, and fruit ice cream. The season of gooseberry fool, strawberry-smothered waffles, and apricot upside down cake. It is the season of plenty.
In festive red and green, ’tis the season, indeed.
Tastes Like Christmas
I know, I know, you’re wondering why I’m posting about Christmas in mid-August. Bear with me here…
I made lemon coconut bars yesterday–a super easy recipe that I chose out of sheer laziness (and the fact I’d written ‘excellent’ beside it in the cookbook).
As I bit into one of them today, I was struck that they taste like Christmas.
Now, if you had asked me what Christmas tastes like, I would have said cinnamon, cloves and black walnuts.
My Christmassy lemon coconut bars contain none of these ingredients. As you would imagine, lemon and coconut are the primary flavours.
But these bars are loaded with brown sugar, and the more I considered it, the more I thought that must be the true flavour of Christmas. It shows up in most Christmas cookies, and even makes an appearance in some of the traditional savoury dishes, like mashed sweet potatoes.
I use brown sugar in many of the baked goods I make, so theoretically, they should taste like Christmas, too. So, why don’t they?
I think it has to do with the concentration of brown sugar. We tend to prefer baked goods that aren’t pure sugar bombs. For my everyday baking, I usually stick to less sweet items. Not so at Christmastime. Then, I throw all caution to the wind and make the most decadent sweets possible.
The lemon coconut bars fall into that decadent category, containing more sugar than flour. They taste like the decadence of Christmas.
And, perhaps that is the true taste of Christmas–the taste of decadence.
A Tale of Two Walnuts
We have two walnut trees, both of them young. The older of the two gave us a few walnuts last year and one the year before. This year it gave us several good handfuls of nuts.
That’s not anywhere close to satisfying our annual walnut consumption. We put walnuts in granola, baked goods, burgers, tofu meatballs, and rice pilaf, among other things. We eat them as snacks, too, and I buy them in kilo-sized bags.
But walnuts here are all the mild English walnut (Juglans regia). They’re a good staple, but somewhat tame. Not something to feature in a dish.
Not like American walnuts (Juglans nigra). To me, these are the true walnuts–piney-flavoured and bitter, difficult to shell, with thick green husks that leave your fingers black. There aren’t many foods from the US that I miss anymore, but American walnuts are one of them.
When I was a kid, every Christmas my mother made walnut crescents–moon-shaped shortbread cookies packed with American walnuts and rolled in confectioner’s sugar. They melted on the tongue, and burst with nutty flavour. I made the mistake of making these with English walnuts once. They were vapid little sugar bombs. Not at all like real walnut crescents.
I have looked high and low for American walnuts here in New Zealand, with no luck. One time I saw a label in the grocery story saying “American walnuts”, and I was thrilled. Then I looked at what they were selling. The nuts weren’t American walnuts, they were English walnuts grown in America.
So I buy the cultured, mild-mannered English variety and dream of the wild, brash variety of my homeland.
Christmas Sticky Buns
These buns are a Christmas morning tradition at our house. I would love to give you a recipe, but there isn’t one, and I’m not the one who makes them anyway. Christmas is the one breakfast each year that my husband makes. On Christmas eve, he rolls his sourdough bread dough around a festive mix of brown sugar, walnuts, currants, citron, and cinnamon. He slices the resulting log into rounds and nestles them into a baking pan. The buns rise overnight in the refrigerator, and I put them into the oven in the morning. By the time everyone else is out of bed, the whole house smells like cinnamon and burnt sugar.
My only real contribution to them is the icing—a simple mix of powdered sugar, vanilla and milk, drizzled on after they come out of the oven.
Mmmm…best Christmas breakfast ever.
Christmas Aspirations
Another Christmas down. Another Christmas in which I feel like I received far better than I gave.
It’s a double-edged sword, at this time of year, to have a husband who is so good at gifts. He puts me to shame every year.
This year it was the two hand-made wooden vegetable baskets (the ones he whipped out in the last couple of days since he finished work for the year) that made me feel wholly inadequate as a gift giver. Add to that the lovely and thoughtful garden tools and kitchen equipment he bought, and I feel like I need to go back and try again on my gifts for him.
I’m not really complaining—how could I possibly complain about a husband who makes gorgeous baskets for me? But I think I need to start preparing for Christmas a whole lot earlier in order to even come close to matching his gift-giving. It is truly something to aspire to.
The Christmas Calzone
Growing up, Christmas eating was strictly traditional stuff—lots of cookies, turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, a token vegetable, and lots of gravy. I remember Christmas day as being a frenzy of cooking, starting with my mother putting the turkey in the oven in the wee hours of the morning, so that by 10 am the whole house smelled like turkey. It truly was glorious from a kid’s perspective.
At Crazy Corner Farm, Christmas eating is about as far from traditional as it gets. Except that it has become our Christmas tradition, and as such, it is traditional.
Our big holiday meal is on Christmas eve. With all the wonderful vegetables from the garden, we make calzones. We enjoy them with a fresh salad, or fruit from the garden.
In the evening, my husband makes up sticky buns and puts them in the refrigerator to rise overnight. I pop them into the oven in the morning before I go out to feed the animals, and they’re ready for breakfast by the time everyone else is awake.
We feast on sticky buns throughout the morning, then have leftover calzones for lunch. We hardly need an evening meal Christmas day, so our tradition is a big salad, broad beans, and the first of the season’s new potatoes.
All very low-key and relaxing, yet wonderfully decadent.
Robinne Weiss 