C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 159

A happy new year….and a link to take you to Seeking-North!

There is now content…it's free, just a playground for Closed Circle authors, and we hope you enjoy it.

A happy New Year! to all and each! And thank you for being here!

Closed Circle has been up for a year, and is the home of new and old books, and has managed to do new things and drive us all insane and keep us all sane in alternation.

We are writing, all of us, which is good! We are planning new things, which is good! We are greatly heartened by the response of you, our friends, and hope that the next year may bring us new memberships and new projects.

We're hoping to learn, and grow, and keep going. There are so many reasons for us to be happy—and one of the greatest is the loyalty and support of our readers and our friends.

We wish you the best of New Years!

Annnnnnnnnd……

There will be an announcement tomorrow.

The day dawns with startling white trees under china blue sky.

It's pretty out there. Gorgeous. The snow was very wet, and the air absolutely still for most of the snowfall, so the snow is an inch thick on every single twig of the tallest trees, against an absolutely brilliant blue sky.

I love it.

Snowmageddon…

Actually, outside of the fact it's very wet, heavy snow, not so bad, but it's snowed since last evening, it's weighing down trees, and there's blizzard conditions in the Palouse, where the wind comes sweeping down the valleys with considerable force at all times—

I did get out to get some eggs and some matches/lighter, the latter for the candles, plus the real reason that drove me out into the snow: cat litter. There are some forces of nature that top a blizzard, and cats needing their litter are one.

We're due about a half a foot of snow. Jane got out and shoveled, and I plied the snowblower—not too hard a task. I was mortally wounded trying to get into the rain-suit: broke a nail way short, ow! but I'll live. I love our snowblower, I love our snowblower…

Jane had just finished half the drive and the snowplow berm the hard way, with the shovel, and had decided to go out front instead and get the front walk—as I volunteered for the drive; and about that time the snowplows roared past, dumping MORE snow onto her just-finished nice driveway entrance. I got through the drive with the blower and again attacked the berm with the snowshovel…not kind to the blower to drive it into deep berm.

Not sure I like this new plastic shovel: the snow slides freely on it, and I dumped a few shovelfuls in unintended spots or had to chase lumps out into the street, trying to pick them up. But wet snow is still 'warm' snow, so a whack with the shovel broke up the foot-across lumps: on a real cold day, the rebound off the frozen lumps will smite thee mightily on the forehead, ruining thy morning.

Anyway, it is still coming down picture-postcard style. We're having beansprouts with chicken for supper; the Colonel Tso's sauce you can buy bottled is pretty good and you can't complain about the speed. An effortless supper, and a diet-friendly chocolate ricotta cream with walnuts. We are not suffering, here.

we're ok with the diet during holidays…

Jane and I both gained back 6 lbs, over the 3 days of Christmas, and have one week to trim up before New Year's. I've observed that there's weight gain, and then there's 'binge weight gain', —and if you don't let B turn into A by going ahead with the binge, you can get away with it.

Each of us gained 6 lbs. We went back to virtue on Monday: Wednesday morning and we were back down 2 lbs. By Thursday we should be down another 1 lb. By Friday, we have another two-day binge on spaghetti, Russian Tea Cakes (beg Jane for THAT recipe—melt in your mouth little balls of sweet buttery nuttiness) and fresh hot bread and butter with Champagne…

That'll probably put on 2-3 lbs, and THEN we start the long haul into spring. We'll be on the straight and narrow for months, and peel off the 'soft' 6 lbs, —by my rule, the second 3 of that will be much harder, by reason of having let it 'sit' unlost for a week—and once we're both into the good zone again (Jane is one inch shorter than I am, and I'm a consistent about 10 lbs heavier than she is when we're both in the good zone)—

So back we'll go onto huge amounts of veggies. The site we're using is South Beach and we're still very happy on the diet, particularly as we can now add bread.

And a merry Christmas was had by all…Jane has the photos.

Including ones of me in the early morning. Shudder. BUT they look better than some circling the interwebs.

Mine was a culinary Christmas: Jane got me a breadmaker and a ceramic knife (and a knife sharpener to tackle our knife set), and I got Jane some cosmetics and a scarf and then MADE some killer thick-crust Italian bread!

We couldn't find our traditional Christmas movie, Lion in Winter, but we found it on the telly, and watched it anyway; we watched Garfield II last night—far better than the first movie, much more Garfield—"Prince and the Pauper," cat-style. I baked bread. We had pie, we had Champagne, and we are, this morning, officially back on our diet until New Year's, before which we hope to drop a little short-term weight gain, and at which time we plan to have less sweets and more pasta, and then get back on the straight and narrow.

We lazed about all day. That's not a bad thing. We needed that.

The cake went without a hitch…

…well, almost. I'd forgotten to buy sugar and milk, but found some sugar at home; and the powdered milk had gone bad so I subbed powdered buttermilk (at 1/3 cup of this ingredient it's not that critical a sub)—

The consistency is that of one large somewhat soupy cookie. I forgot to say sift the flour, and did, and that may have made a diff between soupy and stiff. It wouldn't spread to the edges of the cake pan, cold, but once baking it rose nicely as a roughly 2″ sheet cake.

Icing went well, except the milk, as aforesaid, and the fact I thought I might crack my old measuring cup, which has seen a lot of knocks, by pouring boiling sugar into it, so I went the other way and poured powdered sugar into the boiling brown sugar—wrong. I then spent a while beating heck out of it getting lumps out and may have caused a mild grittiness to the icing (crystallization due to delay in pouring and setting, also the beating)—

I've forgotten what fun cooking is, however, especially on a recipe I haven't done for fifty-five years. And I never have done the icing part. Adventures, adventures. I love watching the chef-reality-shows, because they teach so much technique…but because I'm always on a diet I almost never get to actually use what I learn.

Anyway, we're going to have cake. Lots of cake. With brown sugar icing.

And we're of the opening-Christmas-in-the-morning bent. I think I might thaw some real bacon. Or maybe stir up some pancakes. When we bust a diet we do it with complete sincerity!

We'll be back to the diet bit for at least a week!

Well, the last Christmas shopping foray…Efanor sets his tail afire, and Ysabel…

…went out to get stuff for Grandma Van's Cake, and of all things forgot the milk! I can used dried milk.

It was a zoo out there, people wandering around with a glazed look, frantically snatching the last strange stuffed animal or game, and me, I'm off in the baking aisle trying to find Baking soda. [Which usually gets used up in our marine tank.] But I found pecans. Not easy in the Northern States. Had to go for whole halves, as opposed to chopped, which is spendier. I found brown and powdered sugar. And Jane, bent on her own Christmas notions, exited with a can of popcorn.

We got our banana cream pie…we have our champagne. We got oil to refill the lamps—

Efanor loves to prowl the coffee table. He's usually careful. Last night he got his tail tip in the oil lamp flame. Twice. There was a slight singed smell, but he wasn't burned, and we don't think he noticed.

We have one cat who loves to set himself alight—and one who believes that all Christmas bows are cat toys, but defective ones that cannot be used creatively after you have pulled them off their packages. She also loves to munch organza ribbon. A see-through ribbon will bring her across a room to attack it.

Grandma Van…

The origin of the cake recipe…could be my great-gran or even great-great-gran. If it was great-gran, it was a lady named Missouri Duff; and if it was great-great-gran it was Rebecca Morton, of the Mortons and Cages of Cages' Bend, Tennessee. Cages' Bend used to be a trading post, I suppose: it was a bend on the river, which is now Old Hickory Lake, near Nashville, so the orginal Cages' Bend is probably now under water; and Cages' Bend is now a book, a rock band, and a state park. We don't know much about Rebecca, except that she married into the family and had my great-grandfather Tolbert Vandeventer, who got out of Tennessee and ended up in pre-statehood Oklahoma with his wife and son.

His wife, now, was Missouri Isabel Duff, born in 1852. It's possible her original name was Nancy, but Missouri is what's on her tombstone. She had no family: they all, she said, "were lost in the stream–" , ie, lost in a flatboat accident on either the Mississippi or the Missouri.

Flatboats were how timber got from Illinois and Michigan to New Orleans: enterprising people would build these chancy flatbottomed boats out of finished lumber, families needing to get across or down the Mississippi at its wide part would buy them or hire a flatboatman and put everything they owned aboard, sit atop the pile, and hope it held together long enough to get them across and further down the river.

These boats had no capacity to go upriver. They went further and further south in their careers, and passed from hand to hand, until they finally fetched up in the lower courses of the Mississippi, and became valuable for lumber, which was building the wooden walkways and porches and walls of New Orleans, a former French colony founded to look for pearls (the Louisiana Purchase was sold because no pearls were ever found). New Orleans at the time was a mostly collection of board buildings huddled on high ground in what we now call the French Quarter. The levees did not yet exist. And travelers on the river had to cope with river pirates, who also plied the river attacking boats where they thought they could get away with it: their main port was, yes, New Orleans.

Well, Missouri Duff's family met some accident—they were all lost but her: as she reported. She got to shore and lived. She was alone, calling herself Missouri, in 1871, when she met and married Tolbert, in Iowa. She had a son in Nebraska, lived in Missouri, having other chidren, and she went with Tolbert to the Oklahoma Territory. She was quite a woman—frontier wife to the hilt. She survived Tolbert by some few years. She'd arrived on houseless, farmless Oklahoma Territory hills where she and Tolbert negotiated a deal with the Kiowa, built a two-room house. Her husband and later her son set to farming; and when she died in a young town in a state only just made, they'd bridged the Mississippi (Eads Bridge, 1874), and she was still active and managing her household.

Ironically, when I was doing research, I came across census records that indicate her mother and one young brother may also have survived the river accident, and settled in Illinois. But she would never have known it.

It's my suspicion that she was the person with the recipe, since she would never have had an opportunity to know Tolbert's mother, great-great-gran.

A Christmas prezzy for you all: a 100 year old recipe from my family…

And I'll give the how-to as well as the measurements to enable people who have NEVER made a cake from scratch to do this one:

Grandma Van's Spice Cake

You will need a medium to small sheet-cake pan. And an oven. A mixing bowl. A spatula is nice. And a 2 cup measure.

1/2 cup Crisco from can. A shortening. To measure anything sticky, fill a 2 cup measuring cup with 1 and 1/2 cup of cold water: add the Crisco, and when the water reaches the 2 cup mark, you have 1/2 cup of Crisco. If you don't have a 2-cup measure, hey, be creative: measure it 1/4 cup at a time in 3/4 cups of water!

AND tablespoon or teaspoon always means a LEVEL tablespoon measure, etc, unless otherwise stated!

mix in:

1 whole egg.

1 cup of sugar

1 and 1/3 cup ordinary flour

1 cup of applesauce (in the old days, this would have been homemade applesauce, or scraped fresh apple)

1 cup of raisins

1 cup of chopped pecans

stir all this together. Hand stirring is quite enough. Having a spatula is a good thing, but not necessary.

add one level teaspoon measure of cinnamon.

same of clove powder

same of baking soda

Stir it all up.

Wipe the whole cake pan interior down with oil or Crisco. And here's a trick: DUST it all very lightly with flour: putting it in a paper grocery bag and shaking it will do it. This assures your cake will not stick.

Pour batter into pan and put pan dead center in a 350 oven: set the timer for 25 minutes.

Another trick: do NOT jar the stove OR open the oven door to check on it: this can stop the cake rising or even make it collapse.

And next trick: when the timer goes off, stick a dry toothpick into the center of the cake and pull it out: if it comes out without batter stuck to it, the cake is truly done. If there is batter on the toothpick, give it another 3 minutes. I mention this because if you have an iffy oven and no oven thermometer, you can have a problem. If you're confident of your oven, skip this. This trick was developed back in the days of wood-fired ovens with no thermostat.

Set the cake in a cool place to cool off. You can serve this from the pan, or you can turn it out onto a plate. We always serve from the pan, so I hope you don't need that pan again for another dish!

It's important for the cake to cool before icing, because if you try to ice a really warm cake, the cake will tear under the pressure of the knife!

NOW START MAKING THE ICING:

put 2 cups of brown sugar (white will not do)—into a small saucepan

add: 6 tablespoons of milk.

4 teaspoons of butter (real butter is best flavor)

Boil this until the sugar is all melted.

Pour this hot mixture into: 1 cup of white powdered sugar, in a bowl. Be sure it's Powdered Sugar, not just regular sugar.

Beat the heck out of it as if you were scrambling eggs.

Start pouring it out in various places on the cake, (a wiggly line works) and quickly use a knife to spread it out like butter on bread.

Again you'll use your spatula to get the last of this out.

You can cut and serve it whenever you like.