Chocolate-whiskey drops

Raisins soaked in Kentucky bourbon, then mixed with butter, brown sugar, an egg, flour, cocoa, a little more bourbon, chopped pecans, baking soda, baking powder and salt. What could go wrong? Not much apparently. Topped with a shelled pecan, these are easy drop cookies, and they bake up soft and delicious. The only forethought required is whether to soak the raisins in whiskey overnight, or just to add them dry. Seriously? That’s a no-brainer. Really. Take the time to soak ‘em!

Belated sharing

That’s Robert Schumann’s piano quintet in E-flat, Op 44. Kate and her quintet-mates performed it in its entirety this past Saturday for a packed room. The video is 31 minutes, 42 seconds long, in part because the whole thing takes about half an hour to play, and in part because there was a bit of trouble with the violist’s C-string between the 1st and 2nd movements. If you don’t have time for the whole of it, listen to the Scherzo (3rd movement at 19:10 or so). It’s a thrill ride. There are four movements in all: Allegro brillante, In mode d’una Marcia. Un poco largamente, Scherzo: Molto vivace, and Allegro ma non troppo.

And if you don’t have time for any of that, try the one below. It’s short and cheers me up when I’ve got no time whatsoever. I even sometimes hum it to myself when I am on the treadmill, both the metaphorical and the literal. The beat pushes me on.

It does not help when I have got a project to complete, however, which is what I should be working on now. For that I need to break out Glenn Gould playing The Art of the Fugue… Excellent brain food.

Galletas puertorriqueñas del ron

Six easy ingredients: sugar, shortening, salt, nutmeg, dark rum, and flour. No fuss, no muss — except perhaps the rolling of each individual cookie into a one-inch ball in floured hands. Topped with a creamy rum glaze (confectioners’ sugar, milk, and more dark rum) after baking and before leaving the baking sheet, these are heady sweets! It’s a good thing they are petite. Bruce does not love them, but Kate thinks they taste like sour cream doughnuts. Must be the nutmeg. And the glaze.

Now, if only they included a week on a Puerto Rican beach in February. Or on the rocky coast of Maine in August …

Better late than never, but better never late

A little over a month ago a box came in the mail. Inside were twenty-four strawberry plants, bound with a rubber band and wrapped in brown paper. Unfortunately they did not arrive with the two hours of time I would need to prepare the bed and plant them. Sort of like a new toy that you cannot wait to play with but which requires batteries that are not included.

I put the box in the garage thinking that in a week or so I would have minutes to string together long enough to get the work of planting them done, but the time did not appear, and when it did there was snow, or soaking rain, or some other disincentive.

Then I sort of forgot the box was there. Every once in a while I would open the garage and catch a faint whiff of strawberries and think “where is that coming from?” and then remember. But most of the time when I open the garage? It’s to get the car out and go somewhere. Usually somewhere needful and without delay.

On Mothers’ day, after Bruce prepared the bed and wrangled the homemade cover out of the basement, I unpacked the box, removed the brown wrapping paper, broke the rubber band that bound the mummified, desiccated remains of strawberry plants, apologized to them profusely (for the delay and for my hideous appearance — see yesterday’s post, if you dare) and planted (or buried?) their remains, watered them, and hoped.

I am still watering and hoping… For at least one of the twenty-four. Or maybe next year.

Look away. I’m hideous. (aka TMI)

A week ago yesterday, I finally started doing some gardening. It was the first day in a long time that I had anything approaching enough time to get a chunk of it done. Kate was not well, and so she and I stayed home from church. Bruce and I had started our day early by going to the public market and buying celebratory egg sandwiches (*clink* — our 29th anniversary as well as Mothers’ Day), as well as several plants for the planters and border beds. And I had seedlings in the kitchen (basil and sunflowers, tomatoes and zucchini) as well as a box of strawberry plants in the garage long overdue for planting.

So, while Bruce went to church to sing in the choir, I went outside to Get. Things. Done. I had until evening and dinnertime (we had reservations at a favorite pizza place) to accomplish as much of it as possible, and I worked not unlike a mad woman.

I should have tied back my hair. I did not. I should have had a better supply of tissues. I had none. I should have quit at the first sign of trouble. I could not. And I should probably have worn gardening gloves. Oops.

Makronen-Schnitten

Literally macaroons cut in the inimitable backward-speak of German that makes us love it so, or macaroon jam slices, if you are relying on Sharon Tyler Herbst for translation. These cookies are, according to Ms. Herbst, the quickest and easiest to make of the recipes she provides in The Joy of Cookies. She neglected to mention they may also be the stickiest with which to work. She credits the four basic ingredients for their ease, which is odd as I count five, not including the jam: ground almonds, sugar, egg white, salt, and almond extract.

The recipe is of Austrian origin, and the fragrance of almonds and apricots take me straight back to Vienna in 1980 and a summer day with new friends, searching for and finding, and then lingering for a very long time in a café we had read of in our fat copies of Let’s Go Europe. There we enjoyed a wickedly, delicious coffeecake redolent with apricots and almonds.

Too bad Bruce and Kate are not fans of apricot, which is the traditional jam for these, although Ms. Herbst does suggest others will do. I would bake them again, but if I do my family would prefer a different fruit.

A done deal

I do not wear shawls ever. Well, hardly ever. And I cannot imagine myself wearing this one. It is, however, beautiful. And warm. The pattern is a simple enough repeat that I knit it almost exclusively in dark places: the auditorium at the Memorial Art Gallery during lectures, sung compline at Christ Church by candlelight, a Rochester Philharmonic concert in Eastman’s grand theatre, and more than several recitals in which Kate has participated between last November and this past week when, finally, it came to an end and was finished and ready to block.

The pattern creates a fabric that wants to bias with a vengeance, and so requires vigorous, aggressive blocking both to open it, and to square it. Somewhere this past Tuesday, between a multitude of obligations, I found a window of time to hurriedly yank its damp self into a semblance of a rectangle and pinned it to a mattress to dry. Done! Click on the photo for the particulars. It will take you to the Ravelry page where I record such things.