Ruiskakut

Ruiskakut, literally cakes from rye, are a Finnish Christmas delicacy. Crisp, slightly sweet, delicately scented with vanilla and a subtle nutty taste of rye, these are scrumptious! Speculating that the cookies are threaded with ribbon and hung on Christmas tree branches for guests to break off and eat — the cookies that is, not the branches — Sharon Tyler Herbst’s instructions are to cut a small hole off-center in each.

Equal parts white and rye flours, a little sugar, salt, vanilla and milk, and a whole half cup of butter. Some recipes call for sprinkling the cut-outs of dough with decorative sugars, but these are simply perfect as they are.

What’s that? Why are they hanging out in my backyard garden from the bean/pea trellis? Because it’s the wrong time of year to hang them from the Christmas tree, of course! Don’t worry. I didn’t leave them there.

Black bottom white-chocolate bars

Light, chewy, dark and sweet, these bar cookies are nigh unto brownies if not outright cake, and they are delicious and almost the most satisfying route to chocolate satiation I have made from The Joy of Cookies yet. Awesomesauce! One cup and two tablespoons of butter. Six eggs. Seven ounces of semi-sweet chocolate plus half a cup of chocolate chips and a bit of ground coffee, and six ounces of white chocolate. And toasted sliced almonds atop a creamy bittersweet chocolate glaze. If this is coma-inducing stuff, bring it on!

I am done with school and have gone through the ceremony to receive my certificate. Now what? Who knows! There are hoops to jump through ahead but for now I am resting. Working still and reinserting myself into the art gallery docent world by cautious degrees, but resting. There will no doubt be more cookie-baking in my immediate future. After that? We will just have to wait and see.

Suspiros de almendras

Suspiros de almendras, or almond sighs, are so named because they are “light as a sigh,” says Sharon Tyler Herbst, and they are. Flavored with almond, lemon juice and zest, they are little clouds of sweet meringue.

The recipe calls for mixing finely ground toasted almonds with lemon zest and cornstarch, setting that aside and whipping egg whites with salt, lemon juice and sugar. I did the first part over a week ago, and the remainder just the other day. Crazy busy.

There is a light at the end of this long tunnel, however. Graduation is in two days, and my coursework is done (although I await word of two grades — what will be will be). There are a couple of big things to finish related to my soon-to-be-erstwhile job, and they feel utterly surmountable. So with a little bit of joy, I celebrated by finishing up these suspiros.

I was feeling really good about the way they turned out and then I googled suspiros de almendras and the images … Let’s just say mine are a little flat, relatively speaking. I will have to try again some day, but onward and upward! Next up? Chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate. With a few holiday cookies thrown in now and then. Should be fun!

30

Between physical therapy, doctor’s visits and a few other complications (computer death and a series of two-, three- and four-day long migraines, among other things), I have fallen woefully far behind on several projects and obligations. The blog has been low on the endless list of priorities, I’m afraid.

I am starting to catch up (knock wood) just in time to graduate on the 18th and to take a brief bit of time to celebrate our 30th anniversary with my husband, Bruce, today. That brief bit will have to be in a bistro near Eastman while we wait for Kate to return from theory class, but hey. That’s our life at the moment.

Thirty years. Whoa. And I think my only regret might be the perm…

A hymn, of sorts, for recent times

I had not listened to Bruce Cockburn’s Small Source of Comfort (2011) for a longish while until early last week when I played the album on my iPad to keep me company whilst sorting through a shipment of new books in a church’s basement. The lyrics of the song below seemed so utterly appropriate to the news of the moment they broke my heart. He sums up so perfectly how violent death diminishes us all, and I don’t mean just the death of innocents. Love is hard work, open-hearted tolerance is never the easy path, and trust can be damned difficult, but we are all better when we choose them.

Each One Lost

Under the big lights
shadows stretching long
the ramp is lowered gently to the tarmac
and all of us, we wait
in this sea of gravity
for the precious cargo to appear

And here come the dead boys
moving slowly past
the pipes and prayers and strained commanding voices
and the tears in our hearts
make an ocean we’re all in
all in this together don’t you know

You can die on your sofa
safe inside your home
or die in a mess of flame and shrapnel
we all in our time go
you know you’re not alone
you’re in the hearts of everybody here

Each one lost
is everyone’s loss you see
each one lost is a vital part of you and me

Some would have us bow
in bondage to their dreams
of little gods who lay down laws to live by
but all these inventions
arise from fear of love
and open-hearted tolerance and trust

Well screw the rule of law
we want the rule of love
enough to fight and die to keep it coming
if that sounds like confusion
brother think again
we know exactly what we chose

Each one lost
is everyone’s loss you see
each one lost is a vital part of you and me
Each one lost
is everyone’s loss you see

– Bruce Cockburn

New Mexico, and other knitting

You may recall that I could not get over the light and color in New Mexico during my visit there this past February. Both were stunning to the point of life-altering, or so it seemed, and I took many photographs, almost desperately trying to capture traces of what I saw that moved me so. In particular, there is a pale, almost greyish green with flecks of yellow that flashes here and there in the desert and the foothills. Mostly that color caught my eye from a moving car, and when we stopped I tended to focus the camera on the colors of rocks, the contrast of deep blue sky with red hills, cottonwood trees, and ruins, not unlike the ruins of this monastery here, so I was not quite as successful in capturing that ubiquitous shade of green, but I did my best to memorize it anyway.

The colors in the photo above are beautiful, aren’t they? But look below the blue, and shades of red in the background. Look at the foreground, at the grasses. That is the green I am talking about.

On the flights home, I decided to knit my aunt a gift, a throw, and when I imagined myself in her sitting room, full of its own light and color, I knew in my bones that shade of green was necessary. Fortunately, a designer whose color-sense I have grown to love, Jared Flood, believed that color was necessary too, and had had the grace to name it “foothills.” So I ordered the yarn, tried to catch up on schoolwork and work-work, and waited.

After the wool arrived, I wound it into cakes, packed it away to resist the temptation of beginning, and continued to try to catch up on schoolwork and work-work. My brilliant plan was to get as much of both as I could done before heading to another new-to-me and favorite place, Holy Cross Monastery, on the 19th of March for a three day retreat in deep silence. I planned to read and knit most of my time there. And I did. I finished a required book, and on the long car ride to the monastery and silence I started in on the throw. I knit and read, read and knit, and knit and read. I went for two long walks: one with painting, one without painting but with ankle turning. Then I knit and read some more, this time with ice on my elevated ankle. I knit all the way home, and on and off for another week or so, finishing up on the 4th of April.

I am, I regret to say, still woefully behind on schoolwork and work-work. However, with the onset of spring, I finished a couple of cardigans. The first is Sprössling, (German for sprout), knit in Loft, another Jared Flood/Brooklyn Tweed yarn, colorway “button jar.” It is lightweight, and just warm enough for those spring days that are a little cool, but not too cold. I fittingly wore this fine new cardigan when I finally sowed seeds for broccoli, basil, tomatoes, sugar snap peas, sunflowers, columbine and carrots over a recent weekend. I am woefully behind on the garden-work too.

The other cardigan you may remember my working on and reworking on from a former post. It is Central Park Hoodie, with Viking cable variations and some tweaks of my own, finished and none the worse for the wear or the cursing. It is a bit warm for the weather at the moment, but I am sure there will be opportunities to wear it before the heat of summer sets in. And that’s the state of the knitting here. What’s on your needles?

Polvorones

Sharon Tyler Herbst says “these crumbly rich cookies are of Arab origin but they’re now popular in many versions throughout the world.” She goes on to say some recipes include lard, which I think precludes them being of Arab origin, or at least of Muslim Arab origin, but what do I know? And so I have turned to Wikipedia to deepen my knowledge a shallow bit. I am not sure that helps a whole lot, but polvorón and mantecado seem to be almost interchangeably translated to shortbread, and so I found the article interesting if not definitively informative.

Ms. Herbst prefers butter over lard or shortening in this recipe. She also provides two variations; one for Mexican wedding cookies with two cups of finely chopped toasted nuts added to the butter, powdered sugar, vanilla and flour, and the other for a chocolate version with cocoa, nuts and chocolate chips. I imagine both are delicious. I cheated and opted to shape these in balls rather than half-inch thick, two-inch long ovals. The latter looked a little too much like over-large suppositories for my taste, but I may have been shaping them incorrectly. The primary recipe calls for rolling the warm-from-the-oven cookies in sifted powdered sugar, letting them cool, and then rolling them in the powdered sugar again. The result is a melt-in-your-mouth sweet sensation as the whole confection crumbles into dust. Awesomesauce!