All posts by GretchenJoanna

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About GretchenJoanna

Orthodox Christian, widowed in 2015; mother, grandmother. Love to read, garden, cook, write letters and a hundred other home-making activities.

This cookie might be worth the trouble.

Christmas, food and cooking, ,

I did get around to baking cookies — after Christmas Day. With so many family members arriving and departing at different times, our schedule of activities was hard for me to keep up with, and cookies weren’t a high priority. I made only two kinds in the end, the ones for which I had made a point of buying ingredients. One of those was the one I gave to you last month from the New York Times cooking site: Ginger Cheesecake Cookies.

They were not difficult to make, but they were tedious. You freeze the cheesecake filling in little dollops and then wrap soft gingerbread dough around one at a time. That wasn’t hard to do at first, but I had to interrupt my work and put the dough in the fridge for a day, and when I took it out again it never would become pliable enough to manipulate easily.

Piping the dollops, from the video.

However, my dollops of cheesecake came out almost perfectly even with the amount of dough, and in spite of the sloppy way I did everything (for example, I used a spoon rather than a piping bag to form the cheesecake parts), the resulting cookies were big and beautiful — and dreamy-delicious. The balls flatten in the oven and you end up with a hidden layer of cheesecake inside a cookie that has an intoxicating flavor in itself, from fresh, dried and candied ginger going into the mix. The contrast with the creamy cheesecake layer is special; the family members who were still here to try the new cookie raved about them.

When I finally put the last pan in the oven, I thought, “I’ll never make these again!” But I have already changed my mind about that. The recipe is for 18 cookies, which seemed a ridiculously small number to me, so I doubled it. When I saw how huge the cookies came out, and had realized by then that the dough would best be used right away, I decided that a single batch is plenty to work with in one session.

From the NYT Cooking video.

If you are interested in this cookie, and you click on the link for the recipe, you might want to read the cooks’ comments; many of them suggested making this into a bar cookie, to make it faster. This recipe was one of the Cookie Week 2024 collection, so there is an accompanying video of the creator demonstrating everything. I hope some of you try the recipe in one way or another and let me know how it works for you: Ginger Cheesecake Cookies.

So much of any year is flammable.

calendar, poetry, time, ,

I hadn’t read this poem carefully since 2011 when I first posted it. Now that I consider it afresh, that last line about Things I Didn’t Do is haunting me again!

BURNING THE OLD YEAR

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye, born 1952, American poet

When when Maria Horvath posted this poem on her blog in 2011, she included the painting below, “Abstracto,” 1935 by Joan Miró

Tea and stollen for the whirled.

books, Christmas, Nativity, tea, ,

Early this morning I waved good-bye to the last Christmas guests as they drove off toward home in Colorado. A few minutes later I was back in bed, and soon after that had fallen asleep while listening to Jonathan Pageau’s podcast on “Christmas: The Anchor of Reality.”

Now it’s afternoon, I just finished breakfast, and decided to try one of the new teas I received recently from Tea Runners. The grandchildren who just departed liked this one, called Winter Wonderland Rooibos. I added half and half, and served up a slice of the stollen Soldier gave me for Christmas.

 

I was arranging my stack of Christmas books and realized that I have not read Winter Fire during either of the Christmas seasons since I got it; it is subtitled Christmas with G.K. Chesterton, and is compiled by Ryan Whitaker Smith. So I opened its pages and browsed a little, and remembered that it is arranged as somewhat of a 30-Day Advent collection. Yet for myself I think it will be a good read in the next few days, as winter has only begun here, and I could use more meditation on the Incarnation, as I process all the events large and small that have whirled around me of late.

There are so many things I want to write about, to highlight here, of our splendid Glad celebrations over the last ten days, but at this point my head is still spinning a bit too crazily, and my heart just wants to go to church, light a candle on St. Basil’s Day and The Circumcision of Christ, and give thanks for all that God has done.

Gift from a friend at church.

Theophanies into which we may enter.

calendar, church, quotes, time

As we close in on the end of the calendar year, our rector posted thoughts about the liturgical calendar in our parish bulletin. We Orthodox know at some level that the calendar of festal events and saints’ days “sanctifies time” — but do we live it fully? It’s not an easy thing to prioritize the “holy appointments,” as Fr. Stephen Freeman recently characterized them, in our lives that are typically super busy with various other activities. An excerpt:

This feast, this day, this time in my life, if I will keep the appointment, I can meet God. The feasts on the calendar are not appointments with memorials, the recollection of events long past. They are invitations to present tense moments in the liturgical life of the world. In those moments there is an intersection of the present and the eternal. They are theophanies into which we may enter. The events in Christ’s ministry that are celebrated (to use one example) are of little importance if viewed in a merely historical manner. It is not enough to say and remember that Christ died. The Christian faith is that I must become a partaker of Christ’s death. Christ is Baptized, but I must be a partaker of His Baptism. This is true of all the feasts and is the reason for our liturgical celebrations. The Church is not a memorial society—it is the living presence of Christ in the world and the primary means by which we may share in His presence. There is no time like the present, for only in the present does time open its riches to us and bestow its gifts.