Tag Archives: lemon

Return from the heights.

cabin, mountains, trees, , , , , ,

I don’t think I’ve ever been so sad to leave my High Sierra retreat, to come down from a truly mountaintop experience — and return to too-muchness. It was my longest ever stay up there at our family’s cabin, and no one else with me for any of the ten days, though I did chat with several other owners of cabins in the little community when I met them on my walks. Many of them were  packing up their goods and closing their cabins until next summer.

The solitude was true, in the absence of my usual social interactions via blogging and such; I did without the “news” or even uplifting articles online. Authors of print books I did engage with while I read, and it felt good to sink deeply into those books, and to spend time on other contemplative activities. I liked to sit on the deck to read, with the sun at my back and a blanket on my lap.

There was enough housework to satisfy my love of housekeeping. I always put a lot of thought beforehand into what food to take along, because it needs to last the whole time; if something is missing I’d rather make do without it than drive what would end up being a three-hour round trip to the nearest town.

I knew that the provisions I brought would be more than plenty, but I didn’t try to plan menus beforehand, because when I’m only feeding myself that is too much trouble. Also, I’ve found from experience on camping trips espeically, that when my mind is freed of a hundred distracting bits of business, I like taking time over the Coleman stove or in the cabin kitchen to be creative with the limited ingredients on hand. One thing I made was Greek Roasted Lemon Potatoes.

My last day at the lake, I made a delicious soup to use up bits of vegetables and leftovers, and put most of it into the freezer compartment of our little propane refrigerator. That gave me two more mini-blocks of ice to help keep other perishables cold on the drive home.

I had brought supplies for times when creativity was lacking: like this mix I’d had in my cupboards at home for months, without opening it. In the cabin on a chilly morning, purple yam pancakes turned out to be just what I desired.

Up on the dome, I greeted my favorite familiar trees. I asked them to bless me to return another year to be with them once more. Every time I am up there I think, How can this be, that I am given such a priceless gift, to be in a remote and lofty place, having sweet and solitary fellowship with God and His sublime creatures and vistas? One of these visits will be the last one….

The weather had turned cold the night before my dome walk, with the temps dropping into the 20’s, but the sun broke through the clouds soon enough that I was able to linger a while and eat my lunch, though I wished for a wool layer under my sun hat.

At one steep place, I snugged into the granite slope more closely, and found myself a few inches away from this dense and furry black stuff that I guess is lichen…? Or is it a different thing from the flatter, blacker lichen under it? Maybe my daughter Pippin will jump in here and tell us — likely she already told me, and recently. It had a tiny yellow lichen growing in its middle. Imagine these rocks and lichens and succulents under a thick blanket of snow, all winter long…. but then they will be right there next year when I return, may it please God that I do.

Lemon-Poppyseed Sandwich Cookies

Christmas, food and cooking, ,

My story from 2012, about the wonderful Glad cookie from that Christmas:

Last week I finished baking the last of the Christmas cookies. Encouraged by the happy eaters of the Lemon-Poppyseed Sandwich Cookies at previous holiday gatherings, this year I had made a double batch, and then ran out of time to complete more than half of them. The remaining dough and filling waited in the fridge until I got back some strength, and a plan for where to send the finished product so that I wouldn’t eat them all myself.

With so many young, even teen-aged, folk around here at Christmas, I expected to see the cookies go faster than they did. But never during the week of feasting did I spy anyone who might vie with me for the Cookie Monster title, and there are certainly no other contenders remaining in this house now. So when I found a willing person to be my delivery man, I sent them to Soldier and Joy.

The recipe (based on one not longer on the Epicurious site) starts with sugar cookies that are heavy with poppyseeds and two sources of lemon flavor, and finishes with the crunchy cookies enclosing an also lemony cream cheese filling.

At the epicurious.com site one can read comments from many readers detailing what happened when they tried the recipes, and the various changes that we daring cooks insist on making.

Most people who had made these cookies thought there should be more filling than planned for in the recipe as given, and I also ran out of filling at my first trial, so this year I doubled the cookie part, but tripled the filling. Not that it’s a problem to have leftovers of either. The cookies are wonderful by themselves, and the filling would be awfully nice spread on toast.

The majority of bakers also liked the cookies better after they had sat in the refrigerator and softened up, though the original recipe said to fill them not long before eating to keep the cookies crisp. I prefer them soft, as did most of the people I fed them to. They are good straight from the freezer, too, I found out!

Here is my version with the extra filling, and a couple of other changes, cut in half so that no one has to assemble 60+ cookies to find out if she likes them.

Lemon-Poppyseed Sandwich Cookies

COOKIES:

2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
2 tablespoons poppy seeds
4 teaspoons grated lemon peel
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon lemon extract

FILLING:

12 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 teaspoon lemon extract
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

FOR COOKIES:

Mix flour, salt and baking powder in medium bowl. Using electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until light. Gradually beat in sugar. Beat in egg, then poppy seeds, lemon peel and extracts. Mix in dry ingredients. Gather dough into ball, divide into two parts and flatten each into a disk. Wrap in plastic and chill at least 2 hours. If wrapped well, it will last in the refrigerator over a week.

Preheat oven to 325°F. Butter 2 large baking sheets. Roll out 1 dough disk on floured surface to 1/8-inch thickness. Using 2-inch-diameter cookie cutter, cut out cookies. Arrange cookies 1 inch apart on prepared baking sheets. Gather scraps; reroll and cut out more cookies.

Bake cookies until edges just begin to color, about 18 minutes. (If you use insulated sheets as I did they might take longer.) Cool cookies on sheets 3 minutes, then transfer to racks and cool completely. Repeat rolling, cutting and baking with remaining dough. (Can be made ahead. Store in airtight container at room temperature up to 2 weeks or freeze up to 1 month.)

FOR FILLING:

Beat all ingredients in large bowl until light and fluffy. Spread 2 teaspoons filling over bottom of 1 cookie. Press second cookie, bottom side down, onto filling. Repeat with remaining cookies and filling. (Can be made ahead. Cover and chill.)

Some of the cookies in this later batch are a bit wrinkly, a result of the dough having dried out a little. I did add a few drops of water when I re-rolled the scraps and that helped them look better. But the wrinkly cookies were otherwise fine.

After my last post featuring a photo of lemons, Jody asked how I like to use these fruits. I consider myself a good person to ask, because my father raised not only oranges but lemons, and until a few years ago when someone very stupid — yes, I mean it — took out the two large trees that remained from ten acres of lemon grove, I used to have as many lemons as I wanted for free.

Lately I’ve been using a lot of lemons just to add the juice to hot water for drinking on cold days. But of more elaborate recipes, some that I’ve loved over the years are Lemon Curd, Greek Egg-Lemon Soup, Lemon Chicken, and Lemon Pudding Cake. And now — Lemon-Poppyseed Sandwich Cookies!

A gardener’s work and prayer.

humor, my garden, poetry, , , , , , , ,

I’ve been in the garden every day, at least a little, and often a lot. When I come downstairs in the morning and realize that it’s already warm enough that I can slide the glass door open, without thinking about it I slide open the screen door, too, and go out to have a look.

The bluebird parents can be seen flying back and forth to feed the peeping infants. Finches, sparrows, hummingbirds and even the flirty Bewick’s Wren fill the space with their songs. Oh, and crows. It is a new thing the last few years to have crows in my yard. I prefer the old way, and I politely ask them to leave. They leave but they come back.

Often in the morning I will put water in the fountain, and trim a little here or pull a weed there. Most days I seem to spend quite a while picking sweet peas.

The sweet peas have become very intimate with the perennial runner beans. The sweet peas were up on the trellis months earlier, and were covered with flowers when the bean stems emerged at three corners of the planter boxes and started climbing. They mostly twist their stems around the pea vines as they climb, and quickly they have outclimbed the peas.

The pea vines responded in kind, continuing their reach for the sky by holding on to the beans. This relationship has to end, though, because the peas are expiring while the beans are only now putting out a few flowers. So, the last couple of days when I pick the flowers, I’m also going to a lot of trouble to break up this love affair without breaking the bean stems. Let’s hope I can plan better and not let this situation develop next spring.

When the sun gets too high and I start to droop, I go indoors and do housework. Or read poems. I’ve been bingeing on them in the last week, and hope to share my favorites here eventually. Maybe in the fall when I have finished my Big Sort, the organizing of all my Stuff: rooms, closets, cabinets, drawers and belongings to throw, give or put away. I hope the Big Sort will be done long before that, but there is the garden…

Acanthus
Lemon
Lavender

I mixed up some fish emulsion and fed the lemon tree today. I wanted to give it more iron, too, but I read on the bottle that you should not apply that until late evening. It was time for a break, anyway, so here I am. And here is a poem I read last night, which I hope you like:

GARDENER’S PRAYER

O Lord, grant that in some way
it may rain every day,
Say from about midnight until three o’clock
in the morning,
But, You see, it must be gentle and warm
so that it can soak in;
Grant that at the same time it would not rain on
campion, alyssum, helianthus, lavendar, and others which
You in Your infinite wisdom know
are drought-loving plants-
I will write their names on a bit of paper
if you like-
And grant that the sun may shine
the whole day long,
But not everywhere (not, for instance, on the
gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron)
and not too much;
That there may be plenty of dew and little wind,
enough worms, no lice and snails, or mildew,
and that once a week thin liquid manure and guano
may fall from heaven.
Amen.

-Karel Matej Capek Chod
(1860 -1927) Czech Republic

My birthwort is modest.

my garden, nature, work, , , , , , ,

I’m plant-sitting for a friend who is between lodgings, and one of the specimens in my charge is a pot of healthy nettles. The owner told me to be sure to snip and eat the leaves frequently, because she (the plant) likes that.

Yesterday I stayed home all day, and accomplished a lot of little tasks, including much puttering and pottering outdoors. Though at first I just sat in my corner by the guava and the olive trees, while eating a late breakfast, because the whole Creation had pulled me out of the chilly house into the garden to soak up its benefactions and warm my blood.

We have entered the season when I leave the garden hoses lying around untidily; it adds “human interest” I’m sure. All the lightweight collapsible hoses I invested in got leaks, and I have gone back to heavy and sturdy hoses that last. They are good for strengthening my arms, which is something Proverbs 31 tells us women to do anyway. The bushes with the new leaves that glow like the sun are dwarf pomegranates.

Nutmeg-scented pelargonium in greenhouse.

The day before yesterday, I had told myself, “You only have to do one thing after another — and keep doing it — and in that way you will make a dent in the disorderliness that represents a disheartening backlog of work. Even a little improvement will ease your load!” Of course it helped that I ran no errands at all and in that way avoided having any of those transition times coming and going, which seem to confuse my mind.

First thing: feed the poor lemon tree. I was taught not long ago that it wants feeding four times a year, and after I fed it only two times last year it gave me a good crop. Then I “paused,” and don’t know when it got its last feeding. Now I have set an alarm in my phone to remind me. After the feeding, I gave it a little trim, mostly on top. The photo is “After.”

Near the lemon tree is my little California Pipevine, Aristolochia californica, which I mentioned here recently. It is growing a lot and has several flowers and many new leaves. I read quite a bit about it last night and learned that it is native only to Northern California. It’s very modest compared to showier species of Dutchman’s Pipe, but it is exotic enough to me. I kept wondering what the flowers would look like when they open, but it appears that this is it! If you think it looks carnivorous, you are not alone; in the past people did think that, but it seems they trap but don’t eat:

“The flowers have an unpleasant odor which is attractive to tiny carrion-feeding insects. The insects crawl into the convoluted flowers and often become stuck and disoriented for some time, picking up pollen as they wander. Most eventually escape; the plant is not insectivorous as was once thought. Fungus gnats (Mycetophilidae) may prove to be the effective pollinators.”

They call this “pollination by deceit.” The flowers dry up and crumble and thereby let the insects out to do their bidding. There are over 500 species of Dutchman’s Pipe, known as birthwort, or Aristolochia. Equally exotic and gorgeous butterflies lay their eggs on pipevines all over the world. Do you have any growing wild in your part of the world? Here are some from Sumatra and Brazil:

The flowers are known to have a bad smell, but mine are few and hard to get at, so there is not enough scent for me to notice. It dawned on me that if a Pipevine Swallowtail laid eggs on my plant, and caterpillars hatched out and began eating, they would die of starvation very soon, and I would be sad about that. And if my plant gets so robust that it covers the fence and draws lots of butterflies because its many flowers are exuding stinkiness… well, that would be a mixed blessing. I guess I’ll just wait and see what happens.

Perennial Showy Milkweed coming up.
Yellow Bush Lupine background, lavender at right.

In the meantime, I took a whiff of these geraniums who are also in my temporary nursery section; they only smell delicious. For dinner I cooked up a modest mess of nettle leaves.