The Christmas Diaries, Part 3

Let it snow!

Deck the Halls, December 19th  

After a good 8+ hour sleep we woke up to clouds rolling in with the first few tiny snowflakes falling.  Before long the mountain across the valley disappeared in the snow and low clouds, and over the course of the day the snowfall increased, the light powder blowing off the trees and roof in displays of aerodynamic physics.  We put out seed feeders and a suet block for the birds, and didn’t have to wait long for them to show up.  Stellar’s Jays, Mountain Chickadees, White-breasted Nuthatches, Juncos, and and Downy Woodpeckers were soon sheltering in the ponderosa pines near the feeder.  The larger Hairy Woodpecker rode the suet block, hung from our hanging basket hook, like it was a Tilt-a-Whirl.

Bump the Snow Dog, decked out herself!

Homemade soup with Tina's great whole wheat bread

We spent the day reveling in being at the cabin, fortifying ourselves with good from-scratch food like oatmeal with tart dried cherries and toasted walnuts and a sturdy vegetable soup with red lentils and ruffled campanelle pasta eaten with a fantastic loaf of home-made whole wheat bread given to us by our Tucson friend, Tina.  We got out the Kindles and read by the fire, watching the snow swirl outside.  The temperature had descended all day, from 24 degrees at dawn to 11 degrees at bedtime -- and it was hard to get our desert dog, the one with no undercoat, but a real cute over-coat from L.L.Bean, to go outside to do the necessaries.  We all bundled up and took a few chilly walks to the top of the saddle, returning covered in snowflakes, and ready to warm up by the fire.  But we had one other “chore” to get done, one we’d been looking forward to...decking the halls.

Getting started with Frank Sinatra singing carols on the iHome

Last Christmas, for our first stay at the new cabin, we’d brought up a retro-style three-foot tall white Christmas tree with multi-color fairy lights and a tote full off decorations, some new, some old, and most from some fun scavenger hunts at Tucson thrift stores.  We’d loaded some favorite Christmas music on our iPod and played Frank Sinatra for me and John Denver and The Muppets for Bob...our respective traditional tree-trimming music from the days when we shared that job with our children.  With the tree up and decorated, the window sills festooned, and glittery snowflakes hanging throughout the cabin, we broke out some wine, and watched the snow in the fading light, the reflection of our tree hanging specter-like in the front window, merging with the darkening ponderosas outside.  

Finished

We ended the day continuing the Rummikub game we’ve been playing since May of 2006 (our first summer stay at the old trailer); at some point in the distant past I was ahead, but now I am hopelessly behind, but it’s fun and I get whining rights.  My husband is gently triumphant in his near constant victories.  We are nearing the bottom of the second side of the old steno-book page, a relic from Bob’s Dad’s court reporter days, and I wonder if it isn’t time to start anew.  Or, as Bob suggested, we could just get out Blokus and I could whip him consistently for a change.  At least I’m not throwing Uno cards across the table as I have been known to do, albeit with a smile on my face.

Ho, Ho, Home...

Learning

We’re a third of the way through our first summer sojourn in our new cabin in the Rockies.  Semi-permanent residence is a whole new ball game, and we have already begun thinking of this as the ‘shake-down’ summer.  There’s a lot that’s worked just as we expected, but there have been some surprises, and we have some learning to do.

Just about perfection...

Red-tail Hawk seen on a 'round-the-block hike

With most of the cabin furnishing and provisioning done (we’re heading into Colorado Springs again tomorrow to get a couple of bookcases and a small coffee table at an unfinished furniture place) we’re settling into more of what we feel will be the normal rhythm of life in this remote cabin in the Rocky Mountains.  As Harry, our neighbor across the lake and maker of carved bears, once said to me, “This is still your life up here, just in a different place,” and he’s right.  There are still chores, things to take care of and keep track of, and now two sets of household bills to pay.  We still have a social life to enjoy and friends and family to keep up with (and miss), no matter where we are.  There’s a LOT of togetherness, so far a good thing, and still forays into civilization for shopping, libraries, and eating out.  

Our life in Tucson is in many ways quite similar to here, despite it’s proximity to the conveniences of living near a city.  Our home is out in the Tucson Mountain foothills and we spend a lot of time outside hiking, tending our yard, or watching the abundant wildlife, just as we do here.  Mind you, in Tucson Costco is 10 minutes away and Sunflowers for rational quantities of fresh produce the same, so you can literally run out to do a biweekly shopping in less time than it takes me to drive to a store where I can buy a gallon of milk.  ‘Going to town’ here, something we do once a week, takes on the excitement you read about in Little House on the Prairie...it’s a big, carefully planned event.  If you forget to buy sugar, the hummers are going to be complaining all week (as they do the second they run low on sugar water, from about three inches off your nose).

Cabin Life Lesson #1 - Keep good lists of needs and wants for the weekly trip to town, and try not to make it resemble the Bataan Death March 

Best.  Ever.  Chocolate.  Cookies.

It’s interesting to go a week or more with what’s on hand, especially if you get a last minute call that you have incoming house guests.  I try to keep plenty of the staples -- milk, bread, and eggs around.  For those more perishable items such as fruit and veggies, I’ve come up with a few tricks.  Bags of romaine lettuce hearts keep well.  I have a jars of things like sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, olives, pickles, and pickled vegetable mixes around for when I can’t run out to get more fresh tomatoes.  Half and half, something I almost never have in Tucson, is a less perishable back-up for when the milk for coffee runs low, and as back-up to the back-up, I have a bag of powdered milk.  I make sure to have a few bags of frozen vegetables -- petite peas, corn, and French cut green beans in the freezer for when the fresh greens are gone.  I have stooped to dehydrated parsley, more for color than flavor in soups and stews.  I keep a good-sized jar of pesto (Costco’s is GREAT) in the fridge, not for pasta which we don’t eat much of, but for a wonderful herby base for making salad dressing (a big spoonful with a little olive oil, white wine vinegar or lemon juice, salt & pepper -- fab!), mixing with mayo for Italian sandwiches, tossed with rice or potatoes, as a pistou in soups, in scrambled eggs -- you get the idea --  is good for that fresh herb taste.  We eat the most perishable stuff, like strawberries, first...apples will keep.  I keep things on hand for bread baking, and corn bread is quick and delicious baked in a cast iron pan in the oven (which I can use all the time here, unlike Tucson).  I finally have my spice inventory up to make just about any kind of cookie we feel like (and with the hiking we’re doing, a couple of cookies a day seem to do no harm, just good.  Provisioning for a remote location is mostly common-sense, but we take it a bit more seriously here than we do in Tucson.

Cabin Life Lesson #2 - Provision wisely, be prepared to cook a LOT and well -- food matters

Cottontail taking shelter

It’s so obvious up here that we’ve moved into the habitat of the wildlife, not the other way around.  It’s almost like the physician’s motto, first do no harm.  While I was down at the ranch house making my bear post, the bear was at our cabin eating our niger thistle seeds, and probably getting ready to take on the regular seed and humming bird feeders while our dog cowered inside (as she should have).  When we saw the thistle seed feeder down, chewed up, and empty, we immediately scanned the area for the bear, realizing we may have interrupted it.  We didn’t see it, but we did hear it bellowing just over the rocks towards the lake.  The next day we got serious and suspended our feeders from pulleys high up in the trees around the cabin.  We can lower them for refilling, but a bear would (and could) have to climb for them, and this bear is looking for an easy meal.  If we have more trouble with the bear and bird feeders, we’ll consider taking them down all together, though we are very much enjoying the fantastic bird-watching from our cabin.

Cabin Life Lesson #3 - Do all you can to live in harmony with the wildlife

Sunset from the swing

After about six weeks we admitted to ourselves, and each other, that we were feeling a bit restless; maybe a little bit bored.  Personally, I feel doing without the easy diversions of streaming video and personalized radio stations, movie theaters and libraries a short drive away, constant access to the Internet, and shops loaded with things you don’t need is a good thing, especially on a part-time basis.  My husband, not so much.  We haven’t seen quite as much of friends and family as we’d expected, and do miss our Tucson life in several ways -- our fairly busy social life, our volunteer work (and those we work with) at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and Saguaro National Park, taking advantage of all the mod cons, and for my husband, recently retired, not work, but having more of a schedule.  This is definitely different, and mostly wonderful, but not without it’s challenges.  As with everything, no matter how great things are, they can become a little bit routine.  So we’ve decided to mix it up a bit, do more things, and make sure to do plenty of what’s so good here in the mountains.  First, remember how great it is to be here in the cool instead of in the 100+ degrees of a Tucson summer.  We’re reading more about the natural history of this area, to better understand and appreciate where we are (and how to be a good guest here).  We’re making sure we take a walk or hike every day, even if it’s just down the trail to the meadow, or more often our two mile ‘around the block’ hike, or to the overlook, or Cedar Mountain, or hiking the roads.  The hiking helps the cookies make sense.  Having overdosed on several books a week, we’re playing more games after dinner (I am getting walloped at Rummikub at the moment), doing the occasional jigsaw puzzles (I have a collection of some really good museum ones), and yes, listening to more NPR (but not too much) so we can bitch about congress and gird our loins for the campaign that is apparently (and appallingly) already underway.  We also have some non-provisioning day trips planned to experience more of this part of Colorado.  Oh, and more sunsets from the swing above our cabin.

Karen's Overlook, a favorite hiking destination with a view of Turkey Rock

Cabin Life Lesson #4 - Don’t get lazy, take anything for granted, or forget how wonderful your life is; be grateful and Be Where You Are Fully

More life lessons, cabin and otherwise, to come...no doubt.  In the meantime we’re off to play dominos with some friends at another cabin tonight and tomorrow we’ll head to town -- maybe I’ll get a piece of calico for a new apron or a shiny tin cup (reference may only be clear to lovers of Laura Ingalls Wilder).   

Feeling Kneady

All of us have experienced loss.  For long-time cooks, loss often takes the form of an old favorite recipe, mysteriously gone from the collection of index cards or the shoebox of favorites clipped from magazines.  In my life I have lost two that were old standards which I started baking in my 20s, coming up on 40 years ago.  One was for a truly spectacular lime chiffon pie with a crumb crust from Sunset  magazine; the other was for oatmeal bread which was part of a Christmas baking section from the Family Circle Encyclopedia of Cooking, each of the dozen-plus volumes collected week by week as a grocery store bonus.  Somewhere during the dozens of moves I’ve made in my life, some international, I parted with the encyclopedia set, but I swear I wrote that bread recipe down somewhere.  Alas, it seems good and lost.

The last time I lived (and baked) in the mountains it was in a funky cabin at around 6,000 feet in Descanso, outside of San Diego near Cuyamaca State Park.  I baked dozens of loaves of this bread in the old cabin stove, the kind that was raised a good foot and a half off the floor on metal legs.  There’s little better in life than good bread that has cooled as long as you can stand after taking it from the oven, spread with soft butter.  Staff of life and all that.  

We’ve been at our new cabin for a month now.  All the urgent tasks have been accomplished -- furnishing the loft, registering the old Arizona truck in Colorado, making curtains and hanging more artwork.  The essential guests have come and gone (for now).  The pattern of several hours of reading a day is established, the forest is being tended by my husband and his chainsaw, and the dog is on squirrel patrol near the bird feeders.  There’s time to relax, TRULY relax, and my mind seems to be looping back to cherished experiences that I can try to recreate for us...mostly involving food.  

We’re reminiscing on childhood favorites -- my husband’s all time, hands down, number one meal his mom made is boiled hotdogs, fried potatoes, and Van de Kamps (accept no substitute!) pork and beans.  Ohhhkaaaayyyyy.   My mind turns to my Grandma’s peach cobbler (definitely on the menu for this summer), creamy mashed potatoes (or crack potatoes as I call them, and we had them over the weekend...yum!), and even those split hotdogs stuffed with cheese (American no doubt) and wrapped in refrigerated crescent rolls my mom used to make, so good right out of the oven.  

We were running low on bread and I wasn’t up for another trip to town, so today I tried to replicate the oatmeal bread of the lost recipe.  I remembered that you poured boiling water over the oats in the bread bowl to soften them, adding a knob of butter and either honey or molasses and a little salt, leaving it for half an hour or so to meld and cool off a bit.  Once that time was nearly up I added two packets of dried yeast to some warm water, spiking it with a sprinkling of sugar to give the yeast something to eat, and walked away for a few more minutes, fearing that watched yeast would not swell and foam.  Trick worked, and I added the yeasty liquid to the softened oats and other goodies.

Now for the part requiring some muscle.  I added a cup of “high altitude” flour and stirred.  Another cup and stirred...it was harder.  The third cup of flour yielded a stiff dough and after another little sprinkling of flour I abandoned the spoon for my hands.  After working the dough into a ball I turned it out onto the floured countertop and started one of my favorite parts of bread baking -- kneading.

Kneading dough is one of the best cooking experiences you can have.  Let’s face it -- food is a sensualist’s dream.  You look at it, the beauty of the form and color.  You smell it, the savory smell of a roast in the oven or the cinnamon scent of snickerdoodle cookies.  You hear it, the sizzle of bacon in a cast iron skillet.     You taste it, salty, sweet, bitter, sour.  And you feel it, the mouth-feel when you eat it, and with your hands when you prepare it.  And bread making is very hands on.

When first turned out of the bowl, the dough is still a bit crumbly with bits of unincorporated flour clinging to the lumpy surface.  Kneading works in the last of the flour and as you work the dough -- push away, rotate a quarter turn, fold toward you, repeat -- the glutens in the dough begin to form and turn the dough elastic and smooth.  When the dough no longer sticks to your hands and is as smooth and soft as a baby’s backside, you’re done.  Forming the dough into a ball by turning it in on itself, place it top side down in the washed and buttered bread bowl and turn it over.  Cover the bowl with a clean cloth and place it in a warm draft-free place for a couple of hours.  Punch down, divide, form into loaves and place in bread pans.  Bake until the loaves are browned and sound hollow when thumped.  Turn out onto a cooling rack.  Brush with soft butter.  And wait for it to cool; probably the hardest part of baking bread.

Deb’s Lost Oatmeal Bread

1 cup dry oatmeal (I use Coach’s Oats)

1/4 powdered milk

1/2 cup wheat germ

1/4 cup honey or molasses

generous teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons butter

1 3/4 cup boiling water  

Combine above ingredients in large bowl, stir, leave for half an hour.

two envelopes dried yeast

1/4 cup warm water (105 - 115 degrees)

1/2 teaspoon sugar

Combine above ingredients, stir, and leave to rise and foam for 5 minutes or so -- then add to bread bowl with  lukewarm oatmeal mixture.

Mix in about three cups of flour, one at a time, until stiff dough forms.  Turn out onto floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic and no longer sticky.

Turn in buttered bowl, cover, and leave in a warm place until doubled in size.  Punch down, divide, shape into loaves by turning in on itself, place in bread pans, and let rise halfway in pans.  Bake at 375 degrees for about 45 minutes (start checking at 35) until bread is brown and sounds hollow to thumping.  Turn onto cooling rack and brush with soft butter.  Cool.  Enjoy!

The Importance of Homemade Cookies at the Cabin

Peanut butter cookies crisscrossed with Grandma's fork

I haven’t made many cookies since my husband’s young grandsons left Tucson three years ago for Denver, so the obvious thing to do when they came for a first visit to the cabin last week was to get out the cookies sheets and bake some up.  I made a huge batch of oatmeal chocolate chip, and they were wonderful, if I do say so myself.  Almost like lace cookies, crisp and buttery.  

I find life at the cabin inspires old-fashioned cooking.  Like cookies.  People stop by and it’s nice to have some small treat to offer them.  We don’t snack up here for some reason -- maybe because we’re usually outside and away from the kitchen -- but we do enjoy our three square meals a day.  Breakfast comes when we’re done sitting around in the morning and before heading outside to do whatever strikes our fancy, be it hammocking or lumber-jacking.  When we hear the lunch gong over at the summer camp it’s Pavlovian...if we hadn’t been thinking of lunch before, we do then.  Dinner comes when we’re done with our late day hike or rouse ourselves from our books, and with sunset coming after 8 PM, we sometimes end up eating later than we intended.

Lunch is almost always simple fare, sandwiches and pickles and fruit on a cutting board eaten out of hand while sitting in the Adirondack chairs on our shady front porch overlooking the valley.  The binoculars usually make the trip out too as we invariable do some bird watching in between bites.

Eating Grandma's homemade cookies

After we’ve eaten but before we’re ready to rejoin our other activities, we like to draw out this time by having a little something sweet -- a homemade cookie.  Here on our mountainside where every little jaunt or wander is an exercise in the vertical, we can afford a cookie or two, especially if they’re really worth it.

Today I baked peanut butter cookies.  A favorite from childhood, I love their subtle sweetness and faint nuttiness.  Not the insipid paleness of a sugar cookie, their rich golden color is highlighted by the tire-tread markings of the crossed impressions of fork tines.  I chose the fork carefully -- our silverware drawer here is a crazy collection of old partial sets of cutlery-past -- and ended up with an old fork of my Grandmother’s, the silverplate wearing thin in places.  The tines are long and evenly spaced, perfect for flattening the cookies with the traditional cross-hatched pattern.

As I flattened the first sheet of cookie dough balls, careful to exert just the right amount of pressure to each so that all of the cookies would bake evenly, dipping the fork in flour if it threatened to pull away some dough, I remembered my Grandmother letting me do that task under her watchful, but trusting, eye.  It felt like an important job then, the last touch before baking.  The cookies would bear the mark of she who wielded the fork, and since we eat with our eyes before we eat with our mouths, it mattered.  Then and now.  

Later in the summer I’ll revisit some of the other recipes my Grandmother made for those she loved (me most of all, believe me...I know) -- fresh peach cobbler, lemon meringue pie, chocolate drop cookies joined bottom to bottom with vanilla frosting.  My Grandma lived with us for the first decade of my life, and it is she who taught me about unconditional love, something I hope I managed to teach my own daughter.  

Bake yourself a batch of these old favorites, and ask someone you love unconditionally to make the patterns with the perfect old fork.

Unconditional Love Peanut Butter Cookies

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar (packed)

1 egg

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 1/4 cup flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

Cream the butter, peanut butter, sugar, brown sugar, egg, and vanilla.  Mix dry ingredients, and add, mixing well.  Make one inch balls (or use a small lever-release cookie scoop), place on ungreased cookie sheet.  Press twice with fork tines in cross pattern.  Bake at 375 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes.  Cool on baking rack.