And thank you Mom for all the hard work! 52: Life, the Universe, and Everything, and a perfect 10 on top. This is going to be a great year!

First: there’s a local couple, Tuck and Patti–our family sat under the trees listening to them giving a free concert in front of City Hall once back when our kids were younger, their way, they said, of giving thanks to the community that had believed in them before they were successful.

There is nobody who plays guitar like Tuck. And Patti’s voice!

Being a dedicated Birkenstock wearer, I always got a kick out of her High Heeled Shoes blues song. And this, courtesy of my husband, is what made me think of it. Comfy looking, huh? Something to heel all that ails a body.

The other thing today:

I went to Purlescence to knit among friends, having missed them last night and being in terrible withdrawal. Not to mention, I couldn’t wait to make a delivery. Richard had helped put me up to it. (“I think they’re down that aisle, dear.” –Thanks!)

I walked in the door and handed a certain someone a wrapped present (oh good, she IS here).

She did this furtive quick glance to the sides, because clearly I was just handing one present only and only to her. She whispered, “Should I open it?”

“Yes, sure, go ahead.” (Thinking, don’t you dare not, I’ve been in too giddy an anticipation for you not to.)

The tag read: Because sometimes, that’s just the way the cooking crumbles.

Huh?  She held it down out of sight of the others, carefully working at the paper,  trying to peer through the growing crack at the seam as she gently tugged, the wrapping finally coming off for her to see–and she screamed! Threw her chair back, leaping up, just screaming with laughter, holding it up and showing it to the others and exclaiming, “This is the. BEST. EVER!!!”

Last week, she’d told us all of going out to dinner with her husband and being given a dish with so much more food than she could eat and that was just totally inundated with bacon. Ooh, bacon! And there was so much!  She took the leftovers home.

She woke up in the morning looking forward to that bacon (you know? I never did hear what the rest of the dish was. I don’t think it mattered.) She got up in just so much anticipation of walking into that kitchen downstairs for the rest of it, but her husband, who had had to leave for work earlier than her, had eaten it.

All of it.  Gone.

She told us this last week with an I-know-this-is-silly look and tone of, this was almost grounds… (for pouting, yeah, that’s it. Pouting!)

The wrapping paper fell away.  And she saw: a giant Costco package of cooked crumbled bacon.

I told her as I was walking out the shop door later and she reached to give me another hug before I left, “Best. Response. EVER!!”

Not a teenager to be found anywhere in the house these days. Who am I supposed to embarrass now? I’ve been aged out of the job.

I was thinking that tonight at Costco as I found myself turning down an aisle full of pasta of all kinds. I wanted to break out into song and dance, maybe holding my cane up by either end, waving my arms in time to the music: “Udon oh! what it’s like…”

Cheerful embarrassings create the memories the kids tell to tease their parents with in their old ages.

I think my kids have a good stash socked away by now, ready for needling.

Let’s see, can’t find ground pecans, we’ll try this almond meal at Trader Joe’s; long as we’re here, let’s use their vanilla butter wafers to pulverize with it, a little fresh almond paste from Milk Pail, got the grade B maple syrup, and what? No organic oranges? Skip that then.

(I did a mashup between the kringle and the strudel.)

Okay, no way am I going to roll out the butter/flour layers a bajillion times. Just make a sweet roll recipe, that’ll do.

So I did that and rolled it pie-crust thin on parchment paper twice, put the filling on one layer, topped it with the second layer, pinched the edges tight, and got–

–dang. Much glorified, but.  A giant Poptart!

I think it’s time to go knit.

When you live in Silicon Valley and Christmas is coming and you’re surrounded by geeks, even I the shawl-knitting house elf think this is just really really cool.  I mentioned it to my husband and he said that in Europe they sell Android watches already that link to your phone so you can read your incoming text messages, etc etc, on your wrist. Like this will do for Apple’s product that I always thought was too hopelessly small not to lose. Well then.

Dick Tracy, your future called and left you a text saying it has arrived at the station. Where it’s okay to let some little old lady take your seat on the subway while you stand and hold onto the overhead strap–so you can secretly listen to your music and messages with your arm up near your ears.

(I don’t even own a Nano and neither does the husband, but if they ever start making one that you can link to a knitting needle to create a gorgeous high-whorl spindle on demand with a holding case for the fiber to be compressed into the watch, then I want the first one.)

I’m not knitting.

I have a rheumatologist who, the last time my lupus attacked my fingers, exclaimed, “But you NEED your knitting! We have to *do* something!”

And with that, he finally got me to try plaquenil, an antimalarial drug that, like aspirin, nobody reacts to, and as long as you get your eyes checked regularly for retina damage, everybody can take it.

And you know how well aspirin and I get along. (A thank you forever to my ENT and to heaven above for the rare chance to thank Rachel Remen in person as well; story in that first link.)

I got the most massive case of upper-body hives and we crossed another med category off my list.

I knitted yesterday anyway when I had a half hour wait at the pharmacy and then just couldn’t do it again. Hopefully this will all be a very brief interruption, but I’m afraid to push it for now.  I’m realizing I was getting casual about sun exposure: add it all up and I might have spent ten minutes outside in the sunlight yesterday, way beyond my safe point, rationalizing about the low UV levels this time of year. The cage does get old. And there’s so much that’s so pretty outside in a California winter.

Well, hey, there are other ways to be creative, and desserts have been calling me. Here’s one:

First, turn off your hearing aids, this is going to be loud. Ready?  Okay.  Frozen strawberries, a little sugar to taste, add some cream in the food processor.  Whirr for about a century, stopping every now and then to break up the strawberries that are absorbing just a bit of heat from the friction of the blade, (or maybe I just have to do that because my Cuisinart is very old), whirr some more till it’s smooth, serve immediately and there you go.

I used to use egg whites to make it a non-fat strawberry mousse, but after my daughter drove her friend Natalie to the hospital for salmonella poisoning during the egg scare last summer (no no she didn’t eat here), I’ve stopped doing that.

I handed my sweetie his.

“This is better than usual!”

Yes, well. Cream does that for it. It’s the side effects you have to be careful of.

Here’s hoping a good night’s sleep will leave me embarrassed for saying anything too soon and that my hands will be fine in the morning. I’m hoping.

A conversation with Sandra led to my going and looking…

Years ago I had two signature dishes: the chocolate torte, in its early stages (can you believe Hershey’s called for water in the cake when you could add manufacturing cream?), and maple pecan orange strudel, which I adapted from a recipe I scribbled down and took home after seeing it in a Redbook magazine circa 1990 while waiting for one of my kids to be seen by the pediatrician. (I write notes in my cookbooks to journal our food a little.) Thank heavens I forgot my knitting that day.

This is seriously good stuff. It’s also a serious amount of time and effort and calories and some of the ingredients are hard to find.  Those Danish butter cookies in the tins you see everywhere this time of year? This needs them to be without the coconut added in that so many have now for the preservative effect. Walker shortbread might work better; I haven’t checked their ingredients list lately, but it was coconut-free last time I did. I’ve tried just making my own and they weren’t quite as crunchy.

And the oranges? You really do want organic. I’ve tried, and the regular ones have a bitter aftertaste in the gratings that the organic ones just don’t. I have neighbors with trees (thank you Al J.), which helps a lot. Okay, here goes:

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Maple Pecan Orange Strudel by Alison Hyde

Mix:

1 1/2 c finely ground pecans (a good source is here.)

1 c of finely crushed butter shortbread cookies, about 15 of the little Danish ones

1/4 c sugar

1/4 c maple syrup (don’t even THINK about substituting the fake stuff, you want knock-their-socks-off exquisiteness, that’s the whole point)

1 tbl finely grated orange peel, fresh and organic

1 tsp cinnamon

Mix these together and then take about a half pound of phyllo dough, 8-10 leaves. Watch the ingredients when you buy it: some are all butter, but some in the freezer case at the grocer’s are not. Lay them out with a barely damp but not wet towel over them. Take out one at a time, re-covering the others quickly, and lay out on a cookie sheet with slightly raised sides, ie a jellyroll pan, and brush with melted butter. Repeat till all are layered together; fill with mixture, leaving 2″ at the sides. Roll up like cinnamon roll dough, bake at 350 for 30 min.

While it’s baking, have 1 c sugar and 1 c water in a 1 qt pan, bring to boil and till the sugar is dissolved. Pour half of this over the strudel when you take it out of the oven; let it cool. Meantime, let the rest of the syrup boil another 6-8 minutes till it’s a deep amber. Shake the pot gently if needed to keep one side from burning before the other side turns color, but don’t stir.  Whip in (I have 1/4 c crossed out and 1/2 cup written in instead) of heavy cream with a wire whisk, pouring it in slowly so it doesn’t explode at you (watch your hands–the steam burst is hot!) to make a caramel sauce to serve it with. This may take vigorous work to get the suddenly solid sugar to melt into the cream. If you end up with a few solid leftover lumps, ignore them. Pour the sauce into a mini-pitcher without scraping the sides of the pan, which might dislodge crunchy sugar crystals you don’t want.

Run a finger around the pot later when no one’s looking to make sure it tastes just so. The cream will have cooled it down.

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One note on maple syrup: traditionally, where it was produced, it was the poor man’s sugar and the grading was determined by how close it came to being substitutable. So if you can find it, grade B has a more pronounced maple flavor than the usual Grade A. I explained that once to a Trader Joe’s manager, and a few months later they started carrying Grade B! Cool.

Looking at Sunnyland Farms’ site to post that link, I see they’re now selling pecan oil. Hey. Michelle could eat that. Richard is hoping for a homemade cinnamon pecan kringle… HEY!

To top off our weekend with our son: the phone rang last night.

John’s apartment lease is up at the end of this month (like, now) and he did not want to sign for another year’s stint there. He was going to go Monday to sign the papers at a new place, wincing at the rent.

That phone call was an offer from a relative we know and love well, who knew none of that, who found himself suddenly needing a house sitter. Like, now.  Wondering if he might be interested in a room downstairs?  Free rent if he would bring in the mail and give them a call if anything happened like that time the neighbor’s tree fell on the house? Their leftovers fair game when they left town and his fair game any time they might arrive late at night?

I had no idea what the conversation was but I was watching his eyes go big. The generosity of the offer! And the *timing*!

When he gets back here for Christmas I think I need to send him back with a chocolate torte, ready for them to find in their freezer as leftovers. Wow. Thank you!

(Singing…)

You know those days when you do so many things so outside your normal routine that it feels like you’ve lived a week in the space of a waking?

One of those was that John and I, on a lark, drove up to Burlingame today. He drove; I wound a ball of Malabrigo Rios he’d picked out.

Okay, back up a little.

When I was ten and my family was doing that long drive circling the entire country with a little of Mexico (one afternoon) and Canada (several weeks) thrown in, Maryland to California and around and back that summer, one of the things we apparently did (I don’t remember it) was that we stopped in a Danish bakery in Racine, Wisconsin. (Mom and Dad, correct me if it goes further back than that.) Kringle? What’s that?  …OH!

The end result is that my folks have ordered kringle from that bakery every Christmas for four decades, through a change in generation and ownership quite awhile ago. The bakery does them in a racetrack oval, rather than the traditional pretzel-ish shape, and the things cover an entire cookie sheet: flaky dough rolled in butter to almost phyllo layers, filled with cooked-down fresh fruit or cinnamon pecan. It takes them three days to make them, and for many years you had to order by Halloween for the holiday season or you were plain out of luck.

We carried on the tradition here too about every other year or so, and a few years ago when we did, something was…different.  I checked the ingredients. When did they start cutting corners and putting in hydrogenated fat for part of the butter?

I googled for other bakers; Racine has become famous for kringles over the years.

I asked about the hydrogenated fat issue.

I struck out.

Kringles are a splurge in money and calories, and if they weren’t going to do it right, there was no point. Besides, Michelle can’t eat them anymore anyway.

But they are our tradition.  And Michelle’s not going to be home yet at my birthday.  So with rationalizations in hand, this year I went looking again.  One bakery in Illinois looked promising. One in Solvang quite surprised me–my friend John from Stitches and his wife own the Village Spinning and Weaving shop in Solvang in, judging by the pictures and the addresses, the same building! Small world.

And I found Copenhagen Bakery up in Burlingame, certainly within reach. Hey. Why not try it out?

And so John and I braved the rain and set out on an adventure. We did call ahead to make sure there would actually be one there.

They make the traditional pretzel shape, the traditional almond-paste filling. Only. (At least that they call by that name.)  I guess our fruit-filled oval ones were like chow mein in San Francisco: changed/reinvented by immigrants after they landed in the States. I explained to the woman at Copenhagen why we were experimenting and trying out their kringle and I asked if they put any hydrogenated fats in it?

She was horrified. No!

This evening, I finally closed the box to keep the three of us from finishing off the entire pastry in one day.

As for the yarn? John had said he needed me to go buy him a hat, and I was surprised and amused and countered that we had a ton of hats right here. Some Assembly Required. (An amused, *MOM*.) And so he chose the Azules colorway.

He didn’t really want me to post his picture with the hat in progress stuck on his head for measuring, four needle ends waving around his face.

But it is done. He has his hat. And we have a kringle source.

John’s home, John’s home! He even put up with doing a little birdwatching with me while I tried to explain why the Bewick’s wren flipping itself around by the tail was so cute.

The other bird watching: he and I got up this morning and decided to get that turkey going together. (My husband usually wrestles the yearly bowling ball, but we beat him to it and let him sleep in.)  I was going to roast it in a turkey bag, in part because it was only halfway thawed and that would help speed it up and even the cooking out, I thought. So, John held the flimsy thing ready for me–and twenty pounds of bird slipped straight through it to the floor.

So now we know why they put two bags in a box: one for the Julia Child moment, one for doing it right. I think we better move to over the pan, honey.

I later read some of the more infamous Butterball hotline questions: if I use a chainsaw to carve the bird, will the oil make it taste bad?

Or the college kid who used a cookie sheet under his because that’s all he had and it splattered and sparked and caught on fire in his oven, so he called the hotline.

The person at Butterball who answered that one was his own mother.  I bet they’ll be telling that one at their Thanksgiving dinners forever after!

We skipped the chainsaws and the fires and enjoyed a lovely time in a warm house on a cold day with good food and good family, feeling how keenly blessed we three were to have the time together. One-on-one time with an adult child is a rare thing.

And then for the first time in days I actually sat down, put my feet up, and knitted!

Humming James Taylor’s song that inspired the title. “Took a fall from a windy height, only knew how to hold on tight.”

The first bird I saw this morning when I came out into the family room was that vividly black and white-striped woodpecker, enjoying her breakfast. Good to have things back to normal.

My neighbors have a clothesline with a large, sturdy wooden post to either end, about half of the thing in view of my back window. Today I saw a black squirrel who apparently expected a telephone wire and tried to run down the rope. Twang! It flipped him, he grabbed for it, found himself suddenly clinging upside down while still trying to run the length; that didn’t work so well, so he scrambled to get back up to the top of it. Twang!  He edged away out of my sight, repeatedly being bounced, again and again.

Squirrel trampolines. Who knew.

A few minutes later, a black squirrel safely on the fenceline, (same one?) I looked up again and there, sitting on that post near him and in plain view was the big adult Cooper’s hawk with her blue upper head, sitting in the chilly sunshine.  Casually turning her head every now and then to watch some small bird and then another pass by overhead.  Checking out the entrees.  The squirrel seemed oblivious; she ignored him.

And lifted a big yellow foot and scratched herself. Ah, lovely day today, should make for a good flight.

Meantime I was picking up the phone and calling my neighbor. She ran across her house phone in hand to see the hawk from right there, and together we birdwatched across the telephone wire.

At last it stretched those huge wings wide and flapped off in no particular hurry across my yard. Nope–my feeder was finch-free on the far side too just then. Ah well then.

My neighbor told me about having recently watched a bird, she didn’t know what kind, swooping through snapping up the small cloud of termites that swarm here at the start of every rainy season, like catching popcorn as it bursts free of the popper. It was clearly enjoying the rare treat. Hey, little one: have seconds! Thirds! Bring your whole family, make it a feast!

It’s going to be cold enough tonight and tomorrow night that it could actually snow. The rain doesn’t come till the day after, so it looks like the 1964 date for the last snowman-able amount will hold.  But it’s chilly, the little birds are eating up a storm at the feeders, and the big ones await their turn at them. All is in balance.

And we have another flight we’re watching for. John is almost home! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

“So,” Phyllis, our Sunday School teacher today, said to my husband re his response to her question about humility, “you’re saying we should say” (quoting the Lord’s prayer)  “‘Thy will be done’?”

“By us,” I added.

She stopped and appraised that thought a moment.  “Thy will be done by us?”

Oh, if only.  If only always.  Is there anything that requires greater humility and love than that?

We can’t know, only God knows from moment to moment, how we could use our time and talents for the best, right here right now and in working towards some moment in the future we cannot really know.  We try to do the right thing; we try to see ourselves honestly, our faults and our warps, pray that our intentions might be as pure as we want to see them as, and offer our hearts to Him and our fellow man:

Here I am. There’s only one of me, but I can do some things, at least.  Point me in the right direction–and please, loudly enough that I might stand a chance of hearing it above the noise.

Rain is falling, mellow slow-mo California style, a child’s connect-the-dots plaything, nothing whatever like the great raging storms I grew up with in Maryland.  And then: rare-here lightning and thunder just struck. Reports from friends just south are of a simultaneous thunderlightning *BOOM!*

Cooool.

Meantime, Friday, my daughter-in-law heard that what she had spent these last three years working hard towards, she had actually accomplished: she has now passed the California bar. Go Kim!

(Silly timestamp. Wrong time zone.)

You know you live in Silicon Valley when, instead of knitting after Knit Night, you help solder some electronics to help the husband create himself a toy when a funky angle needs a third hand. It’s the equivalent of his holding the hank of yarn while you wind. (That’s his ham radio in the pocket: he’s a Red Cross volunteer.)

For those looking for a new copy of “Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls,” Purlescence now has some at the cover price. I haven’t signed them yet, but I certainly could be talked into going back into my favorite yarn shop.

And that red or blue question? Blue.  Totally the blue.

I happened to mention to my husband the other day that while I was down in San Diego last weekend, our son was teasing his mother-in-law.

Now, by that I took for granted that he knew I meant a good-natured teasing, and he did; any other type is simply not in any of us.

And my husband’s response? He took it as a sign of closeness between them, answering me simply, “You don’t tease people you’re afraid of or that you’re not comfortable around.”

I’d never thought of it quite in those words, but yes, exactly!

p.s. With thanks to the crochet-y Suburban Correspondent for the heads-up, go here if you want to see a car that is Smart-ly at-tire-d.