I can’t vouch for these, but the picture looks good and with that much sugar and butter you can’t go too wrong. Here you go: make your own Twinkies. (For those who haven’t heard, the market share of the Hostess ones had been going down for years and at the workers’ strike the company declared it the end.)

And then there was this article, while I was looking for the Newsweek one I read a few years ago. Ingredients mined in Idaho. Fourteen of 20 top industrial chemicals. Yum. Note the January date as it says that Hostess had just filed for bankruptcy.

And now I need to go cast off that shawl. (Edited to add: done!)

I bought a rotisserie chicken last Saturday, kept it in the coldest part of the fridge, and today plunked what was left of it in a pot and boiled it down.  Chicken soup. (Michelle was home sick too.) Actually, Richard would have been happy to do it for me; he worked from home in case we needed anything but I had this decisive toddler moment as I opened the fridge door of, me dooz it.

I kept thinking if I just go knit something, too, I’d be energized for sure, but I haven’t quite made it there yet. Eh.  It’ll come. The Crohn’s early-warning flare that hit with this flu seems almost over, and for that I am very very grateful. Pass the soup. And thank you, everybody.

One thing my daughter has not been able to have for eight years, since she developed her allergy to dairy (after having mono–who knows), has been the simple pleasure of a pizza with cheese on it.

A new spot popped up near the university, Patxi’s. Vegan crusts, two types of vegan cheese if you so desire, all meats naturally cured.

I would never have heard of the place, but someone told Michelle about it and she hoped we could try it? They even had a chart of what allergens are in which of their foods. Now there’s a place that can capture a big market segment right there. Being able to go out to eat safely is a rare thing around here, and we were hoping the place would earn the loyalty we so hoped to be able to give it. This is after a place she went to last week listened to her concerns, assured her all would be well, and then handed her a dish that, it turned out, had melted cheese hiding on the inside.

It is not fun having your throat swell.

Daiya? What’s Daiya?

And so, at long last, tonight we all had pepperoni, sausage, and *cheese pizza. It looked like mozzarella, it had the mouthfeel of it, it even tasted like it in the presence of the best pepperoni I have ever had. (Take *that,* nitrates!) And as we finished our small splurge of a dinner, Michelle was just overwhelmed suddenly at how wonderful it was to be able to–wow. She could have real pizza again in her life!

Sometimes, the little things are the big things.

——–

*Cut and pasted: Daiya Vegan Mozzarella Ingredients: Filtered water, tapioca and/or arrowroot flours, non-GMO expeller pressed canola and/or non-GMO expeller pressed safflower oil, coconut oil, pea protein, salt, vegan natural flavors, inactive yeast, vegetable glycerin, xantham gum, citric acid (for flavor) titanium dioxide (a naturally occurring mineral).

Random fact of the day: our house, like most around here, is a single-story built on a concrete slab; we’re close enough to the Bay that our water table is far too high for any kind of basement or wood subfloor.

I have my chocolate hazelnut torte recipe, and with last week’s prediabetes diagnosis (oh didn’t I mention that. At 111 pounds!) I’ve been trying to learn to avoid sugar, but Michelle’s been dying to have me make her favorite torte version from my Cocolat cookbook. She’d baked it while at grad school but I’d never tried it–by the time I found out about it, I already had the recipe I wanted.  Cocolat’s uses about half the hazelnuts mine does–not a feature, I thought, and now I would need the extra nuts to buffer it all the more, if anything.

But there was my child I could so easily make happy.

She walked in the door tonight and her face lit up as she figured out what was in the oven. When we sampled it after dinner, it had come out, as she put it, as “Less rock! More cake!”

I casually mentioned: “You know how I’m really good at dropping things but really really good at catching them between my leg and the cabinet on the way down so they don’t break?” (All that Pyrex and Corningware around here over that hard floor, not to mention my Mel and Kris stoneware.)

“Yes”… (wondering where this was going.)

“Doesn’t work so well with an egg.”

Left the house at 2:00 to take a friend to the airport: his grandmother had just died of Alzheimer’s and he was taking one day off from the intense world of medical training to fly out for the funeral.

When someone needs a ride for that, you take them.

But I asked him beforehand if we could leave just a few minutes earlier? Maybe ten? I had a doctor’s appointment to go to.

Sure, no problem!

As we went down the road, he talked about the strangeness of grief mixed with relief and the loss that had happened years before–and loss again, but with a…but…. Now at last she’s with his Grandpa again.

And then. I only got a brief glance because I was the one at the wheel–but at the place where I have seen one before, a peregrine falcon suddenly burst past the trees next to the road and zoomed across in front of us, both of us going, WOW!, low enough down that for a split second I worried maybe a semi might… But it was safe. In the blink, I would have guessed it a female for the shape of the body and likely an adult or near-adult. So close! Wow!

And I wondered silently, Ty, you have no idea, but a raptor always shows up when I need one, especially peregrines and my Cooper’s hawk. Maybe you needed one too.

There was some slowdown going on in San Jose but I got out of the backup and away to the gate about the time expected–but coming back around onto the freeway, traffic where I had just been was one solid mass of cars clear back to the next city. Had we left five minutes later, I would have been utterly hosed.

I was exactly on time for my doctor. We had a fair bit to discuss, and she’s a good one: she takes the time.

I raced home (it was 5:00 by now) and started peeling apples. Richard called; I dropped everything and went to get him since I had his car. Coming out of the neighborhood, a large red-tailed hawk soared right above. I have never seen one here before!

More backup. They’ve been digging up the road where pipeline 132, the infamous San Bruno Fire pipeline, goes down the neighborhood. Came home. Chopped apples. An old quick New Hampshire autumn dinner is that you cook sausage crumbles with diced preferably Granny Smith apples (getting out absolutely as much grease as you can) and then when it’s all done, pour just a little maple syrup on it in the serving dish, grade B for the more intense flavor if you can find it. Trader Joe’s here has it.

Thirty-seven minutes after we walked in the door together, the table was cleared and set, three different dishes were cooked from scratch, and our dinner guests arrived. We did it.

I could never have pulled half of that off in the bad old days. Wow life. Look at me now!

Five large juicy-ripe, perfect nectarines, cuisinarted, a pair of pints of raspberries left whole, the juice of half a Meyer lemon from my tree, a cup and a half of sugar, boiled and stirred five or six minutes.

Michelle was in and out all day with an old high-school buddy of hers and I had this fresh fruit needing to be put to good use. It came out sweet enough and it set enough to call it jam; next time I would use half the sugar and half the cooking time to make a sauce to keep in the freezer, to be doled out carefully.

The first jar of jam went to her friend.

Who went along with Richard and Michelle to Costco to buy us more nectarines and raspberries for the next batch. I want to do more of that combination!

Random thought of the day: smoked salmon on a crisp cracker, it occurred to me as I nibbled, is fish bacon.

I have figured out how I want the next project to look–I’ve just never done it before. Wish me luck, and silk is froggable should I need to start over.

And with thanks to Lene for the heads up:

Someone who tried something she’d never done before, on a grand scale. Sonia Soberats lost both her children to cancer in a short time while losing her sight to glaucoma. As Norman Cousins once wrote in great wisdom, the only way to cope with a major, life-upending illness is to do something creative.

She went completely blind–and then she took up photography. Amazing work. She dances with the light that she and only she can only picture.

Lemon juice with pears sounded kinda boring, and I wasn’t inspired by it enough to brave the thorns on the lemon tree in the dark. My mom once created a pear-lime pie that won a recipe contest, but there were no limes around. (Gotta get me a tree for that…)

But the idea of sour to balance the intense sweetness of the ripe Bartletts that needed to be used up got me thinking. Yes we did still have cranberries in the freezer. I was curious. And so:

——————

Pear Cranberry Pecan Crisp

2 c quick-cooking oats

~2/3 c brown sugar or to taste

most of a stick of (butter would be better, but for the dairy allergy in the household, I used) Earth Balance, melted

Shakes of cinnamon to taste

about 1/2 c pecan pieces

4 large ripe Bartlett pears, sliced up

About a half cup cranberries. Note that mine were still frozen. I think next time I would mix the cranberries and brown sugar separately before throwing it all together.

Bake in a buttered or cooking-sprayed 13×9 pan at 350 for about 35 min, maybe 40, depending on oven and pan: I waited till the cranberries were split open and cooked to early-mushy-looking; the edges of the pan should be good and bubbling.

——————–

I thought I was making breakfast last night when I did this but there was only a very little left by the time we three went to bed. It is safe to say we were very pleased with how it came out.

And on the wildlife front? I set out some suet crumbles this afternoon for the juncos and towhees that don’t care for the safflower in the feeders. A birdy-looking version of crisp, I found myself musing.

A jay showed up to steal the last big clump.

I ignored it. It had probably already gotten the rest of it when I wasn’t looking anyway. Go ahead, stare at me, I know the hawk has recently gotten a taste for jay meat–you’re letting down your guard, you know, you’ve got your face to the window.

Hey! You’re no fun! You’re supposed to shoo me away! It stared, just in front of the food but not touching it, waiting the signal.

All it got was a smile out of me. No, really, I wasn’t trying to feed it to the hawk, I was just curious how long it would take for it to give up and just grab it and go.

Now, one birding site I recently read claimed that scrub jays have a bigger brain ratio and are smarter than squirrels: they not only hide food for the winter, they remember forever where every single morsel went (which is why the squirrels watch the jays. A little thievery between friends.) And so, like the squirrels, you can never set out enough to make the jays be satisfied, despite the fact that in our climate there’s abundant food year-round. Hoarding is in their biology.

I knew it wasn’t hungry. Eh, what’s a little suet between friends. Go ahead. I went back to what I was doing.

It kept waiting for me like a little puppy pleading with me to play the game. Oh, finally, okay, and I waved my arms to give it the good scarecrow try. And at that, it at last scooped up that beckoning beakful, just to let me know it was still the one in charge around here, and flew off satisfied at last.

Glad to oblige.

The lace hat I was already working on yesterday when Representative Cleaver was speaking is finished. The cabled hat that I dropped two stitches at the needle switch awhile ago is now finally ripped way back and restarted: he’s getting a cabled hat and it’s back to halfway done so far.

Had quite a few laughs at the typos in the closed captions during tonight’s convention. John Kerry, it claimed, said: “We do batter where we must, peace where we can.”

That was even better than the spoken “a man and a woman” scrolling across the screen as “a minimum bomb.”  Let’s all go have that proverbial Army-fundraiser bake sale! (As the cold-war saying goes, it’ll be a great day when the schools get all the funding they need and the Army has to hold a bake sale.) Batter up! Bring on their just desserts! Robert Fulghum once wrote about how great it would be if we could stop wars by dropping from the planes colored paper and crayons, a bit of childhood delight revisited to make friends with the enemy below. I guess he’s saying we could let people have the means to draw down the fighting.

Add in some carrot pecan cake and some chocolate chip cookies, too, and surely you can’t go wrong with that.

(p.s. And maybe you’ve already seen this, but how many handknit lace fences are there out there? With thanks to Betsy Bowman for the heads-up.)

Here’s my version of chocolate hazelnut torte, and I would show you a picture if only my blog and camera were playing nicely together today. If you loved fingerpainting as a kid, this is for you.

9″ springform pan (thank you Don and Cliff!), the bottom covered with parchment paper and then the bottom buttered or with a no-stick baking spray on it. Oven at 325.

Ingredients:

10 oz really good bittersweet chocolate. This is 22 squares from a Trader Joe’s Pound Plus bar.

6 eggs, separated

1/2 lb toasted hazelnuts*

1/4 lb toasted hazelnuts*

1/2 c sugar

2 tbl sugar

1 c powdered sugar (Whole Foods carries one without cornstarch for the corn-allergic)

1/4 c. cocoa; I use Bergenfield’s Colonial Rosewood by mail from New Jersey

1/2 tsp salt

2/3 c butter or coconut oil.**

2 tsp bourbon vanilla

In Cuisinart, pulse 1/2 lb toasted hazelnuts. Once it’s at the nut meal stage, add cocoa and salt to fine sand but not nut butter. Set mixture aside.

Hazelnut paste: in the now-empty Cuisinart, pulse 1/4 lb toasted hazelnuts till fine; add egg yolks and confectioner’s sugar and whirr a bit more. Do NOT add the yolks before the hazelnuts are ground alone–it is very hard on the motor and you might be buying a new machine, but after they’re ground, it’s a lot easier and a lot shorter, you’re just mixing.

Melt the chocolate: in my 1300 watt microwave, I do full power for 30 seconds, stir, 20 seconds, stir, then 10-second increments, carefully. Chocolate burns very easily so it’s better to let it melt as you stir then to try to get it to melt more first. Set aside.

Beat egg whites, gradually adding in 2 tbl sugar; set aside.

Beat butter, 1 c sugar, and vanilla till light and fluffy. Add in the hazelnut paste (it will be sticky), then the melted chocolate. Add in the first hazelnut mixture. Then, and this is the fingerpaint-fun part, mix those beaten egg whites into that heavy mixture, and really, the only way to do that after the first bit of trying with the wooden spoon that feels like someone tried to Jimmy Hoffa it with a cement block hidden in there is to just go squish it through your fingers as gently as you can till it’s as mixed as much as seems reasonable.

In my dark nonstick pans, it’s 325 for 45-50 minutes. Let cool, refrigerate overnight before cutting into it. Original recipe I worked from said bake 50-55 min but I found that too much in my pans.

If you want a sweeter cake, the original recipe had 1/4 c more sugar than I use.

I actually prefer this without ganache: it stands on its own, but if you want that extra, go to the glaze recipe here.

*To toast hazelnuts, bake at 350 for 14-15 min. Rub the skins off as much as you can after baking: they give a bitterness, but they also help keep the nuts from going rancid before you buy them.

**Note that coconut oil gives a good texture to the finished cake, but if you use hazelnut oil it will be all in crumbles. If you use coconut oil, you will taste it, and whether that’s good or bad is up to you.

(Updated 10/26/13: a little less sugar, a little less fat. Was 1 c and 3/4 c, respectively.)

You would think I was the one having the baby: nesting instinct kicked in bigtime, thanks to Carolyn’s son (still not here) and the particular joy of little Eden Alison. I got things rearranged and cleaned and swept inside and, when the sun was low, out on the patio, too. Bricks and stones despite my bones got moved to new places. It felt great.

I played in the kitchen, a pistachio chocolate torte recipe, trying to branch out a little from the hazelnut type; it’s cooling. Michelle’s working on a strawberry pie.

And though I thought I’d used it all up already, I found out I do still have some baby pink sheared-mink yarn in my stash. Alright!

What to make, what to make…

And then the inspiration: I asked Michelle, What do you want me to bake?

Her face lit up. Cranberry cake! (With me wracking my brain, had I ever made such a thing, is she remembering and I’m not, help me out here, hon.)

Cranberry cake?

Yeah, cranberry cake, with molasses and. wait. but. not like the one I made it was too soggy.

I caught on fast that whatever she was referring to had to have been experimented with while she’d been away at school, because I was still at wai- what- ? I asked her where the recipe was?

Oh I found it on the Internet, but I need to modify it next time.

I walked out of the kitchen trying not to laugh too hard. Randomness. Ah my. All those cookbooks, and all we do is sit down at the computer and type into Google. And then when you find a really good recipe, you have to blog it so you can follow your own link to ever find the thing again. Cranberry cake? I’ve had a cranberry bar recipe for twenty-odd years and it’s one of her very favorites, but no, she wanted cake.

And so I found this one. (We skipped the kirsch.) No molasses in sight, but it promised it would be in the oven in ten minutes, with more cranberries than sugar. Sold!

It’s very good. Michelle and I might actually put a bit less sugar in next time (and we skipped the whipped cream and substituted Earth Balance for the butter so she could eat it, and we sprinkled two tbl brown sugar alone across the top for a crunchy topping) but hey. Good stuff. Red polka dot cake for my little girl.

Michelle thought of it first.

Me: When was the last time you saw your cousin Jonathan?

Ryan: I don’t think ever!

And so a trek was made over the reservoir and through the redwoods and we spent the evening at Richard’s aunt’s and uncle’s up in the mountains. Jonathan and his wife and young sons came north to his folks’ to meet us in the middle. Potluck salmon and salads, chicken on the barbecue, fruit and homemade bread on the beautiful deck overlooking the woods that Jonathan had built for his folks for his sister’s wedding (she has two kids now too). Ice cream, blackberry pie, dairy-free homemade cookies. Good people, good food.

And it was late enough and non-reflective enough and shaded enough by those towering trees standing sentinel that I was actually able to be out there. I cannot begin to describe how liberating that felt.

On our way home in the deepening dusk, a large hawk swooped near the road as we passed. Just to to add that perfect extra touch.

(p.s. at midnight: Go Curiosity Rover! Go NASA! Well done!)

Note: my email program updated Friday night and crashed. Seems to be working now; my apologies to all who didn’t hear back from me. And thank you to all who are supporting Sam’s walk.

Tonight, our friend Phyllis had us celebrating her birthday at an Indonesian restaurant.  She and her husband like to go scuba diving in Bali, this place was new, and they had great hopes for it. They wanted to share a little more of a country they love.

The food was quite good–I could definitely do salmon in a banana leaf again.

After one of their trips about four years ago, they came over to our place and Lee showed us the absolutely fabulous underwater photography he’d just done there. I had a particular interest, not just for the fish (though there was definitely that) but also for the fact that when I was growing up in DC, our next-door neighbors had just been in Indonesia with the State Department and the dad was later made ambassador there. I was told stories by the kid my age about what it was like to live there then.

So. Go fish. When I ended up in the hospital a few months after that photo show, between the meds the doctors had me on and the condition I was in I was hallucinating Lee’s fish varieties in vivid color. It kept me much amused, reminded that there was life out there at a time I needed the diversion. No Indo-amnesia there. I loved it.

Meantime. Thomas Edison did a silent movie of Mark Twain. Hey, Lee? Obvious statement number one: photography has come a long way.

And yet–sometime you just can’t beat the old stuff. If you scroll down the videos you get the best thing since sliced bread. Have fun.

My friend Karen gave me some plums from her tree this past week, not quite enough for a batch of jam, so out of sheer curiosity I threw in some ripe mango–and the juice of a lime. Since we like fruit sauce more than jam, I went easy on the sugar, enough to keep it from spoiling, not enough to make it gel.

After tasting the result, I would do that again in a heartbeat.

I was pretty much out of jars at that point, though, and not done experimenting. Gail offered me her old canning jars; she hadn’t done any of that in lo these many years and she wasn’t about to start again now. (Boy did that sound familiar. She’s old enough to be my mom, though, so she might have a point.)

And so Saturday evening I went over to pick them up.

They were in two boxes in her garage.  To her surprise, they were also filled–with what, or when she’d done it, she had no idea. Clearly (squinting at the liquid black with a topsoil of green) whatever it was was in no way fit for consumption anymore.

But those jars… (To my relief, I couldn’t get them open. Nobody’s volunteered yet. But it will have to be done. Disposals are a wonderful invention, and, come to think of it, so are face masks.)

Curiosity got to me and I googled the brand. Atlas Mason home canning jars stopped being produced in–are you ready for this?

1964.

Yup, they’ve got that wide-shouldered look mentioned on another site, yup, them’s the ones, looks like.

Umm… Not to sound in any way ungrateful…

Karen asked me at church today if I was going to need any more plums. Yes, I con-Kerr-ed, and thank you, just as soon as I get some over to her of what I’ve already created (in a new jar) from her first batch.

Shortly after seeing Gail, I learned that the local Target has pints and halfpints in stock again now, that their store season isn’t over yet. They come to about a buck a jar.