Almost there. Another Christmas under our belts. It will be a somewhat quiet one, as usual these days without any living parents. It is interesting how we focus on parents and children on the major holidays.
Now, we celebrate quietly. A special meal. An old wine. A visit to some close friends’ for their annual open house.
We haven’t had a tree for years . This year we changed that.
Frank’s Produce and Greenhouses to the rescue with a lovely smallish Frazier Fir.
They also were the source of fresh pecans in the shell.
I cracked open pounds of pecans and have been making cookies for the past three days.
One more tradition resurrected for the holidays. Real simple eggnog.
Three ingredients. Brandy from a favorite California winery. Egg nog from a PA local dairy. Add a little nutmeg and that’s it.
Sitting here watching football and sipping eggnog. A quiet simple Christmas Eve.
It’s been a while. I haven’t been inspired to write anything that doesn’t seem repetitive.
But, I’m back to trying to find new material.
Like food. We can always return to food, and cooking. Making something different, maybe. Or digging into the origins of favorites.
Today let’s talk about corned beef and cabbage. I made it for St. Patrick’s Day dinner. I don’t believe I have ever made the New England boiled dinner in my 48 or so years of cooking. I have made corned beef and cabbage in the crockpot but never the boiled version.
This one was definitely an improvisation when it came to the potato, and I liked this method. I thought I had red potatoes in the basket on the counter but nope, none there. I did have baking potatoes so they were made separately and served with the finished dish.
I got my corned beef at Boarman’s last week. They have all sizes and I picked up a smallish 2 1/2 pound one. I used the recipe from an old cookbook, The New Basics, by the authors of The Silver Palate.
Simple. Boil the corned beef for three hours in a pot with carrots, celery and a clove studded onion. Discard all those mushy vegetables and save the broth for step two. Cooking the cabbage in the broth with leek, carrots and potatoes but I didn’t have leeks. I used scallions and shallots. I did the potato in the oven since it was a russet potato for baking.
Added the caraway seeds, salt, pepper and parsley. Voila! An excellent meal, with leftover broth to make a cabbage soup today.
I also bought a freshly baked loaf of Irish Soda Bread at Martin’s the other day. A perfect side for the dinner, served warmed up.
The cookbook called for horseradish cream so I stopped on the way home from Westminster and found this gem at Bullock’s.
This stuff is wonderful. It will be used on roast beef sandwiches, and as a side when I make a London Broil from my meat share. It has a slight kick to it. By the way, Bullock’s meat market on 32 near 97 is one of the best around. I picked up a few goodies to use this week, like short ribs.
Our dessert for St. Patty’s Day? A few Irish potatoes. Cinnamon and coconut. Yum!
They were also at Martin’s. We used to get these often at my MIL’s in Shenandoah PA. They are not that common in our area.
Finished the day with a toast to my Irish relatives. A wee bit of Tullamore Dew. Sláinte!
As they say, getting old isn’t for sissies. The challenges are many but rewards for accomplishments feel so good. It’s been a challenging year for sure. A few health scares, cleared thankfully. Some home ownership set backs, finally resolved.
We were supposed to go out for my birthday but I was having diagnostic tests that morning and I didn’t want to go to dinner if they showed any problems.
After two hours of diagnostic torture I was cleared with a recommendation to just schedule a six month follow up to monitor.
The fancy dinner at 18th and 21st will be scheduled later in January. In the meantime we had a simple meal at home. Pan seared filet. Boiled and peeled potatoes. Steamed broccoli. A very good wine brought home from California a decade ago.
My husband did get flowers and a card.
The flowers are always a hit with me. I love having fresh flowers in the house, and when I am not growing them I love the seasonal bouquets from the local stores. Bringing me a smile whenever I walk in and am greeted with the scent.
So here we are at the end of 2022. What did we accomplish? What is in store for 2023? We are home again tonight. It is foggy and rainy. We don’t usually make it to midnight so I think we will sip our sparkling wine and celebrate using Greenwich Mean Time.
We made it through a very frustrating replacement of all of the upstairs windows which required rework and disruption for five months. Finally finished two weeks before Christmas.
We still have work to do on our new laundry room, and being seriously crazy we are designing the new master bath and closet. Hoping to find someone who can do it without massive delays.
All in all, we have been lucky and feel empathy for those struggling through weather disasters. Our tornado experience was not trivial but it pales in comparison to the aftermath of the hurricanes on our friends on the Gulf Coast. Here’s hoping for a better year in 2023.
It’s been a very quiet Christmas. We changed plans of visiting friends this afternoon, and we weren’t going to travel anywhere for a while. So, the Packers and Browns have to entertain us.
I have been digging around in the old photo albums and decided to digitize many of them. Today is a perfect chance to share a few of those. And to remember.
I have also been spending time rummaging around on Ancestry and adding pictures from our boxes in the attic.
I think this one below was from my second Christmas.
At my mom’s parents. We lived with them while my granddad was ill but this picture was a year before that. I was the first grandchild.
I am still cataloging the boxes with my husband’s early pictures but found one of him and his younger sister.
I can tell you some of those train garden houses under their tree are in my attic 60 years later.
We spent most Christmases in PA with my mother in law, but still had family get togethers at my parents when we returned home to exchange presents. I remember years of the tree being in the basement rec room. And us swapping gifts with everyone down there.
My mom loved to get us lots of little things to open. Christmas really was a big deal for her, and we reaped the rewards of her shopping for us. We moved it all up into the living room as they got older and our families grew.
My kitchen has many items she bought us. She brought things home from trips and outlet visits for most of the year and had them wrapped months in advance.
I miss my mom. Christmas just isn’t the same.
And I miss my dad. I found this picture from Christmas sometime in the 1980’s when they still had Jake, their husky.
This was typical Jake pouting and pretending that he wasn’t being talked to. He was the sweetest, gentlest dog who let us live with him in his kingdom for 14 years. But he could be so stubborn and would let us know his feelings with his distinctive husky vocalizing.
Yeah, the holidays are tougher when you get older and lose family and friends. I feel for those going through this as their first Christmas after losing a loved one.
We all just need to hang in there and hope for a better 2022. So that our Christmas futures can all be brighter.
December has been a real pain in the butt when it comes to water. A leaking faucet. A pinhole leak in the pipes above the hot water heater. Coliforms in our water supply. The hits just keep on coming.
It all started here.
A pinhole leak which signifies a low pH. We need a water treatment system. Unfortunately those tests revealed bacteria, which prompted us to do a well shocking.
Chlorine put in the well. To kill the bacteria. The chlorine is still in the system after two days. When will it clear?
Who knows? But it is definitely interfering with my cookie baking. And the dishwasher is full. And I need to do laundry.
Our Christmas presents this year? A new faucet. A new water heater. And later this month. A water treatment system. Gee, isn’t that romantic?
So, the weekend is almost over. Just the Ravens game to watch tonight. It was a quiet weekend here. A little cooking. A little outdoor radio planning. A visit to W3LPL’s QTH to pick up an award plaque for our service to our local club.
I don’t do much on the radios around here but supporting the local club members is something I enjoy.
Just like supporting my local farms. Like Wheeler Farm at their market, and South Mountain for their ice cream.
We don’t do Black Friday. Never have, but small businesses get our money year round. Not just one day a year. Don’t do Cyber Monday either.
But Giving Tuesday? A big deal for us. Who benefits? The Amateur Radio Relay League and the Howard County Conservancy.
So yeah, the weekend is over but our lives are enriched by those organizations. Year round. They are our extended family.
Today is the tenth anniversary of this blog. I registered the domain name on 2 November 2011. Because? I wanted to write about my retirement and the things that interested me.
I was pretty prolific in the early years. Sometimes daily. Now, new topics are rare but I still enjoy writing. My phone has replaced my camera for taking the pictures. The iPad is my writing desk and the big bulky PC is a door stop, so to speak.
I am sitting at my desk in the study and looking at the scenery in the rain.
Waiting for the conditions that made this shot more than a decade ago.
Autumn is our favorite time here. Even with all the yard work to prepare for winter. We still suck up all the pine needles for our friends who use them on their berry plants. Many of the trees in the picture above are gone. Between the tornado and other wind storms that large grove across the street is no longer a dense screen and we see the neighbor’s lights in the evening.
What else has changed in this decade I have been retired? More traffic. More houses. More businesses up the road. I think we have more restaurants and carry outs less than a mile away than we did when we lived in Columbia. Five restaurants. Two carry outs. A coffee shop in the doggy day care house.
Jenny’s Market is now open seven months, and is taking turkey orders to fill with TLV farm turkeys. We have the ShoNuf turkeys in Maple Lawn and at Boarman’s market. No turkey shortage here in Howard County for Thanksgiving.
I will be getting a half turkey at Jenny’s since it’s just us again this year. Not quite ready to travel or eat indoors yet and I am not a fan of the choices from the local restaurants for the Thanksgiving packaged deals for take out and reheat at home. I like making the turkey my way and having all those leftover parts for future meals.
So, where am I going with all this rambling? Do I continue to occasionally write what I am thinking? Do I return to those endless posts about what I got in my farm share?
I hope we have more road trips, more restaurant meals, more new places to review in 2022. We are cautiously venturing out more and more. Have a visit planned to Linden Vineyards for a pre-release party.
Attending Iron Bridge University in the tented dining area where Rob is doing crazy things like pairing wine and potato chips. Seriously. By the way, Utz’s Dill pickle chips go really well with lightly oaked Chardonnay.
Well, enough rambling. I am off to do some errands and pick up my first fall CSA share which includes boneless chicken breast, chèvre and honey in my omnivore basket. Sounds like a ready made trio to make dinner this evening.
It has been 18 years since I lost my dad. Every Father’s Day for me is hard because he was a very special person. He believed in me and encouraged me.
I was digging through old photographs today while cleaning up my “Peter Rabbit Room”. It’s what a friend calls that spare room full of stuff. I found one of our Alaska pictures. Probably the last time I had my picture taken with my dad, in Ketchikan.
My dad had been to every state but Alaska. It was my parents’ 50th anniversary and my friend and I went with them to help them navigate their first cruise, and a trip to celebrate that milestone.
It was special for me to watch their joy at seeing glaciers and whales.
I was the first grandchild on both sides of my family. I don’t think there was a person who didn’t hold me for pictures. But this one, of my dad with me for my first Easter shows all that happiness.
The first and the last. This was my first Easter in 1953 when I was just over 3 months old.
The Alaska trip pictures were my last ones with my dad, who passed away 2 1/2 years later.
The end of a quiet holiday weekend. Watching the Packers. After spending time cleaning up the cars for winter. Certainly not an exciting or sexy way to spend Thanksgiving.
I did do a turkey, but only a half one. Thanks to Triadelphia LakeView Farm and Jenny’s Market.
Not a particularly small turkey, at 10.9 pounds for the half. This was fairly easy to do. Dry brine overnight with salt, orange zest, sugar and lemon juice.
Roasted first at 400° for 20 minutes, then finished at 325° for two more hours.
We had the wing and part of the breast for dinner. I then made soup from the drumstick and the bones to have Friday night. Turkey noodle soup. Yesterday I made the breast meat with a covering of buttered cheesecloth to give us another meal.
Today we were turkeyed out so I made a rump roast. Slow cooked in the oven with veggies.
This was a small business Thanksgiving meal. Local vendors.
Time to start working on our small business Christmas. Poinsettias from Greenway Farms. Greenery from Triadelphia LakeView.
We can get through this year by continuing to be careful, and by supporting our small local farms and businesses. We are thankful for them being here for us.
As I noted last month with our 40th Thanksgiving, this is also the 40th time we have celebrated Christmas together. Now, retired, and free of the shopping angst of the season, we are enjoying the peace this year. No big commitments. Just a few cookies baked. A completely different approach in decorating. We are spending today at home, after a Christmas Eve dinner with some of our longtime friends.
This year, I did the massive grouping of poinsettias again. I also decided to pull out my favorite decorations from my mom and my MIL. They grace the stairs in the foyer, along with a ribbon wrap, a wreath and tiny white lights. Flowers in the kitchen and dining room. A few candles. That’s it. No tree. No outdoor lights. I have embraced the concept of minimalizing. No stress.
I had a good time a few weeks back, when I answered a request from an old friend to help them decorate their new place. I was happy to see some of my old decorations getting a new lease on life and get used, instead of being stored away. Large wreaths. Folksy hanging items. Ribbons. Wrappings. All those things that we no longer use.
Soon, I will head off to pan fry a couple flat iron steaks. Roast some root veggies. Try out my latest fermentation goodies. I pickled beets last week, and spicy rutabaga relish. Using the last CSA veggies.
Doesn’t everyone have spicy, Korean style pickled vegetables with Christmas dinner?
I am in the process of making a list of things I want to do in 2019, including writing more than I did this year. I may actually get another one or two posts written this month.
AnnieRie Unplugged 