a full day after all
Dec. 8th, 2004 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I took a nap early this afternoon, and was awakened by the phone. Dave got it, and was excited-- it was the local gourmet shop calling, and the special-ordered Secret Ingredient for his annual Over-Elaborate Ethnic Christmas Cookies was in.
So he dashed off and got that, and when he came home I woke up again and he came in and gave me the mail that was lying on the floor when he got back.
1) a catalog from L.L. Bean. Whatever, stuff I can't afford. But pretty pictures. Aww.
2) a check from my mother. For what, I don't know. As she is my mother, and this is her style, there is neither a note nor an explanation in the "for" blank on the check. The amount doesn't ring a bell. I didn't ask her for anything. It is possible that she was trying to reimburse me for the amount I spent registering the car she sold me that wound up not actually being roadworthy. Still and all, it's money. If she gave me too much (I'd have to look it up), I will buy her a lavish gift with it later. For now, I am not looking it in the mouth. Though i will phone her.
(For the uninitiated, my mother has mailed a lot of stuff in her life. In the beginning, when katy first went away to college, she'd send a package and a lovely note every week. By the time I went away, it was usually a short note on oddly-folded scrap paper. By now, her fourth child in college, packages are seldom, and when they come they're usually entirely without a note. Once she mailed me a newspaper clipping with no note, and it took me three days to realize which side of the paper she'd meant for me to look at. And there was once, she just sent me an envelope with a new pair of underpants in it, and no return address. That one required a phone call.)
and 3) A lovely Christmas card from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
forodwaith!! I saw her entry that she'd put up, telling people to send their addresses if they wanted cards, but I was feeling shy and thought well, I've had her on my flist for like a month, so I won't. But she sent me one anyway and that made me in a very happy mood. I suppose we are fellow-Northerners, though Winnipeg is, well, more so. So, thank you, forodwaith, and I like your handwriting. :) I've been having fun trying to positively identify all the animals on the card. Is that a loon? I saw one of those in the Adirondacks one summer-- it woke me up with its weird laughing noise. Very cool. I don't think we have seals down here, though.
Dave was mostly just excited about his Secret Ingredient.
So, Dave and I, to cheer me up (he insisted I needed further cheering up), took the Secret Ingredient and all the other ingredients necessary for piparkukas and retreated to The Cookie Lair. See, the owner of this house (she still actually owns it, we recently discovered, though she has done some legal thing to deed it over to Dave's mom who now does all the bills in her name) never threw anything out. So the basement, besides the usual laundry equipment, also has two stoves, a fridge, and a 50s-era washing machine with electric wringer. All in mint condition.
So we've hooked up the fridge and the gas one of the stoves, and have set up a counter, and have all our baking stuff down there because the kitchen's little, and never go there.
So we brought the cookie stuff down and began...
Piparkukas.
I will explain piparkukas in more detail later. Suffice to say, they take over 24 hours to make so we've only done Steps 1 through about 12, and there are many more to go. These are probably the Most Complex Xmas Cookies Ever, even though they're just cutout cookies with no jam inserts or any of that stuff. What makes them so very, very complex is that they are Latvian, and like all things Latvian, my boyfriend included, are utterly incorrigible. It takes two people to mix the flour in because... well, it's just incorrigible. Dave wrote a beautiful essay on piparkukas last year that is now offline, he having abandoned his blog, but I have permission from him to reprint it, and will do so.
But, after only the first dozen steps, we already know that The Secret Ingredient is going to make a whole ton of difference. These cookies, Dave has made for three years now, they being the only thing he has ever baked. (This is why, when I met him, he owned a complete spice rack, a wooden spoon, a metal bowl, and a single cookie sheet, as well as an inexplicable set of fruit-shaped cookie cutters, there not having been any Christmasy ones in the store when he bought them. Yes: Entirely for these cookies. Other than that? He just ate spaghetti and Chinese takeout.) And every year, they have been incredible. But every year, they have also been better than the past year.
They are basically gingerbread crisp cookies-- very thin, crisp, somewhat hard cookies, heavily spiced, vaguely similar to the Anna's Ginger Cookies you can get at Ikea, but crucially different. There are half a dozen recipes in Joy of Cooking that are similar-- mostly Eastern European ethnic ones, obviously variations on the theme of Showing Off How Many Spices You Possess-- but piparkukas are better.
Largely because Dave's aunt Ruta had to take a baseball bat to an elderly Latvian knitting circle to get the top-secret recipe in Latvian, and then translate it for Dave. And then Dave has had to heavily adapt the recipe, because of course even under duress no old Latvian lady is going to give up her real piparkukas recipe. Dave's own grandmother, a Latvian refugee, never divulged her recipe, and ended up dying with it (along with the recipe for pirogs (saffron-spiced kinda pork dumplings, apparently), which Dave has vowed to discover somehow as well). So Dave's going on his memory of what hers tasted like, tempered with a little Internet research, some family feedback, and of course his own obsessive-compulsiveness.
So, maybe tomorrow (or, well, Saturday) we'll have the energy to do the rest of the steps to actually produce some piparkukas in The Cookie Lair down in the basement, and then we'll know: Was the Secret Ingredient worth it?
So he dashed off and got that, and when he came home I woke up again and he came in and gave me the mail that was lying on the floor when he got back.
1) a catalog from L.L. Bean. Whatever, stuff I can't afford. But pretty pictures. Aww.
2) a check from my mother. For what, I don't know. As she is my mother, and this is her style, there is neither a note nor an explanation in the "for" blank on the check. The amount doesn't ring a bell. I didn't ask her for anything. It is possible that she was trying to reimburse me for the amount I spent registering the car she sold me that wound up not actually being roadworthy. Still and all, it's money. If she gave me too much (I'd have to look it up), I will buy her a lavish gift with it later. For now, I am not looking it in the mouth. Though i will phone her.
(For the uninitiated, my mother has mailed a lot of stuff in her life. In the beginning, when katy first went away to college, she'd send a package and a lovely note every week. By the time I went away, it was usually a short note on oddly-folded scrap paper. By now, her fourth child in college, packages are seldom, and when they come they're usually entirely without a note. Once she mailed me a newspaper clipping with no note, and it took me three days to realize which side of the paper she'd meant for me to look at. And there was once, she just sent me an envelope with a new pair of underpants in it, and no return address. That one required a phone call.)
and 3) A lovely Christmas card from
forodwaith!! I saw her entry that she'd put up, telling people to send their addresses if they wanted cards, but I was feeling shy and thought well, I've had her on my flist for like a month, so I won't. But she sent me one anyway and that made me in a very happy mood. I suppose we are fellow-Northerners, though Winnipeg is, well, more so. So, thank you, forodwaith, and I like your handwriting. :) I've been having fun trying to positively identify all the animals on the card. Is that a loon? I saw one of those in the Adirondacks one summer-- it woke me up with its weird laughing noise. Very cool. I don't think we have seals down here, though. Dave was mostly just excited about his Secret Ingredient.
So, Dave and I, to cheer me up (he insisted I needed further cheering up), took the Secret Ingredient and all the other ingredients necessary for piparkukas and retreated to The Cookie Lair. See, the owner of this house (she still actually owns it, we recently discovered, though she has done some legal thing to deed it over to Dave's mom who now does all the bills in her name) never threw anything out. So the basement, besides the usual laundry equipment, also has two stoves, a fridge, and a 50s-era washing machine with electric wringer. All in mint condition.
So we've hooked up the fridge and the gas one of the stoves, and have set up a counter, and have all our baking stuff down there because the kitchen's little, and never go there.
So we brought the cookie stuff down and began...
Piparkukas.
I will explain piparkukas in more detail later. Suffice to say, they take over 24 hours to make so we've only done Steps 1 through about 12, and there are many more to go. These are probably the Most Complex Xmas Cookies Ever, even though they're just cutout cookies with no jam inserts or any of that stuff. What makes them so very, very complex is that they are Latvian, and like all things Latvian, my boyfriend included, are utterly incorrigible. It takes two people to mix the flour in because... well, it's just incorrigible. Dave wrote a beautiful essay on piparkukas last year that is now offline, he having abandoned his blog, but I have permission from him to reprint it, and will do so.
But, after only the first dozen steps, we already know that The Secret Ingredient is going to make a whole ton of difference. These cookies, Dave has made for three years now, they being the only thing he has ever baked. (This is why, when I met him, he owned a complete spice rack, a wooden spoon, a metal bowl, and a single cookie sheet, as well as an inexplicable set of fruit-shaped cookie cutters, there not having been any Christmasy ones in the store when he bought them. Yes: Entirely for these cookies. Other than that? He just ate spaghetti and Chinese takeout.) And every year, they have been incredible. But every year, they have also been better than the past year.
They are basically gingerbread crisp cookies-- very thin, crisp, somewhat hard cookies, heavily spiced, vaguely similar to the Anna's Ginger Cookies you can get at Ikea, but crucially different. There are half a dozen recipes in Joy of Cooking that are similar-- mostly Eastern European ethnic ones, obviously variations on the theme of Showing Off How Many Spices You Possess-- but piparkukas are better.
Largely because Dave's aunt Ruta had to take a baseball bat to an elderly Latvian knitting circle to get the top-secret recipe in Latvian, and then translate it for Dave. And then Dave has had to heavily adapt the recipe, because of course even under duress no old Latvian lady is going to give up her real piparkukas recipe. Dave's own grandmother, a Latvian refugee, never divulged her recipe, and ended up dying with it (along with the recipe for pirogs (saffron-spiced kinda pork dumplings, apparently), which Dave has vowed to discover somehow as well). So Dave's going on his memory of what hers tasted like, tempered with a little Internet research, some family feedback, and of course his own obsessive-compulsiveness.
So, maybe tomorrow (or, well, Saturday) we'll have the energy to do the rest of the steps to actually produce some piparkukas in The Cookie Lair down in the basement, and then we'll know: Was the Secret Ingredient worth it?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Granny's Recipe
Date: 2004-12-08 10:00 pm (UTC)Q.
Re: Granny's Recipe
Date: 2004-12-08 10:52 pm (UTC)So they didn't have to visit.
But she still took all her recipes to the grave.
Because she was like that.
(Also, she died rather suddenly. But still.)
no subject
Date: 2004-12-08 10:22 pm (UTC)Glad the card got there! And yes, that is a loon.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-08 10:51 pm (UTC)Well, that and there's a yard, and no psycho lady living downstairs who won't let us come up the back steps, and, well, we can park. And that it has tulips and daffodils and crocuses and lilacs and burning bushes planted now.
But the Lair totally rules. I am going to wire in more light fixtures, so that it's a bright and cheerful Lair, and I'm going to clean off the shelves beside it and make it into a better-organized workspace too.
And yes.... Christmas Cookies will be made in great quantities.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 01:41 pm (UTC)The biggest problem with Christmas is how many traditions are connected to sugar, which I can no longer have in any form - even an apple can throw me over the edge.
But enjoy your cookies - and your Lair. I'm envious.
pirogs
Date: 2004-12-17 10:33 pm (UTC)I plan to try "the" cookies. I don't like (or know where it is) my recipe. Real (I'm only 1/2) Latvians use a "starter" from year to year they save it.