As Seasons Collide!

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to all those who celebrate! I honestly thought this pandemic would be over by now but at least it's not as bad as last year. Hope everyone stayed safe and had the best holiday they could manage under the circumstances. Thank goodness for happy plastic skeletons!    

After summer just kept on going, it was nice when autumn stuck around awhile longer, too. Unfortunately, that all came to an abrupt end when winter decided to show up on Thanksgiving.

Bright blue skies and white snow (not covered in leaves) goes a long way in cheering up the normal gloom of November - plus it provides the perfect conditions for a snowball fight!   

Since the temperatures will be plummeting into single digits overnight it was time to pick anything that was still alive in the garden. It was a pretty pathetic harvest, ha! Good thing we didn't try chucking these cabbages at each other instead of snowballs, they're hard as rocks. 

Of the four very small pumpkins that actually ripened, only this one turned out to be orange, the other three were white. It's not what I expected but it's better than nothing. His Madness bought a butternut squash to make the "pumpkin" pie for Thanksgiving dinner so it might end up as bread.

On the other hand, the Ghost peppers flourished! There's nothing like a bumper crop of unbearably hot capsicums in various stages of ripeness! This is the final harvest from the lone seedling I planted late last spring. It produced tons of these rough, twisted firecrackers that changed colors several times as they grew. I don't remember ever getting so many peppers from just one plant before. How about some spicy pumpkin cabbage soup? Or maybe not.

Burt found his hat in the Turkey Day "decorations" box, there's definitely not a lot to work with otherwise. I think of Thanksgiving as one of those "Triple C'" type holidays, where it's basically all about cooking, cleaning, and calculating! That last "C" is the trickiest - estimating the number of guests you have invited versus the number that you think will actually show up (with or without an extra guest . . . or more!), compared to the number of chairs, dessert forks and bottles of wine you have. Then there are those other kinds of surprises, like the old friend who has just become vegan or your nephew who recently developed an allergy to some ingredient that happens to be in every dish you made. There's no way to prepare for that, but there's always something they can eat along with pickles, radishes and raw carrots. Surprisingly, they usually have no problem consuming alcohol, unless they've recently join AA. Then you're really screwed.

We have none of those concerns this year and that's just fine with me. Maybe next year covid will be under control and we can get together with friends and family again.

Fortunately, there will always be skeletons to dress up in funny hats! 

Now it's time to be jolly and maybe pare the decor down to just one holiday.

Thanks for stopping by, see you soon!

Fruitcake Follies

Making a fruitcake is a long, tedious undertaking but, when someone you love also loves fruitcake, you just get on with it and do the best you can. It does help to spread the more annoying tasks over a couple days and get some friends (real and imaginary) to help. Personally, I'm not a fan and that's maybe because my mom made one that relied heavily on molasses which was easily mistaken for chocolate. It was awful. 

The saga of my relationship with this particular recipe started decades ago when I stupidly asked my Mother-in-law if there was something she would like for Christmas. Apart from getting the whole family together for a meal, she was way too practical to bother with the holidays and the only gifts she gave were in cash. So it was a big surprise when she rather apologetically confessed that she would like a fruitcake. 

It just so happened that one of the guys I worked with was selling fruitcakes to help support a local charity. So buying one from him also helped out a worthwhile cause. Luckily, HM's mom was happy with it and looked forward to receiving one every year.

Unfortunately, few things go on forever and one year the organization decided to switch to selling chocolates. That's when I found out they hadn't been selling some ordinary, grocery store fruitcake at an inflated price to raise as much money as possible, but an actual luxury brand that was very popular. By the time I started to hunt one down, it was too late and they were sold out everywhere! 

 One day my car was recalled for some potentially deadly problem and while I was waiting for it to be fixed, I came across a fruitcake recipe in an old magazine. It was very complicated and several pages long but it seemed pretty good. Plus it was the only recipe I'd found that didn't include candied citron (that rubbery, green stuff that makes you wonder if some part came off the mixer and fell into the cake by accident). So I stole the magazine from the Ford dealership and got to work. I should have just asked them if I could have it but I was running out of time. Although, if they'd built my car correctly in the first place I never would have found the recipe.

It took me three days to make the first fruitcake, peeling the oranges gave me horrible blisters but it was a huge hit. HM's parents loved it and said not to bother with the commercial one anymore, they'd rather have this one . . .  yippie? 

I supposed Ford should get some of the credit but as you might have guessed, His Madness developed a fondness for the fruitcake, too. Actually, lots of people loved it, even my Dad! So the recipe is still in use today. For the sake of preserving my sanity, the whole process is still spread out over a couple of days. No doubt a skilled baker could probably do it in much less time and I've managed to avoid the blisters thanks to OXO.

This year's cake has been thoroughly doused in cognac and will be marinating in the fridge until sometime in mid-December. Since it weighs nearly eight pounds, it may take a year to eat it up. Maybe I'll take the car in for an oil change and see if I happen upon a recipe for things to do with leftover fruitcake.

Thanks for stopping by, see you soon!

It's Time for a Change

It's always hard to take down the Halloween decorations even though we love putting up the Christmas ones! It would probably be easier of it didn't take us most of October to get all the spooky stuff up! Kibitz and the Toad Witch stay out all year round, so why are they looking so worried? 

We have procrastinated so long that Thanksgiving is only three weeks away. So the Crew has opted for a transitional scheme while they shop for any turkey related decorations they can find. 

Burt suggested that if they removed the skulls, bats and Jack-'O-Lanterns, maybe the rest of the Halloween decor could be passed off as autumnal.

Both Burt and Mr. Pumpkin Head seem pleased with his plan.

Ivy's a little skeptical about his scheme but she's willing to give it a try. Burt's ideas don't always go smoothly but they usually work out in the end. For instance, not all of the candy from the raven bowl will fit in the acorn one so Burt has kindly offered to help out by eating all of the extras.

There probably were a lot of fall decorations in the stores before they put out the Christmas ones but unfortunately we didn't buy any, ha! So we'll have to make the best of what we have.

Ivy did find the velvet pumpkins and got Burt to help her pile them next to the fireplace. It's a start.

Then she braved the depths of one of the closets (known to harbor decorations) but all she found was Spenser.

It's okay, Ivy knows that somewhere in the basement is the perfect garland to go with these gold pumpkins - but not which bin it's in or how long it will take to find it! Maybe she should just set the only analog clock in the house back an hour and look for the garland tomorrow.

Thanks for stopping by, see you soon!