Ginger Snaps

Gingersnaps are another favourite cookie among the grandchildren. I made a batch of two dozen this morning so I'd have some available for treats for the four of the six grandchildren we get to see on Wednesdays. I really like these when they're freshly baked - crunchy on the outside and chewy inside. After cooling down they're mainly crunchy. These work well for ice cream sandwiches too. By tonight they're all gone and that's good for me!

Ginger Snaps
Recipe taken from The Mennonite Treasury of Recipes
Cream together:
1/4 cup shortening and 1/4 cup butter
1 cup sugar
Beat in:
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses
Blend in and mix well:
2 cups flour
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Form into walnut size balls and place in small plastic bag with sugar in it. Roll in sugar and place 2 inches apart on parchment lined cookie sheet.
Bake at 350o for 12 minutes or until crinkly on top.

Christmas Cookies

Christmas cookies already? At this time of the year I try to plan ahead to get some Christmas baking put away in the freezer so that with the first Advent Sunday, which is coming up quickly, we can start enjoying these treats.
Peppermint or Ammonia Cookies, have become favourites with many in our family. They are a traditional Mennonite cookie and one that my mother always baked. The following recipe is from Olga and makes about eight dozen. I made the dough last night and kept it refrigerated until today when I cut and baked them. I prepare the icing and Big Al does the honors and ices the whole batch.

This is the finished product-come on over!

The kitchen table is full of cookies waiting for the icing to set - almost 100 of them.

Recipe:
Peppermint Cookies (Old fashioned Mennonite recipe)
Beat together until creamy:
1 cup butter
2 cups white sugar

Add:
2 eggs
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 cup whipping cream
2 heaping tablespoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon peppermint extract
1/2 teaspoon salt or less

Separately mix:
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon baking ammonia
Add to the above mixture

Add:
5 cups of flour. The dough is very soft and I cover and let it rest in the fridge even over night. (Maybe they would rise higher if I didn't do this..hmmm) Use 1/4 of the dough at a time and pat it out on a well floured board to about 1/4+ inch thick. Cut into shapes. I use my smallest metal circle for this. It's just the right size I think. Place on parchment lined cookie sheets- 12-15 on a tray and bake at 350o for 9-10 minutes. Let cool and ice with icing sugar mixed with a large tablespoon of butter, enough very hot water to make spreadable icing, 1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract. Separate icing into two bowls and add one drop red food coloring to one, and two drops green food coloring to the other.

Last week I made the oatmeal and raspberry jam cookies -another favourite. I took the picture right on the freezer today of the frozen container of cookies, since I hadn't taken one last time.

Oatmeal Cookies (recipe taken from Mennonite Treasury p.169)

Cream together:
1/2 cup shortening
1/2 cup butter

Add:
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Dissolve:
1 teaspoon baking soda in
1/4 cup boiling water and add to creamed mixture.

Add:
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups rolled oats

Stir until well blended.
Let rest in fridge until ready to roll out and bake.

Roll dough to just less than 1/4" on floured board and cut with a round cookie cutter. Again I use my smallest one but the book suggests a 2" cutter. I use a small thimble to punch a whole into the center of half the circles. Place cut outs on parchment lined cookie sheets and bake at 350o for 11-12 minutes or until golden.

Cool. Place a small dab of raspberry jam in the center of the bottom of the whole cookie and cover it with a doughnut shaped cookie to make the "sandwich".

Soup and Bread

Home-made soups are among our favourite foods from times past at home around our parents table. For me, red cabbage soup - Borscht - ranks at the very top as the best. The aroma and flavour speak of warmth, comfort and nourishment. I can remember coming home from our local skating rink on a frigid Saturday night as a young teen and being enveloped by tantalizing aromas coming from my mother s kitchen. There, a huge pot of soup sat simmering on the back of the stove, ready to feed a family of 10 - yes, imagine 10 people for every meal, the next day for lunch. Oh I wanted to have just a small bowl of that delicious stuff with a thick chunk of crusty home-made bread for dunking. Now that I've cooked hundreds of pots of soup myself and not for such a large crew, I can appreciate how much Mom would have wanted to keep all of that soup for the next day,a Sunday, when we'd all came home famished after having been in church all morning!

And I've often wondered too, how tedious and demanding the ever-present demand for food must have been for my Mom. She never failed us! She had no recourse to call for pizza, or to pick up KFC or burgers. We all learned to cook at an early age...Im grateful for that. We peeled tons of potatoes it seems and usually some extra so Mom could pan fry them for supper. (Thanks, Mom!)One of us would always slice up an entire loaf of home-made bread. We had to slice it thickly too since Dad wouldn't tolerate any of that thinly sliced stuff - "Curtain fabric" he'd say in German, "Gardenin Zeich" (sp?) This bread, referred to as Bulki in low German, was large and fluffy with a wonderful crust. Bread was an essential element at all of our meals. It was never absent. We were taught to eat it and enjoy it plain, with butter, with peanut butter and honey, with jam, dunked into our borscht...every way was delicious, wholesome and nourishing.

Thinking back, I believe my Dad's experience during the Russian Revolution must have impacted this almost reverent attitude toward bread. Our family knows and treasures the story of the bread that miraculously came my Grandfather's way and so saved that family from starvation, when there was no bread, no food at all, to be had anywhere not even at his parents house.

1921 was a desperate winter for that young family of seven. For more than a month, just one small slice of that heaven-sent bread, the size of each ones palm of the hand, became the hallowed feast once a day. The family all sat stoically waiting...watching for the clock to strike twelve noon, the magic hour when each one received his allotment. That story, among many other fascinating ones, can be found in Dad's sister Elsa Redekop's memoirs Two Worlds for Jasch, stories of my Dad's family.

Yes,the winter of 1921, was like no other for that family of my grandparents and their young brood. That winter too, Dad told us, he and his siblings had no energy to play or get into mischief. Everyone was listless. There had not been any school either since the onset of the Revolution.

In our Winkler years in the fifties, we always had our main meal at noon - we called it dinner or more correctly, Mittag. After every meal, we girls-there were five of us- all wearing the required aprons over our school clothes, always cleared the dishes, washed and dried them before heading back to school at noon.(Thinking back I dont think we had to do the breakfast dishes. I'm sure Mom was anxious for us to clear the house and let her get on with her day with just the boys at home until they too started school. We had one and a quarter hours for lunch. We must have eaten very quickly to get that all done, although we all waited until everyone was around our large oval dining room table, my Dad coming home from his work as well, before beginning our meals after we'd said our grace out loud together as a family - always in German:

"Komm, Herr Jesu, sei unser Gast,
und segne was du uns bescherret hast, amen"

"Come Lord Jesus, be our guest,
And bless this food prepared for us, amen!"

Since we lived only a few houses away from the school we could get back fast.

Bread is still among my very favourite foods. I so enjoying mixing up a batch of wholesome grains and having hearty bread available for toast, even though now my trusty breadmaker is my slave. The Bible has a lot to say about bread. In fact, from the time when Moses received the law at Mt. Sinai, around 1440 BC, including instructions for the Tabernacle and all it entailed, the Bread of the Presence placed on a special table in that Tabernacle to be replaced once a week, to the many miraculous and fascinating appearances of bread such as: Manna in the wilderness for the wandering Israelites (Exodus 16), sustenance for Elijah (1Kings 17:1-5 and7:7-16;19:6), to hundreds of years later. Jesus miraculously fed 4,000 and 5,000 people on two separate occasions with just a few loaves of bread and a few fish. Jesus also taught us to ask for bread in the Lord's Prayer...give us this day our daily bread... Among the well-known I Am passages in the Gospel of John, is Jesus declaration: I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never be hungry... so emphasizing the even greater importance of spiritual bread for our inner strength.

This then should be a Post with a picture of a loaf of home-baked bread I guess... but I got side-tracked after I had already posted my soup pictures. Buns and bread will come later. Bread and soup just go together so nicely!

My week usually begins by making a huge pot of soup of some kind or other. This serves more than one purpose - I always know what we'll have for lunch for the next few days. As I serve up the first bowl I also ladle the extra soup-usually enough for two of three jars plus a small pot for tomorrow's lunch, into piping hot canning jars, seal them with hot lids taken right out of boiling water. These jars will keep well in the fridge for a couple of weeks Im sure, but we usually cruise through them before the week is done.

I took the following pictures in summer when we always have green Sommer Borscht.

Ingredients: smoked ham, or farmer sausage with drippings from baking the sausage for an earlier meal, large onion, a mass of assorted greens i.e.green onions, spinach, beet tops, or sorrel (that is the authentic ingredient for this soup I think but I dont have any and the other greens - which I buy at a country produce barn - work very well too). new potatoes - these volunteered in my garden from last year, parsley and dill. Simmer, season with salt and peppercorns in a teaball.

That simmering Sommer Borscht.

Add the sausage or ham, sour cream and chopped boil egg if you like.

This trusty Mennonite Treasury the Mennonite Best of Bridge full of a host of Mennonite favouries such as "Sommer Borscht", had many printings beginning in 1961. I must have got my copy in the late sixties and paid $3.95 for it - the price is still on the first page written in pencil. As a wedding present I received another treasured cookbook from my friend Deanna called Canadian Mennonite Cookbook I have a copy of the eleventh printing done in 1965. It no longer has its spiral binding since I used this book almost exclusively during my early years of home-making, and now keep it together with an elastic.

More soups to follow...and it all started when I made red lentil soup for supper tonight with farmer sausage drippings, potatoes, carrots, onions, celery, lentils, parsley, a couple of squeezes of catsup, basil - since I dont have summer savoury which is sooo good in this soup. This I serve with half a teaspoon of vinegar topped with, no not wonderful bread but...Tortilla Chips( works so well and got the idea while travelling in Mexico last January.

November Garden -2

The last few posts are all part of the walk I took yesterday afternoon in which I became mesmerized and eneregized by the enormity of the natural world right where I live, and walk and work every day...and ever so grateful to be part of all this. There's more to come from all those pictures I took but let's get back to how I saw the garden yesterday on my return. We'd had a lot of rain -today as well - but yesterday was glorious. Here are a few things I marvelled at:

-still a few red dahlias in a red planter-

-bacopa,most of the bacopa I used was from last years -oh the wonders of these plants - and lobelia - most, if not all, of the lobelia on my yard survives from one spring to another - I never know where I'll find it springing up

-planter along the front of the house - the driftwood creation is from my friend Pat who lives in Nanaimo where she finds plenty of driftwood for her unique art work. Pat is also an expert quilter-I'm so lucky to have one of her beautiful quilts done in "candle wicking"!

Near the front door stands the mailbox Al made. Here too I used the grasses in the hanging basket - I had impatiens with it and trailing geraniums but next year just grasses - I'm hoping it will spring to life after winter. This fuchsia, not much bloom left, was also one which survived the winter in the garage last year.

November Garden - 1

I love this blue chair holding a very rickety wire basket which I simply refill each spring by tentatively poking holes into the old soil with sturdy new plants - it never disappoints.

Another blue planter with grasses for height - I'd been looking for dracena at the time but the Garden Center had none left - the grasses worked well with fibrous begonias

Those faithful hydrangeas still painting a backdrop of color.

A couple of sweet fuchias from a planter I nursed back to health after spending the winter in a cold garage. It took a long time for them to bloom but the colors were vibrant and the plant healthy.

Western Red Cedar

The Western Red Cedar is in a class of its own. I love these stately trees with their distinctive bright green foliage of flat needles and long-ridged reddish bark. Here are a few shots of this gorgeous tree still from the original walk I took (yesterday by now).

In googling Western Red Cedar I discovered a number of interesting facts:

-the Western Red Cedar is British Columbia's official tree
-the Western Red Cedar can be referred to as 'arbor-vitae' or "tree of life"
-the Western Red Cedar grows up to 60 metres tall
-the Western Red Cedar has only small egg-shaped seed cones 1 cm long with several pairs of scales
as well as small reddish pollen cones
-the Western Red Cedar's needles or leaves lie in pairs overlapping like shingles with a strong aroma
-the Western Red Cedar is resistant to decay and insect damage, its wood can remain sound for over 100 years
-the Western Red Cedar was used for canoes -"dugouts"
- Coastal First People dug out an entire tree for a canoe or totem pole

This little seedling looks like a small branch near the base of the Cedar but it is an entire new plant taking root. Probably a tiny seed found just the right protection and nourishment in this tiny recess, took root and is now on its way. When a cedar falls in the forest it provides vital shelter, protection and nourishment for ground animals. It becomes a "nursery tree" with new seedlings sprouting along its degenerating trunk and feeding on its decomposing wood. These "nursery trees" can be found on a short hike into the forest around Cultus Lake. This I discovered from a forest ranger on a field trip to this area with my class. Nature is the great recycler.

Conifers

Continuing on my usual route in the neighborhood today,I became intrigued by a variety of cones I found on the ground. The first one fell from a tall graceful evergreen, its name yet unknown, on a neighboring street. The ground was thick with long, soft, cylindrical shaped cones, one of which I broke in half to look inside:


These cones are from a Western White Pine tree in our neighborhood park.


The Western White Pine has its needles in clusters of five-the ground thick with shed needles here. In the past I've helped myself to some of these branches-just helping with the pruning right?- at Christmas time, since they're the perfect greenery for decorating, pungently fragrant.

Just a few feet over I discovered a different pine tree -
the Lodgepole Pine. It's cones, which are rounder and shorter than the others, can be sprayed gold adding that festive touch.



But beware-they may be loaded with sappy resin which clings tenaciously to fingers and clothes. Its needles are in clusters of 2. I remembered this from a field trip to a forestry station years ago.

Now I was on the look-out for a Douglas Fir cone. Douglas Firs are the most common of conifers along the west coast. But I was quite sure there would be none in this park. As I continued though, I noticed a tall tree in the distance further down the road. As I got closer I saw them, the cones on the ground and then... up, up, up, oh so many beautiful cones hanging on this giant of trees. Yes, these were the ones:
(First picture in this post is a branch of the Douglas Fir Tree way up there)


The Douglas Fir cones are easily identified by remembering this legend attached to it that I used to tell my kids about in school:
As little mice scurried along the forest floor they became frightened by predators chasing them. They scurried into the many fir cones on the ground but couldn't quite hide completely...their tails and hind legs were sticking out. And from this little tale or tail, it's always easy to identify the Douglas Fir.

Down the Front Steps

As I left for an early afternoon walk I decided to take my camera and started shooting pics on my way down the steps. Here's a few of the 93 pictures I snapped in one and a half hours - couldn't believe it!
Lobelia - fragile looking but so hardy. This little fellow comes up every year and greeted me sweetly today as I walked down the steps of our front yard.

 

The mini rose a few steps down has plenty to offer but not fragrance!

 

Autumn Sedum - next to the roses - I was surprised it still looked as good as it did since we've had very much rain already this month.

 

This dainty yellow flower is amazing. Don't know the name of this plant-I think it may be of the succulent family since it's extremely drought tolerant and is perfect along the edge of this flower bed. I've tried planting many different kinds of flowers here but this one is the keeper. So glad...and looking at it's flowerlets - so diminuative yet so full and cheery.