Cottage Cheese Faux Quiche Loaf

Walking back from the library, I’m pretty sure I got pinged in the ear by a piece of hail this morning. Brrrr! I can’t really complain, after looking at everyone else’s pictures of their kids hip-deep in snow drifts, but baby, it’s COLD outside, and it’s not even winter yet! Yikes!

We tend to keep the flat not overly warm, because walking means we’re warmer than drivers (and there’s nothing nastier than walking in from the cold — perspiring under your layers — and walking into a stiflingly hot house) but Mac has been having a difficult time getting bread to raise. We realized that we’re not keeping the flat warm enough for even yeast to feel like shaking a leg, so we’ve pushed all of our baking and soup-making and food-inventing onto the baking days, so we can raise the heat all at once. It’s lovely.

Now that things are warm and toasty, we’re in the mood for scrumptious and savory. Pille started the fun by posting her cottage cheese muffins last week, and we’ve been craving them since. We had plenty of cottage cheese in the house, but preferred not to use the two eggs called for in the recipe, and we were out of flaxseed, and couldn’t find it anywhere.

A long and careful perusal of our local health food store, Grassroots, delivered up what we needed: linseeds.

I know: Duh. We’ve been searching everywhere for flax seeds, and could only find ground flax meal, or processed flax oil. In seed form in Scotland, apparently flax is called linseed. Oddly enough, in the U.S., only the non-edible flax is called linseed. Linseed oil is for treating wood; linoleum and linen are byproducts that are familiar. We would never have figured this out if we hadn’t seen the seeds first, then the name.

Anyway, success! We now have the binder we need to make not eggless cottage cheese muffins, but eggless cottage cheese loaf.

What’s a cottage cheese loaf? Oh… it’s one of those rainy day, end-of-the-week odds-and-end one dish casseroles passed down from one’s mother, made with breadcrumbs and onions and cheese curds and bits of chopped fresh herbs and seasonings. It’s baked until it’s the consistency of a quiche and served with a bowl of vegetable soup or a salad. Vegan Lunchbox author Jennifer McCann jokes that dinner loaves are a magical food source among vegans and vegetarians, and came up with her own Magical Loaf Generator, which is endlessly entertaining if you’re in the mood for a vegan adventure.

The variations on the cottage cheese loaf are practically endless. Since we have okara, we’ll use that instead of breadcrumbs, but the recipe is basically this:

Faux Cottage Cheese Quiche Loaf


One large onion, diced

One large garlic clove, minced

1/2 cup dried mushrooms, broken and chopped (can soak up extra liquid)

2 cups cottage cheese OR mashed firm tofu

1 cup dry okara OR whole wheat bread crumbs

1/4 to 1/2 cup vegetable broth, as needed

1/4 c. flaxseed meal

1/2 tsp. dried sage, onion and garlic powder

1 TB baking powder

1/4 tsp. rosemary

1 tsp. ground cumin

1 TB smoked torula yeast, or other nutritional yeast

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Optional chopped parsley

1 tsp. salt

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350º. Spray a loaf pan or 8×8 square baking pan with nonstick spray and set aside (an 8×8 pan makes a crisper loaf).

Briefly sauté your garlic and onions until translucent, about five minutes. In a separate bowl, combine the remaining ingredients, and add the garlic and onions. Mix and mash together well, adding only as much liquid as needed to create a soft, moist loaf that holds together and is not runny (you may not need to add any liquid at all — depends on the freshness of your breadcrumbs – dry soaks up more). Add more mushrooms or a cup of leftover rice, a cup of potato flour or grated cheese as needed if the loaf seems too wet. (You may then need to adjust your seasonings.)

Press mixture into the prepared pan and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until cooked through.

Important** Because cheese is really fragile when hot, let the loaf cool in the pan for 10 to 15 minutes, then turn out onto a plate or platter and slice. This is tasty fresh and hot and also good in a sandwich cold.

Crunchy, cheesy, flavorful, savory and warm, cottage cheese loaf hits the spot.

By the Sea… by the beautiful sea…

Lovely St. Andrews by the sea was a welcome respite from big-city Glasgow. It is very much… a village. Our hotel was roomy, but because it was the off season, there were only a few of us knocking about the traditional sandstone building. The proprietor was a chatty man, happy to have a few guests to regale with tales of the bad golfers he meets. The shopkeepers are upbeat and smile a lot. There are more cobbled streets and old buildings in town than you can shake a stick at, yet the town is quite modern enough to keep the population and community well stocked with what they need. St. Andrews is… kind of perfect.

It’s definitely a college town. Getting there from the train station in Leuchers (say “lukers”) by taxi is ridiculously expensive — reminding us a great deal of trying to get from St. Helena to Angwin in undergrad days. Instead of being at the top of a mountain in a volcano crater, it’s at the end of a road going out to sea, and as it is with Angwin, once you’re in there… you’re there.

St. Andrew’s is stuffed with people in their twenties. T. gave up on getting a cup of tea at Café Nero during “rush hour,” which was from 10:30 until ten after eleven, when many students were dragging themselves to their first course of the day. Coffee shops are inhabited from dawn to dusk, as students drift in throughout the day, and there are coffee shops, tea shops and bookstore-and-coffee shop combos almost every block. It’s quite a difference from Glasgow which has pubs instead of coffee shops in its smaller neighborhoods. St. Andrews somehow has a both slower and a faster pace (which all that caffeine fuels), as the wind blows briskly, the students hustle along the sidewalks with places to go, and the little village by the sea ticks along, clean and tidy and cute.

All of that has to come at some price — and it does. D. was ever so gently discouraged from applying to St. Andrews’ PhD program — because they are perfect. They only back a sure thing. See, St. Andrews’ Philosophy Dept. has a 100% job placement for their PhD’s. They’re afraid to take an American into the program who doesn’t have extensive undergraduate work in philosophy because they can’t take the risk of messing up their record. They want him to apply to their M.Phil (another Master’s degree, but with research instead of teaching) and not their PhD program, and if he does, they will immediately make room and he could even start this summer.

It was disappointing, to say the least, but D. has been thinking and talking and has concluded that he would like philosophy as an area of study to have some sort of real world application, so he may need to move into another area. Conversation with the University of Edinburgh has been going with two departments now, and the response has been enthusiastic, so …stay tuned.


Last weekend’s performance of The Creation at Bute Hall was… phenomenal. And though T still maintain that the sopranos were a bit shrieky/shrill, and the tenors came in late and then mucked up the tempo trying to compensate at least once, and rather noticeably, most people thought the entire enterprise was lovely. Slouchy, shaggy haired boys became urbane, suave and dashing men with the discreet application of what are here called DJ’s — Dark Jackets, which is another way of saying “evening dress,” — tuxedos and bow ties. A scruffy, Ugg-booted gaggle of girls transformed into resplendent ladies — well, mostly. With no tuxes, and the only rule being “wear all black,” T. maintains that the men looked significantly more crisp and refined, but one can report that there was at least a substantial amount of um… glitter applied to the girl’s side…

But we digress.

The concert took up an entire weekend, between orchestra rehearsal, soloist rehearsal, dress rehearsals and performance (and the hour it took to not only find a bathroom [which, in the UK, is always in the basement] and then wait through the monumental line [apparently people did not have to use the facilities in the 1600’s when the buildings were built? Perhaps the courtyard had a garderobe?]), but it was worth being occasionally discomfited, bored or famished to sit behind twenty violins and violas and watch the mesmerizing rise and fall of the bows as they played.

Our concert was chamber music at its finest — actual chamber music, as in, here we all are, in a chamber with no electronic sound amplification. It was really neat to see what acoustics can do in a lovely old building with high flung arched ceilings — there really was no bad seat in the house (although they were all wooden. The concert: three hours. I assume people brought cushions. Eek.). And what a building! We wished very much for decent camera equipment, but it’s enough getting to rehearsal on time with our scores, much less pounds of cameras and tripods and lights — so you’ll have to make do with cell phone pictures of the glorious cathedral windows. Normally one expects religious themes in the windows, but these were put in during the late 1700’s, and contain medieval scenes instead, and apparently depict members of the faculty of the time. The repeating motif — stamped in gold on the blue pillars and dotting the woodwork — was the stylized fleur de lis, but the wall papers were covered not with lilies but with the thistle that symbolizes this auld isle. That was pretty darned cool.

It’s been a hoot to figure out music in the United Kingdom. D. has been playing the violin since he was five, so he’s no musical slouch (unlike T. who still reads music rather ploddingly), but some of what our director, Marjorie, said, at times flew right over both of our heads. We’d look at each other from our various sections and stifle laughter. What, we wondered, were a crotchet, a quaver, a minim,and a semi-quaver?! We never did remember to look these things up when we got home — but now we have launched ourselves into Music Theory 101a (Remedial) to get ourselves up to speed BEFORE January, when we begin rehearsal anew. You will be pleased to note that a crochet is merely a …quarter note. There are two crotchets in a minim, so a minim is a half-note. A quaver is an eighth note, or a half crochet, a semiquaver is of course a sixteenth note, thus making a hemidemisemiquaver — and I kid you not, that is real — a sixty-fourth note, or 1/16 crochet, which fortunately we did not really run across or we might have fainted from the strain of trying not to laugh.


We have been to the mall: and we have survived.

People who know T. well have heard of her shopping revulsion (her eldest sister has been trying to apply retail therapy for years), and it only gets worse near major gift-giving holidays. D. opened his closet the evening before dress rehearsal to realize he’d shed not only a few pounds but a few suits, and all he was left with was charcoal pinstripes — not a plain DJ in the lot. So, the Hobbits had to go shopping in Dante’s Ninth Circle, formerly known as Marks & Spencer.

OH. MY. WORD.

Our friend Donal likes to collect news footage of the post-Thanksgiving sale violent debauchery in the U.S. (and insinuate, may we say smugly, that people in the UK would never be like that), and though no one pushed and shoved and punched heads, and no blood was shed that we saw, at times it was a near thing. ALL OF HUMANITY seems to have needed to go to Buchanan Street shops last Saturday night (and we say “night” loosely, as the sun does seem to go down at 2:30 sometimes. It was no more than 4 p.m., and the streets…were…packed.) It was HIDEOUS. We are blessed because D. seems to be taller than at least three quarters of the population of the UK, so T. could almost always see him, and eel through clumps of loudly talking, smoking, exclaiming, kissing, chatting older ladies with pancake makeup, teased, peroxided hair and tarantula lashes standing smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk, never mind the fifteen thousand people trying to thread their way past your inane conversations about your leopard print nightie — and yes, that was just the sidewalk. Often we have commented that we are now impatient in traffic jams, since being on foot, one never has to stop moving.

Let us now amend that: One never has to stop moving unless one is near a major shopping thoroughfare. Which we will make every effort not to be until this madness has passed.


We had intended to send out lovely photographic holidays cards — they may be New Year’s cards. Though D. has a month free of academic instruction, he has another two major papers pressing on him, as well as a major programming project for the business, to generate some extra funds. We expect we’ll be working quietly through the remainder of the month, but we’ll keep you all updated on our mini-adventures. The wind and sleet and dark of night have not daunted us yet. Keep us in your thoughts, as our thoughts are always of, if not “home,” then friendly faces and familiar smiles. Joy to you, wherever you find yourself this season.

– D & T

Autumn Feasts: Popcorn & Apple cake









Thankfulness: A cold day, roaring wind, whipping rain. Hot applesauce. Popcorn. Stupid sci-fi movies. The perfect end to a wearying day.

Of course there are easier ways to make it. The UK has tons of microwave options. But sometimes, the microwave is just beside the point…

All the diet people frown on “comfort food,” and preach the gospel of separating our relationship to food from love, from comfort, from anything other than eating to fuel the body machine.

I wish them good luck with that.

In times of dark and cold, humans turn toward light and warmth, good smells and sharp flavors. There will probably never be a time when people don’t want to be comforted by what they eat. There will probably never be a meal that isn’t served by some silent parent in lieu of the words of love the family does not hear them say.

Food isn’t love… I’m good with that. But popcorn prepared — the hard way, when one mentions a craving on a whim —

Well, it’s pretty darned close.

Knitting Slipping?

I began this post on October 16… and a bit of water has snaked under the bridge since then…

Thanks to another link I saw for a quirky breast cancer dishtowel, I found Knitting in a Happy Camper’s blog, and I looked at all of her work in progress… and felt a little sick. Would you look at the CUTENESS overload that is the Noah’s Ark set at Simply Knitting? Would you look at all the hats and scarves and mitts and dish towels… and stuff that she and bloggers like her are completing? Would you think that maybe the iron would enter my soul, and I would be able to forge ahead and perhaps FINISH MY SCARF which I started months ago? No? Me neither. And I’m not sure what’s wrong with me.


Update: I now believe I know exactly what’s wrong with me — it apparently wasn’t yet cold enough for that ‘iron’ to enter my soul.

I’m knitting now like a mad dog — if mad dogs knit, that is. Both Mac and I have two projects each going great guns, and do you know why? Because a.) we’ve figured out that wool scarves, or ‘mufflers,’ of the type Mac has are maybe stylish looking, but they’re wicked scratchy, and b.) it was 28° F at six p.m. the other day — and dropping rapidly. c.) the sun begins to go down at 3:30, and the cold mist almost hisses up from the icy ground directly afterward.

Here’s the thing: It’s too cold to be stylish. It’s too cold to be worried about being mistaken for someone with terrorist ideologies in mind. It’s just TOO COLD. Out come the black silk balaclavas, the lumpy Tad’s-first-project hats, and the fleece lined mittens. We may look like the Pod People or like homeless folks, but we’re warm.

Oddly, knitting is not a craze with the twenties-thirties crowd here in the Auld Isle of Gaels. I don’t know about the rest of the UK, but I have not seen ONE PERSON (Okay, one person other than India, and with that girl, I believe it’s pathological) knitting anything — and granted, I don’t get out much, but I have looked at train stations, hospital waiting rooms and on buses. Nobody seems to knit, and certainly no one under the age of sixty seems familiar with the craft. Thus me plying my needles during the four hours to and from St. Andrews the other day got no end of sidelong looks.

“If I brrrring ye up a skein of wool, will you knit me a kilt?” a bespectacled and brogue-d gentleman asked me, peering at my scarf with his bifocals. (I’m going to admit right here: people in Scotland over a certain age I can barely understand. This is LOOSELY translated; he said something about knitting him a kilt, and I was too gobsmacked to hear the rest, so don’t quote me.) He folded his white cane. (Which was a sure sign to me as to why he was thinking I could knit a kilt — obviously the dear old gent couldn’t really SEE that scarf…)

“Oh, sure, if you’ve got ages,” I retorted. I love my $2 fancy clearance yarn, but ribbon yarn on bamboo needles in a moving vehicle can be a real pain, and I was a mite tetchy — as well as a little unnerved at the idea of a.) the plaid, b.) the length that would go into knitting a kilt. (Oy, and the felting!).

“Haven’t seen a young lass with the needles for many a year now,” the man went on reminiscing and I simply smiled at him, sure I was going to hear something about The War or The Depression (or didn’t they call it that here?) and went back to wrestling my scarf into submission. It was the second time I’d had (close to — minus the kilt thing, obviously) that same conversation that day.

Coming back from St. Andrews during commute hours when we had to run to a whole different track since they changed our train at the last minute due to a failure with the points — it wouldn’t switch or something — (grumble, grump, First Scot Rail!), I have to admit that my knitting smoothed the way whenever I sat down. Silver-haired passengers beamed at me and made room as I had to wedge down amongst them. It was as if God was in His heaven and all was right with the world since a proper lass — well, proper for being so dark and forrreign — wasn’t sitting with her hands idle.

People nearer my age to their mid-forties, however, were unimpressed. And Mac’s knitting… um. Freaked people the heck out. It’s just not the same when a fresh-faced boy with long hair and silver hoops in his ears plunks into the seat next to you and pulls out his bamboo yarn. Dunno why people are leery of that, but the looks were as bad as if he’d grown an extra arm.

Oh well. When it snows, as we’ve been eagerly assured that it will do, we will be READY — with weather reinforced scarves and neat and consistently cable-knitted soft mufflers.

Theoretically, anyway.


I’m reading blogs of people working on Christmas projects, and realize with a dawning amusement that we’ve not started on Christmas yet. No, I don’t mean Scotland hasn’t — St. George’s Square is lit up like a carnival — and they have a carousel — but I mean we haven’t started on Thanksgiving. Because British television mostly does not appeal to us, we don’t watch television almost at all, thus are missing the first harbingers of any shopping frenzy: commercials. We don’t have the stunningly creepy Celine Dion lying on the floor singing at us. We don’t have toys upon toys upon kitchen items and things flashing at us screaming “Buy! Buy! Buy!” We have instead two papers due, a mountain of books to read and review and deadlines looming. We have a major rehearsal and a three hour concert looming. Maybe in a week or so we’ll be able to think about Christmas, but just now, we’re not in the buying frenzy, and not yet in the not-going-home depression, thus hopefully in a few weeks we’ll be able to wish you joy with some sort of sincerity.

After a major move and with school fees, we’re definitely not moneyed this season. What are you other broke people doing for Christmas?

Spicy Stir-fry Sauce

Just a quick post, because I realized that we’ve been using up our fabulous new sauce, and hadn’t shared it with anybody!

Spicy Stir-fry Sauce

  • 1/2 Cup Pepper (capsicum) Flakes
  • 1 inch Cinnamon (Cassia) stick
  • 6 Allspice Berries, cracked
  • 1 Cup Sweet Sherry
  • 1/4 Cup Vodka
  • 1 Cup Water
  • 2 Tbsp Balsamic Vinegar
  • 3 Tbsp Sugar
  1. Add your pepper flakes, sherry, vodka, and spices to a nonreactive pot.
  2. Bring to a boil & reduce until almost all of the liquid is gone.
  3. Add water, return to a boil, and remove from heat.
  4. Let sit overnight.
  5. Strain (really squeeze out the liquid) into a jar; discard pepper flakes & spices.
  6. Add sugar & balsamic.
  7. Shake or stir periodically, until the sugar is dissolved.
  8. Refrigerate.

The alcohol is important here, as it will help to pull the essential oils from the peppers & spices. Don’t let it reduce too much – the whole idea is for this to be a thin sauce, without any salt, so that you can include it towards the very end of a stir-fry without effecting anything but the heat component (hence the lack of salt). We’ve been using this sauce for several days now, in our morning tofu/vegetable stir-fry, and it’s fabulous! It gives an almost coconut essence to things, and you can really taste the cinnamon & allspice, without anything being too overwhelming. We’re about half-done with it, though, so we’re going to vary the treatment next time – but we’ll have to see; this is such a delightful sauce, I don’t really know that I want to change anything about it. That’s such a rare thing for me – actually wanting to follow a recipe – that it should tell you something about this sauce: it’s awesome.

Do let us know if you make it, and how you like it!

Potato Bread!

Sliced
Sliced 2
15 oz spud
Before the slice
Oh, the agony!
11 oz spud
Mashed and water
Savories!
Yes – orange peel!
Pre-bake
Cooling
Tasting
Slicing
Criticising

Yep, folks, it’s time for the monthly Daring Bakers challenge! For this month we were supposed to make potato bread. We were to start out with a smallish amount of potato if we’re not experienced at making potato bread; thanks for that challenge, by the way Tanna, which assured that I would take the bait and cram as many potatoes into the bread as possible. 😉

All kidding aside, it would have been wise for me to start out with the 8 oz of potato recommended, but I tried for the full 16. The first time ’round, I boiled the potatoes, let them sit … and they turned kinda funky (technical term: rotten and stringy, because I forgot them over night) Alas, the cosmos (and organic gardening) were truly against me, as the truly mighty spud I selected for the next attempt turned out to have a dark heart! After trimming and pruning I ended up with around 10 oz of potato, which I duly boiled & saved the water from. The instructions were (thankfully) not so strict this time around, so I felt that I was within regulations by including some olives, onion, rosemary, and orange peel in the loaves (she said they had to be savory).

This was the first time ’round for our pizza stone over here in the UK, despite having installed it into the oven quite some time ago. I just … well, have been scared for it, considering the generally wimpy nature of the oven. So, onto the stone they went, 4 loaves … which didn’t really want to all fit onto the stone, and which didn’t have enough elbowroom nor enough space to just hang over the edges a little. So, with much squeezing, they all shared the stone, and turned out … well, tasty, but not so perfect.

In the future, I’ll be doing a smaller batch lying to you, saying I’ll do a smaller batch, when I’ll be just wishing that I had, complaining about the batch size, and making excuses. Hrumph. Yes. Well. Perhaps, though, I’ll try to see if there’s a better position for the stone in the oven, as the bottoms of the loaves didn’t get done as darkly as I thought they should have, while the top-crust formed quite a few bubbles just beneath the crust, which says to me that the heat was coming from the top rather than from beneath, as it should with a stone. So, I figure that the stone didn’t do its job. Maybe it’s something to do with it being a convection oven? Anybody have any ideas?

The bread was quite tasty, tender, and generally wonderful. The rise was a bit abysmally slow, and I attribute that to the fact that I forgot to use something other than tap water in which to boil the potatoes. So, the poor wee yeasts were struggling for life with chlorine, not to mention that they’re this strange yeast we find over here, and that I’m not used to. I’ve one more can of the stuff, and then I’m switching back to my vacuum-sealed brick of yeast brought along from the US, which is quite familiar to me, if rather flavorless.

As far as what happened to these loaves, one of them went over to Holler, and the others … vanished mysteriously. Quite rapidly. Probably too rapidly. This type of thing is why we used to give bread away to our neighbors, but since we’re in the UK now, we’ll probably not have anybody to share with for another decade or so. 😉

So, enjoy the other versions, and thanks for listening to me ramble on about bread once again! Can you tell that we like it, over here?

Remembering to Look


Just before Thanksgiving, the International Club finally got around to taking us to what we’d seen on the Discovery Channel: the “Megastructure” formerly known as The Falkirk Wheel. And yes, it was as big an engineering geekfest as we’d dreamed. We got to play with mini models of the full scale wheel, which connects sixty-eight miles worth of canals and the Forth and Clyde, linking Glasgow to Edinburgh, east to west. We wandered through the interpretive displays, we craned our necks at the “double war hammer” as it slowly revolved to send boats up the loch to another waterway and back. When it was our turn, we lined up to settle into a long narrow boat which took its slow time to get into position and take us up that dramatic 100 feet in the air ourselves.

It was not quick. When they told us it would take an hour, we thought we’d be motoring up the canal a ways, but with the detailed safety protocol each boat has to undergo, and the generally relaxed air of the workmen, going UP, riding through the tiny section of canal, going down and turning around to go back the same way we came and down to the ground again took A FULL HOUR. We went no great distance forward, but the 100 feet or so into the air we went UP made it seem so.

Despite the gray slate color of the sky, it was a good day out for us. We realized we hadn’t been doing… anything lately. Nothing but working and worrying. Though we’ve gotten some good news — T. sold another manuscript, and D. is only two four papers away from ending the semester successfully — the idea of Thanksgiving away from loved ones dragged at our spirits. The change of pace presented by a day out even the iciest wind couldn’t dampen… until we got to Stirling.


We’re good with icy wind — we’ve gotten used to being cold as we walk. We hadn’t counted on rain, however, when the weather was in the low forties and the windchill factor made it seem like it was in the low thirties! We popped into a shoe store just to warm our faces, and the enthused sales women went on and on about how fabulous the snow would be this year.

We looked at each other. “Snow?” T. queried politely. “We were told it doesn’t snow that much in this elevation.”

“No? But it snows a bit every year, and this year — this year we’ll get tons,” we were told confidently. “And you’ll come back here to get your heavy boots,” the other clerk added.

Right.

It was at that point we decided that one more drafty castle was not on our agenda; we repaired immediately to a coffee shop to sip hot drinks and watch the sleety rain fall.


There is an office park next door to us and every morning, when D. leaves the building, T. leans out from five stories up to wave goodbye. The security guards from the other building watch this and sometimes smile. Various people hurrying to and from work glance up and look startled to see someone hanging their upper body from so far away, waving frantically. The ritual is its own little spot in the day and goes on every weekday morning and afternoon. Except when we forget to look.

It’s too easy to become distracted. Sometimes we are so busy cleaning and cooking
and putting away and thinking about what we are going to say to the realtor, the professor, the UPS guy, that we give each other a quick goodbye and go on about our duties. It never fails, however, that five minutes later it hits us — that we let the person we loved go back into their day without remembering to look at them and fix them in memory. It is such a balancing act to be in this life, and we are often too single-mindedly focused on meeting expectations and demands and due dates and doing well to remember to look at where we are and what we are doing and who we are with — and revel in it. We are consumed with busyness, from rewriting papers to revising novels, from reading tomes to writing book reviews. It’s easy to take the fact that we have more time in each other’s physical proximity for granted, and to take the idea of the person being “right there” as an excuse not to really see them. It’s easy to miss the people around us. It’s dangerously easy to neglect the frivolousness of dropping everything to lean out of a window, waving.

Remember to look. It’s a message leftover from the Spring, when we reveled in everything we saw; when almost everything was bright and colorful and filled with life. We looked, and felt ourselves blessed, and it is those images we now call up to take us through the darkness of winter.

Remember to look. Looking makes what’s in front of you worth seeing.

– D & T

This American Holiday

Thoreau, writing to H.G.O. Blake, once a Unitarian minister, in December of 1856:


“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite — only a sense of existence. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.”

Indefinite riches.

I think that’s the best description of what we have right now.

Indefinite plans.

Indefinite goals.

Indefinite futures.

Infinite wealth in indefinite riches.

We miss our friends and family in the United States, I think, the most today that we have since we’ve arrived. Today our thoughts are tinged with a bit of nostalgia for Thanksgiving holidays past. We’ll take a little time today to think of you all by name, by deed, by interaction and experience, even some of you who are unknown to us, and be thankful for your contribution to the experiences that we’re having. Even though it’s difficult not to be in a country that celebrates Thanksgiving, or to be surrounded by familiar traditions today, we wouldn’t trade our experiences here right now for that security, tempting though it might be. We’re so very grateful for the opportunity to do and be something completely unique and different.

We hope that today everyone indulges in the way that suits them best; whether in splendid isolation, or surrounded by friends or family; whether with a near-gluttonous feast or in acetic selectiveness of one favored food. We wish everyone relaxation and warmth and good books and the leisure to read them. H A P P Y * * * T H A N K S G I V I N G !

– D & T

A Tale of Two (Apple) Sauces













We begin our tale of two applesauces by introducing our 3kg bag of apples, courtesy of our local Box Scheme (everything seems to be a scheme here in Scotland – it baffles us, as a scheme has quite a negative connotation in the US, but apparently is perfectly reasonable over here), which arrived at our door by accident. Yes, we’d ordered windfall organic apples — once. The second week they arrived, we were a little nonplussed. So, what does one do with 6.5 pounds of apples? Sauce presented itself, naturally!

We fortunately brought out our beloved manual peeler to the UK & turned the handle for quite some time, ending up with a bowl of cores, a pile of peelings, and a heaping pot full of apples. Adding some spices (ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg), a squeeze of lemon, and a bit of time and heat produced sauce! We prefer lovely, chunky sauce (we added about 4 granny smith apples, as well, to increase the chunk/tangy factor). But that’s not the end of the story, quite … as we also made sauce from the peels! If you look carefully at the little glass, you’ll be able to pick out the two different colors of sauce. The peels got whizzed up with the stick blender (yes, it does everything in this kitchen). Funnily enough, it kind of tasted like pear. Strange, but good.

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You might wonder what to do with so much applesauce (other than eat it out of the pot, warm, with a bit of freshly grated cinnamon and nutmeg, or as a snack with unsweetened soy yogurt and a drizzle of honey – yum).

Applesauce keeps pretty well, so don’t panic if you can’t think of two hundred things to do with it right off. We use ours in a variety of ways. Some vegans use applesauce as an egg substitute – 1/3 c. per egg called for. While we’ve never personally tried that, we do know that applesauce is a great substitute for added fat in baking. You can substitute up to 3/4 of the amount of butter with applesauce when making muffins — and voilá, your muffins or quick breads are a little less pound-friendly. And then, there’s applesauce cake… which is deadly dangerous and addictive…

Applesauce Spice Cake
This recipe is a fiddled-with-it adaptation of one from Vegetarian Times.

* 1/2 cup molasses (or treacle if you’re in the UK!**)
* 1 cup applesauce
* 1 tsp. freshly ground cinnamon
* 1/2 tsp. cloves
* 1 tsp. baking powder
* 1/4 tsp. baking soda
* 1 3/4 cup flour (I use whole wheat pastry flour)
* 2 Tbsp. ginger (I use grated fresh and candied as well – it’s a SPICE cake!)

Combine the molasses and applesauce in a large bowl. Combine remaining ingredients and stir into the liquid. (If the batter seems very dry, add a little more applesauce or a little milk.) Bake in a nonstick or pan-sprayed 8*8-inch baking pan, in a 350 degree oven, for 30-45 minutes or until it tests done.

The optional ginger makes an amazingly good ginger bread. Another option is leaving out the ginger and adding 3 or 4 tablespoons of a good quality cocoa powder and a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips to make a tasty but not very rich chocolate cake. If you use cocoa alone you might need to add extra sweetening, or really go all out on the frosting, but that depends on your taste.

We used the peels of the apples because… well, our parents weren’t old enough to go through the Depression (the most depressing thing that happened to them was probably JFK being shot and The Supremes splitting up), but both of us were brought up with parents who wanted us to clean our plates and not waste… so perfectly good apple peels being tossed, especially when we don’t have a compost pile here, made us a little sick. So, we knew we had to use them. One idea for using peels is to dip them in a little lemon juice to stop them from browning and then chop them and toss them with balsamic vinegar, stone ground mustard, and a little maple syrup as an accompaniment for salad of spinach, red onions, and mandarin orange slices. It’s very haute cuisine, yet simple.

Our first thought, because of the abundant pectin beneath the skin, was to make Apple Peel Jelly. Though we’ve heard it’s gorgeous and delicious, that really doesn’t taking advantage of the fiber in the peels, which is also so good and cholesterol-lowering, so we couldn’t use all of them that way. We came up with making a sauce from the peels – ’cause our immersion blender can do anything. And it turns out we were right not to toss them anyway — Cornell University published a study this last spring about the cancer-preventative properties found in apple peels. Score one for us!


**Treacle is a real pain — because we can’t find any unsulphured molasses, we’re using something called ‘molasses sugar’ which is dark, dark, DARK brown, dense and moist sugar. We just add a little extra applesauce to compensate for the moisture and go on. We’re learning to do that a lot here!



3 Oat Breads



Since we’re not so close to anyone here & our neighbors haven’t discovered that we bake yet (meaning that we get to eat most of it), I branched out a bit in my baking, to include three varieties of bread from one base batch. Starting with my basic recipe (4 cups water, 1 Tbsp yeast, 1 tsp salt, 2 cups oat bran, 2 cups flax seeds, 1 cup steamed whole oats, flour), I rolled up one plain loaf (in the middle), one Olive / Orange Peel / Onion loaf (to the left), and 2 Ginger / Raisin / Orange Peel / Lemon Peel / Brown Sugar / Cinnamon / Clove / Nutmeg loaves. Sadly, there are only about 6 slices of the plain left. We had the last slices of the raisin loaves this evening, and the olive one went … well, probably within 3 days.

Since developing film involves two trips to the camera shop, and the camera shop is over the hill from the University, I’ve been kind of holding back on getting film developed. It’s a bit of a slog, frankly, and out of my usual route to classes. So, I encourage you to visit the latest chunk of pictures up on the Flickr site.