Rule 1: Don't worry about baking too many cookies. I'm guessing that I baked at least 60 dozen cookies this year. That was for 9 gift baskets, 3 holiday dinners and/or parties, surprise treats to someone special, etc.. As of this evening, I don't have that many cookies left, less than 10 dozen. 10 dozen cookies really aren't that much. I did mostly small cookies, and I could have easily made more. Actually, I made another batch of Pfeffernusse cookies today. I only had a dozen or so left, and they are actually my favorite cookie right now. They are the one sweet that I've made this year that I still consistently enjoy. They aren't sickeningly sweet, and also have a pleasant bite to them, courtesy of a lot of strong spices (black pepper, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves) and dark molasses. They also have a nice bite to them, dense, but moist and chewy. They're fantastic with tea, and since I have so many, I'll just vacuum seal most of them, and I'll get at least a month out of them, probably more.
Otherwise, I can't stand the smell or taste of cookies or candy. As I said in a previous entry, if you want to get rid of a sweet tooth, bake a lot of sweets or make a lot of candy. The smell of sugar baking and sugar syrup cooking gets nauseating after awhile. It's like when you go the the carnival and smell the cotton candy, waffle cones and funnel cakes everywhere: it smells great for about 10 minutes, then after that, it makes you want to vomit.
Rule 2: Keep cookies that are dusted with powdered sugar to a minimum when you are making cookies in advance (I start a month and a half before Christmas, and store them in my garage, which stays below 55 degrees in the winter, usually colder). I get sheet cake boxes at the local bakery and stack them in the box with layers of cardboard and baker's sheets (kind of like parchment but different) between each layer, and only put one variety in a box. You don't want strong flavors like cinnamon, and peanut butter and molasses to taint the flavor of a more delicate cookie. But back to powdered sugar-dusted cookies: the coating just doesn't hold up, and the powdered sugar attracts moisture, which can make the cookies quite soggy. For some reason, the Pfeffernusse held up great, even though they are coated in powdered sugar, but they are the only one exception. The Linzer cookies still taste good, but the beauty of the dusting of the powdered sugar doesn't last, and the moisture wicking of the sugar, combined with the jam in the center can sog the cookies down a bit. Those are cookies that are meant to baked at the last minute, that is when they are their best. Same goes for Chocolate Crinkles. And while we're on the subject of powdered sugar: with any cookie that is either rolled in or dusted with powdered sugar, don't be stingy, go for broke. Especially for cookies that are rolled in the sugar, slather it on. Dusting can be a little more subtle.
Rule 3: For me, the jury is out on sugar cookies. Mine were good, I frosted them with fondant and they were sweet, thin and slightly chewy, just the way that I like them. Decorating them, however, is tedious, and in the end, I think my time could be better spent. Next year, I think I will substitute Pingoles (Italian Christmas cookies with pine nuts and marzipan) for the Linzer or the sugar cookies. Hey, I love them (the Pignoles), so I may as well get something for me out of all that labor. Now that it's over, I have 11 months to plan out my baking and candy making for next year's holiday season. I'm sure every year I'll iron out a new wrinkle or two, as well as learn from a mistake or two.
Rule 4: It is fairly impossible to make too much candy, especially peanut brittle. Everyone has gone bonkers over my peanut brittle this year; I think I could have made just that and people would have been satisfied; well, except for me. This year, 4 batches of fudge seemed to be pretty good. I get 49 squares per batch, and even though my pieces are small (1" x 1"), fudge is rich, and a little goes a long way. But good fudge seems to always be a hit, especially with the kids. The Divinity this year was quite the hit. Most people have never even had it, and nearly everyone went crazy over it. This was the first year that I put dried fruit in it; I did candied orange peel, and it was great. Next year I might do a batch with candied ginger. And since we're on the subject of Divinity, that is the perfect segue to:
Rule 5: Do not make 4 batches of Divinity in a row, without a break, unless you want to by a new stand mixer every year. I'm not joking; I did exactly that this year, and by the 3rd batch that night (and 6th overall), the motor was really starting to not sound good. Once the nougat started to firm up, it was inflicting a terrible strain on the motor, and I heard gears starting to sound like they were getting chewed up, and I lost a very noticeable amount of power to the beaters. This is a 25 year old Kitchen-aid stand mixer. It's built like a tank, and it weighs about what one weighs. Hopefully, I can replace the motor at a reasonable cost. If I buy a new one, it won't be nearly as well-made as the old ones are. Kind of like my 25 year old Cuisinart food processor. They don't make theme like that anymore. Mine is as good if not better than any commercial one you can get nowadays. I thought I burned out the motor a month or 2 ago - took it into the repair shop, he looks at it, and sees that the shaft cover (a plastic sleeve over the blade shaft from the motor) was cracked. Easy $15.00 repair, and a huge relief. When I told the guy that I thought I had burned out the motor he laughed. I asked what was so funny and he said "I have yet to see a motor burn out on a Cuisinart this old. This is from when they knew how to make motors, it's a 1 hp motor with a huge coil." I should have known that; whenever I pulse mine, the motor is so powerful, it will make the whole machine jump about an inch across the counter, any counter. I love that thing.
Rule 6: Don't think homemade gifts, if done well, are any kind of easy; they aren't, but making them is very gratifying. You need to know what you're getting into, however, and be very organized, planned out and disciplined. Even something as seemingly easy as assembling a gift basket can take hours. I have huge respect for anybody that does this for a living, it's tedious, time-consuming and at times, mind-numbing. I didn't just plop some crap in a basket and call it a day; these are professional quality. I made little covers for the canned food lids out of red and green gingham, made my own loose fill in my shredder by shredding red and green printer paper, and once assembled, sealed them with shrink wrap. Here is a photo of 6 of the gift baskets that I assembled in the last 2 days:
.jpg)
Do not put this project off til the last minute. Start assembling your supplies months ahead of time. If you have a craft/sewing room, even better, because it's a messy cluttered undertaking. Plan, plan, plan, and then plan some more. Right now, my sewing room looks like a giant ribbon exploded in there. I tried to go in today and clean up, but I had to just close the door, it was too overwhelming. I'll deal with it tomorrow.
It has been a rather surreal holiday season, much as they all have been for the last three years. Brian and I broke off our relationship on Monday, and it did cast a pall over the rest of the week. It doesn't matter if it was the right thing to do or not. It doesn't matter if you want to do it or not, it is still painful. You can't spend 2 1/2 years with someone in your life and not have their absence make an impact. That said, I am looking forward to turning the next part of my life into a more disciplined and goals-oriented soul-searching and personal values assessment.
I don't know if this is universal, but I know for me that as I have gotten older I have become more regimented and more set in my ways. I have also become more eccentric, and it's really nice to not have to apologize for or explain away my eccentricities, I can just let them be. It's far more relaxing than the alternative of trying to change the habits of a nearly 50 year old man, especially since there really isn't a compelling reason to do so.
I do, however, wish the outcome with Brian had been different, but wishing does not make it so. If it was meant to be, it still would be. I also think I let myself rush into a relationship far before I was ready to do it. That is nobody's fault but my own, I could have put the brakes on at any time, but I didn't, but hindsight is always 20/20. There was a lot of good that came of the relationship: I was introduced to and made a part of of a very artistically talented community, and it sparked a lot of creativity in me that I didn't know I had. Brian is a wonderful guy; talented artistically, sweet, soft-hearted, kind, well-liked and respected by his peers, and even better, he is a loyal, loving and hella funny guy. I have many fun, hilarious, outrageous and interesting memories from these last 30 months, ones that I'll cherish for a lifetime. But in the end, despite all that, I am not the guy he wants, needs and deserves - with me he is settling, instead of having a man in his life that shares the same goals and same way of looking at life. The old saying says that opposites attract, and that is true, but I now understand that the attraction is the excitement of the differences. Once you have to start intertwining your lives, what attracted you can become the personality type that pushes all the wrong buttons. If I lose his friendship that will only make this whole mess sadder, but I'm hoping for the best in that regard, and preparing for the worst. Hopefully I'll get the former.
All this really shouldn't be any harder because of the holidays, at least theoretically. Christmas is just another day that has arbitrarily been assigned December 25 and labeled as "special" and "important". Don't get me wrong, I love the holiday season, and it holds a lot of meaning to me, but at the same time, I also have to remember to keep it in perspective. In the grand scheme of things, it is just another day on the cosmic wheel of life.
I really still love many of the traditions of the season, save the materialistic orgy that ensues for most people. But I love the holidays of the Advent. I'm a sucker for cultural traditions, for which there are many this time of year. For the most part I avoid the feeding frenzy of consumerism gone amok, and just enjoy the traditional celebrations. I've integrated many cultural traditions into Christmas over the years: English (I'm 100% brit by descent), Scandinavian (specifically Swedish and Finnish), Italian and French. For me, that part of the holiday season used to be very gratifying, and is starting to be so again. Next year, my goal is to make it to Sweden to celebrate St. Lucy Day (December 13), and then be home in time for Christmas. If I can't make it to Sweden, I'm going to try to have my own little St. Lucy Day party, and have any friends over who are interested in being a part of it. I'm thinking the way to go would be a traditional Swedish dinner, including of course, Lussekatter, followed by some caroling, warm glüg and flaky cookies and sweet cakes, and making our own little festival of lights to light up a long dark winter night. As I think I've said before, Celebrating St. Lucy Day in Sweden has been a dream of mine, and my goal is next year, but we'll see how the money situation is and how adventurous I'm feeling (that is usually not a barrier for me to travel). Sweden is very secular (REALLY secular), but this is one of the most important national holidays, and as I've said before, one that speaks to me deeply and poignantly, for some unkwown reason.
This last Sunday was week 28 of 56 in the Interferon protocol, and I don't know if it really felt monumental to me or not. I did make note of it, processing that I was hopefully coasting downhill from here on out. It's a nice idea, but with Interferon, there is no coasting. Right now, it's more like Groundhog Day. All the side effects that I had in early therapy: mouth sores, psoriasis flaring up, boils on the skin, 1 or 2 at at time and a continuation of the nausea, especially in the morning. It's weird, now I'm wondering if my cluster of adverse reactions is going to be cyclical; that it will basically run the same course, with the same adverse reactions at the same time as before. It's an interesting postulation, but probably unlikely.
It's funny, but since I cut all my hair off, it seems like I'm losing less. This is of course untrue, it's just that shorter hairs look like less hairs, and I'm likely missing many that just get washed down the drain. I remember that when my hair was long, it looked like there was a mouse in the shower drain every morning; now it's barely noticeable. This is, of course because I'm losing 1"-4" hairs instead of 9-16 inch hairs that I was losing a month ago. It also looks a lot less thin now that it's short; I would have expected the opposite, but in retrospect it makes sense, since what hair I didn't lose was fried and fine in texture, making it look stringy and thin long. Now that it's short it still looks finer than my hair usually is, but not necessarily thin. If it's going to exact any permanent changes on my hair, I would love it if it would straighten it. I'm tired of curly hair, straight is so much easier to manage and neater in appearance. Somehow, unfortunately, I doubt that I can make special requests of the drug, however nice that thought may be.
I continue to be frustrated by my lack of energy and my severely compromised physical endurance. Over the last many years it's been far from optimum; Chronic Fatigue Syndrome saw to that, but Interferon actually found a way to make the fatigue even worse, and then it put a cherry on top of that by making me so anemic that I can't even walk up one single hilly block in San Francisco without getting so winded that I often need to stop mid-block to catch my breath. That is truly frustrating. Again, I can fight a futile battle with this, or I can just surrender to and accept my limitations. I keep reminding myself that it won't likely feel this bad forever, and there is a payoff, but in the moment, it's usually cold comfort. Right now, I'm just trying as much as possible to make lemonade (i.e., when life gives you lemons...). Sometimes you have to really dig deep to put a positive spin on every situation. Good news, however, is that I'm still able to do so, for the most part.
I'm still cranky and bitchy and terse all the time. That is one good thing about being on medical house arrest (as I call it); I'm not going around either constantly apologizing for myself or biting my tongue so often that my teeth have left permanent grooves on my tongue. It's also allowing me to indulge my daily weepies. It's really nice to be able to just burst into tears without embarrassment (I do not like to be seen crying, not in the least), and actually enjoy the catharsis. As I've said before, these moments are never ones where I really feel depressed, I clam up when I'm depressed. The only way that I can accurately describe it is to say that it feels very purging and cleansing (an emotional enema perhaps?), and I always feel a deeply profound sense of relief after these episodes. Hell, sometimes I'll inflict them upon myself by watching a sad movie or overly dramatic TV drama. Law and Order, SVU has been my go-to device as of late. It doesn't matter what episode, pretty much everyone I've seen lately has incited the same response in me. Go figure.
Once again, as it always seems to happen, I look at the clock and it's after 2am. That seems to be my witching hour. I would love to keep going, but my brain and eyes aren't cooperating, so I'll go ahead and publish now, even though this chapter is likely incomplete at this point. I'm trying to honor the promise of an online friend who has been following my adventures and wants to know how the holidays all turned out for me. So here's to you Ray, enjoy.
Doggydad's Life Now: The Viral Monologues by Parry Tallmadge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doggydad.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.runnymedesilkys.com.
<>
No comments:
Post a Comment