Thursday, December 23rd, 2004

Time	Event
9:30a	Cousin Beryl's Fruit Cake Recipe By request of arielstarshadow. This cake is remarkably easy to make. It's possible to make even if you can't cook at all -- and I can tell you this for sure because I personally made it before I could cook. It's also not really a fruitcake. Think of those dark heavy fruitcakes full of weird things like (ick) candied peel and (nasty) glace cherries, and even (horrors!) little candies, as heavy as a brick, as rich as Croesus and as dry as New Mexico. Then forget them. This is a light sweet mechanism for delivering excellent dried fruit. It might be better not to call it a fruitcake at all. If you love heavy dark fruitcake with brandy in, go and find a recipe for one by googling on "fruitcake, brandy, candied peel". This cake is as good as the dried fruit. Buy golden raisins and plump sultanas and big luscious dark raisins. If you like currants, buy currants -- personally, I think currants don't travel. In Greece they are wonderful, plump and tasty, and once, in Pireaus, before dawn, waiting for a boat I came around a corner to where there was a boat unloading currants, and the wonderful smell was solid enough to bite and it made me quite drunk. However, once exported they tend to become wizened and comparatively tasteless. ( The actual recipe ) (11 Comments | Comment on this)
6:50p	Pretty much ready It's nearly Christmas, which is a quaint ethnic ritual thing we do at this time of year in my tribe, which involves giving things wrapped in coloured paper to people we like. I don't know why, but I've been doing out and out Christmas shopping today, unmitigated present buying, and I wanted to say I find it much less repulsive here than I used to anywhere I've lived in Britain, despite the fact that the weather today is about as yucky as could be imagined. (Freezing rain on snow, followed by rain on freezing rain on snow. It's going to be like an ice-rink tomorrow, because we have a predicted low of -12 tonight.) I seem to have done the whole thing this year entirely without going to malls, except Alexis Nihon which is the bit of the GUE between Atwater metro and the bus stop, and without going to very many shops that employ more than half a dozen people. This wasn't a deliberate policy: I generally avoid malls because they tend to make me claustrophobic and anyway I hate the shops in them. But it was a good policy and one worth remembering, because I have bought a lot of things without once feeling oppressed. Something else that helps is that awful Christmas music isn't as ubiquitous -- there's quite a bit, but it isn't impossible to get away from. Partly this is because there's genuinely less of it, and partly because awful Christmas music in French isn't horrible in the same way, because it's unfamiliar and in an ignorable language. This works all year with advertising, it just doesn't importune in the same way because it's not in English and I have to reach out to it rather than having it forced down my gullet. I notice this a lot when I go somewhere English speaking. Anyway, I am a mighty gatherer and have bought presents for my family, which I will wrap and put in bags for them to take turns opening on Saturday morning, as part of an ancient tradition that to my certain knowledge dates back at least as far as 1964. (12 Comments | Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2004/12/23 [Calendar]

Next Day >>