every day is a good day
Making bread ranks up there along with making tofu and petting your cat as one of the most relaxing, heart warming things you can do. Sometimes I add nutmeg, or allspice, or coriander to the dough. Today it’s dillweed.
It’s not something to rush. Adding just a bit of yeast to the dough and letting it slowly rise overnight makes dough that is as soft and pliable as a baby’s butt. Tomorrow the house will fill with the wonderful aroma of baking bread.
Hmm, so this is what a shiitake feels like when you cut it up after just picking it. I highly recommend starting a day by making an omelette using mushrooms plucked at the time you break the eggs. It really ups the flavor a notch.
Getting a New Years card from a dear friend on the other side of the ocean ups the day a notch too. It’s like the old days. The card took a month to get here even though it was sent air mail. It makes you wonder where all that plane went. Guam? The Marianas? Hop-scotched through Micronesia? Each of the Aleutian Islands?
What is the proper etiquette when your cat has made itself comfortable on your chest and you would like to get up and do something? Are you supposed to wait five minutes before moving? Pick it up and find an equally comfortable place for it? After living so many decades, why don’t I know all these rules?
Fortunately the cat moved while I was still deciding what the polite thing to do was. I had branches to chip. Lots of branches. Freshly chipped branches make soft, beautiful forest paths. Even dogs like walking on them.
When I went to bed last night, I knew the morning was going to be magical. I could feel it in the way the cold night air stung my nose. This morning we had our first ice. You can have many a frosty morning before first ice arrives, the morning when the surface of the puddles freeze over. The leaves which yesterday were floating on the small pond by the front entrance, are trapped in a layer of clear, cold ice this morning.
We’ve gone beyond dainty frost to the wilds of hoar frost and ice hair, phantasmagorical creations of a deep freeze. They can look like an army of flesh-cutting glass shards to soft, cuddly blankets you want to wrap around your shivering body.
The freezing nights do wonder for kale. Icy weather turns the starches in kale to sugars, making it much milder than kale picked during the summer. It becomes a mild, crunchy green, great for salads. It’s the middle of November and I’m still harvesting a bin of salad greens for Tweets every week. I wonder sometimes where the kale and other salad greens I gather each week end up. I imagine travelers stopping in at Tweets, devouring my eggs and nibbling on my greens, only to fly off that night or the next day to the far corners of the earth. By the time the kale comes out of their bottoms, it could be on the other side of the world. Bon voyage my hearty greens. Send a postcard if you can.
When I first brewed a cup of Yogi Tea’s Egyptian Licorice tea, I wondered how it could be so sweet. There was no sugar listed on the ingredients, just licorice root, cinnamon bark, orange peel, ginger root, cardamom seed, black pepper, clove bud, natural and organic flavors, and essential oils.
Curious as to what could be making it so sweet, I purchased some licorice root because I knew what all the other ingredients tasted like. I ground it up and made a tea with it Wow! So that’s why the Egyptian Licorice tea was so sweet. I was even more curious.
I grew up where there was no licorice candy. The first time I had it as a child, my reaction was, “This is icky. People eat this?” It put me off from touching licorice for a long time, but grinding licorice root and tasting it made me explore this interesting root. It is glycyrrhizin in licorice which makes it so sweet. Glycyrrhizin is 50 times sweeter than sugar, and explains why licorice in Chinese is 甘草 which translates to sweet-甘 and grass-草.
I’m having a lot of fun making teas with licorice root. A bit of mint, some allspice, cloves, slivers of garlic, ground with licorice root is today’s tea. Fresh tea every day. Why not? I grind coffee every morning, why not tea?
Licorice has a long history of being used by peoples around the world as a medicinal herb. There are dangers in consuming too much of it, so be curious and read up on it before using it.