Frost

Nights have been clear and frosty, here, with temps hovering around 30 at night. Not cold, but certainly chilly. Going out in the morning shows a fascinating world of tiny ice crystals.

Freesia leaves

Lantana branch

Dead Sycamore leaf on grass

Fence rails

It's beautiful. I like when the sun hits the fence rails, and then they start to steam. I wonder how the tiny hummingbirds make it through the night, or any birds, really. How do they stay warm? But somehow they do it, because they start visiting the fountain very early. Today, I watched an Anna's Hummingbird feed from the Manzanita, then take a drink from the water feature.

You can see his pink throat, top left. He's just landing at the fountain.

I also watched the Lesser Goldfinches drink and bathe, and the Black-Capped Chickadees eat from the feeders.

Later, a whole flock of Titmice and Pygmy Nuthatches came by for the seed. They were too quick and shy for my fumbling photography skills.

But I was able to capture an industrious native bumble bee sipping from the Manzanita blossoms. This is a queen, just living on her own until spring, when she can make pollen loaves underground and lay one egg on each loaf.

I seem to have a lot of different kinds of Inky Cap mushrooms in my yard. This group came up in a moist, shady section, appearing to be dusted with powdered sugar.

The frost has killed many flowers, most of them non-natives.

I won't cut them back, even though they are ugly, until threat of frost is over - the more dead stuff I leave, the more protection the plants will have through further frost.

On the flip side, lots of plants are thriving:

Blueberry bush

Asian Braising Greens

Garlic

Rainbow Chard

Herbs

Red Russian Kale

Sugar Snap Peas

Poppy

Romaine

Shallot

Spinach

The colder temperatures feel right, and make being outside exhilarating. The views are clear and the sky is a beautiful blue, and all our December rain made the earth green.

Can you find the clump of mistletoe?

Now, we need more rain.

Books!

My favorite Christmas gift every year is a box of books from my parents. This year, my box included several cookbooks, and Tom also got me one! I've perused them all in the last few days and yep, I'm inspired.

The book from America's Test Kitchen is great for standards; I made a buttermilk coleslaw recipe from it the other night, and it was tasty. You can always trust their recipes, as they have tested them so thoroughly. Tom and I are both interested in preserving food, hence Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Practical Pantry. Wow. This is an exhaustive resource for preserving; I can't even imagine using every recipe in this book. The Nourished Kitchen is a beautiful book filled with recipes using whole, nutritious, unprocessed foods. The Kitchen Ecosystem is set up in a systems-fashion and goes by ingredient, using a sort of flow chart for each one, with recipes for eating fresh, preserving, using the preserves, and using the scraps. It's a very different way of looking at recipes and ingredients. And finally, Fresh from the Farm is a seasonal cookbook - what's ripe is what you use to make dinner. This is helpful for those of us cooking out of our gardens, or from a CSA.

I also was the recipient of several mushroom books, yay! One I borrowed from a neighbor, one was given to me by a dear friend (Field Guide to Mushrooms of Western North America), and the last was in my book box (Mycophilia). Two are for identification and one is stories, history, and facts from the same author as Kitchen Ecosystems. I'm having fun going through these, too.

Speaking of cooking, it's hard to go back to normal eating after the holidays, isn't it? (It's in fact so hard that instead of typing 'cooking' just then, first I actually typed 'cookies.') My body is craving nutritious food, but my mind is craving sweet doughy things. Ack. So we've had simple dinners here at home the last few days. The aforementioned coleslaw with a vinegary pulled pork. Roasted chicken with Brussels sprouts and tiny potatoes. Italian Wedding Soup, using the stock from the chicken, greens from the garden, and meatballs. Delicious, plain food, geared to provide our bodies with what they really need.

However there is still leftover chocolate and a few stray Christmas cookies at dessert time. Hey! Moderation, right?

Today I've been reading Jacques Pepin's autobiography. It's full of what can only be described as fancy food! It does sound tasty. Maybe in a month, I'll be ready to try some rich French sauces.

Homemade Suet Cakes

On Christmas Eve, my mom made a wonderful prime rib. When it came time to do the dishes, she decanted the drippings from the roasting pan into a mason jar to save for broth, of course, but she was left with a large amount of rendered beef fat. I mentioned that it might be good to have it for some purpose or another, and then Tom thought maybe he'd make plum pudding with it, so we brought it home. Today I took it out and made it into homemade suet cakes for the birds.

Suet cakes aren't expensive, but I thought it would be fun to try my own. I found this great tutorial at Instructables and loosely used their method.

First I melted the beef fat, which had hardened in the fridge, down to a liquid using low heat.

Man, this smelled good. Suddenly I had a dog in the kitchen, watching my every move, and drooling.

After the fat was completely melted, I took it off the heat and added a substantial amount of peanut butter. Then bird seed, until it was a very chunky mix of goodness.

There's a great store near me called East Bay Nature that sells bird seed by the pound, specifically mixed just for our area. I would have much rather used their seed, but since I already had to go to Safeway this morning, I just bought generic. Not the best quality, but will do in a pinch.

I poured it into a tupperware container and put it in the fridge to harden. It didn't take long. I cut it with a sharp knife and pried a chunk of it out - not easy. Very sticky. My peanut butter ratio must have been too high.

I slipped the little chunk into my suet feeder (reserving the remainder in the fridge) and hung it in a Chinese Pistache tree, next to the cute feeders Mom gave the kids for Christmas. This is very near the water feature and many birds hang out in this tree, after bathing. Plus, the house you see behind the fence belongs to our wonderful neighbors who have many feeders, too, so it's a popular area for birds.

We'll see who visits. I'm expecting chickadees and finches, mostly. We do get titmice and pygmy nuthatches at the bird feeders, and scrub jays of course, and probably a squirrel or two. I wonder if the sweet little black phoebe we've been seeing in the yard will partake?

Christmas Cookies

Our family has had a wonderful friendship with another family for three generations. Somehow, through 45 years, we have lived practically next door to each other, first in Maryland, and then in California. The grandkids of the original friends are now growing up together, though with a more challenging distance, as Adam and Kate are in Northern California and Olivia and Luca are in Southern California. Still, we manage to meet several times a year and celebrate major holidays together.

One non-negotiable date is for Christmas cookies. We've been meeting at one of the matriarch's homes for this for 11 years now. She makes a wonderful dough ahead of time, from a recipe that has been passed down in her family, and the kids cut out the cookies into various shapes. When the kids were little, they basically just made a mess, but as they've grown older, they've been able to roll, cut, and bake more and more cookies. This year, I think they would have kept going as long as there was dough!

After the cookies are baked comes the decorating with Nana's buttercream. Again, when the kids were young, this stage mostly involved eating, but now they like the decorating best. As the years have gone by, second generation buddies Greta and I have stretched our creative wings and gotten more adventurous with our decorating. I remember graduating from spreading buttercream with knives to cobbling makeshift pastry bags together using ziplocs, which was a major step up in our skillz. 

This year, I found an interesting post on The Kitchn, my go-to place for new and different food ideas, and thought this icing technique might raise our game even further. I bought a giant pack of four- ounce Wilton mini squeeze bottles on Amazon, and spent a morning making icing out of powdered sugar and milk. This is exceedingly easy - just dump some powdered sugar into a bowl, add a little bit of milk, and whisk. Add more milk to make it the consistency you want. If you make it too thin, add more powdered sugar. You can't mess it up. It has a very simple taste; it's not as delicious as buttercream, but this icing allows the flavor of the cookie to come through.

I find that many fancy food colorings add a bad taste to icing, so this year I went back to the standard liquid stuff you can find at any grocery store. Certainly not good for you, but just once a year, I think it's gonna be ok. And it's tasteless and makes great colors. I made a rainbow and filled the squeeze bottles.

This technique had a learning curve. Unlike buttercream, this liquid frosting floods the cookie and everything runs. We had a few melted-looking snowmen and listing trees, at first.

We finally got the hang of it, realizing that you need to flood the cookie with a base coat first, let it dry, and then add decoration. Either that, or make the icing thicker to begin with, which I'll try next year.

Greta also stumbled upon a great way of making a sort of tie-dye with the colors, and dipping the cookies into it. This yielded some very interesting results. Here's one of Kate's:

Greta always makes cute cookies:

The cookies look great all together.

And, the best part is, no matter how they look, they taste AMAZING!

I found this picture from seven years ago - so fun to look back at these cuties.

And here they are this year, teenagers or almost-teens:

Watch out for sisters with rolling pins!

I hope all of you had a blessed Christmas, filled with family, friends, and love. Our plans for the coming week include researching chicken coop building plans, taking the dog for long walks, and trying to keep the nighttime frost from killing the winter veg (so far, the hoop houses are winning!). I'm actively seeking chicken advice, so if you've got some, lay it on me.

What the Rain Brings

We've had rain almost every day here in Northern California, for the past few weeks. It's sorely needed and we're all grateful, but our wildfire-razed hills and unprepared infrastucture in the valleys makes it hard to take in and absorb all the bounty. We've had flooding, electrical lines down, and uprooted trees. None of that has happened here at Poppy Corners - at least, nothing more dire than the 'river' we get in front of our house, which is a permanent fixture in rainy winters. Our garden seems to withstand quite a bit of moisture, which is one of the benefits of having an abundance of organic matter - it just holds on to the water more efficiently, allowing less to run off.

I haven't gotten out much in the yard, however, because - well - it's kinda miserable to garden in the rain. All the greens and peas are growing gangbusters, the shallots and garlic are doing brilliantly. The broccoli, beets, and kohlrabi are another matter. I never seem to have luck with these vegetables, no matter which season I plant them. Luckily there is plenty of other green stuff to make up for that.

Red Russian Kale, my favorite!

Snap peas

I've been harvesting braising greens from Renee's Garden (Asian stir fry mix) and eating them every day, they are just so delicious right out of the garden. The spinach and chard are almost ready, and even the romaine is making a go of it.

Another thing the rain brought, in abundance, is mushrooms.

I'm really fascinated by fungi. I've found a great guide online, but it really is hard to identify some of these. Ideally I'd like to take a class, but so far the only one I've found is in SF (the Mycological Society of San Francisco), and it seems a long way to go for a passing fancy.

On my walks with Joe, I see changes all around, as creeks and streams start to run again, and vernal pools fill in the hills. I hear bullfrogs and wonder how many eggs, deeply buried in mud, just hatched in the past few weeks.

Joe loves to eat the fresh, new grass bursting out everywhere in the open space. Walks take twice as long, because he's snacking his way through them.

In my yard, I noticed that the manzanita is blooming. The hummingbirds are happy, but this is occuring at least a month earlier than it should. Also, my neighbor's narcissus are blooming, and that's at least two months early. While the rain is nice, we also need some colder weather (and some frozen water in the form of snow in the mountains!), and that hasn't happened yet; I think the plants are a little confused.

We finally got out to cut down our Christmas tree. We went to Castro Valley Christmas Tree Farm, where we were told that the trees grew very little this year, due to the drought. We picked out a very small tree and it took about one minute to chop it down.

I don't think the Christmas trees will have that problem next year. So far, it looks like it's going to be a wet winter. Stuff is growing EVERYWHERE, even in unexpected places.

Now that I've sent out my holiday cards, I can share them with you. I decided to paint a seed packet of sorts, and include a few seeds for each recipient. I enjoyed working on this project, and smile at the thought of California Poppies growing in little swathes all over the world.

I also thought you'd get a kick out of my honey labels - we gave honey to all the kids' teachers this year (just a taste! there really wasn't enough for much more than that.):

We're a brand!

With just one more day of work and school, we're looking forward to having a couple of weeks off to enjoy Christmas - family, church, food, presents, concerts, and of course, getting stuff done in the yard. I have several projects lined up, including moving the remainder of that pile of mulch, and taking a trip to the dump. It's possible that we'll be part of an urban farm tour coming up in the next year (details to follow, if it comes through), and preparation for that needs to start now.

oh! I almost forgot a recipe I wanted to share with you: Lacinato Kale Gratin. This was incredibly delicious and we had zero leftovers. I used the kale they recommended (also called Dinosaur Kale), because of the large, puffy leaves, but I suppose any kale or hearty green would work. I also took the cream down to two cups, and used leftover gruyere I had in the fridge. This was an amazing recipe that will be in our regular rotation. Enjoy!