Woke up early and went for a bracing walk with a few friends — sun rising like a thunderclap, birds all singing at once, cloudless skies. Temperatures soaring by 5am.
Not bracing at all, that adjective is quite wrong; it was a leisurely amble with pauses to yawn.The smell of eucalyptus on the hilltop was bracing in a medicinal way and there were grey squirrels darting up and down the trunks of oak trees. Last week I read a review of a book entitled Outwitting Squirrels. It can’t be done.
Back home I read American recipes for Thanksgiving turkey and looked at pics of my friend Annie and her family enjoying a dinner together. How lovely.
Said to the housemate and a neighbour, ‘I’m thinking of stuffing and roasting a Thanksgiving sort of turkey for Christmas. With cranberry relish (à la Ms Moon) and Mary Christine’s pumpkin pie and butternut squash with seven spices from Lebanon (à la Syd) and Pam’s shoe peg corn with cream cheese, lots of butter and chopped green chillies and jalapenos.’
‘You’re completely mad,’ they both said in unison. ‘The temperature here at Christmas reaches 40 degrees Celsius/104 degrees Fahrenheit. Who eats a stuffed roast turkey in a heatwave? What people want to eat is watermelon and ice cream.’
So that is that.
My neighbour B came around and gave me a basket of apricots from her tree, gorgeous and blushing red. Unfortunately they are mouth-puckeringly sour, so I am going to make apricot crumble with lots of brown demerara sugar.
Still in mild shock from the the scary supper the other night, but the former art teacher has decided to turn 80 again this year and wants a party. Her birthday is 27 December, so we shall go around and celebrate her 80th birthday for the third time. One of the best ways to get over a dire social event is to go right out and have another social celebration, rather like climbing back onto a horse after falling off.
The hydrangeas are producing big blue mopheads, perfect for a summer Christmas bouquet. The bluest blue you can imagine.
I think you should make that big feast anyway! I will be happy to send any recipe you need!
Thanks so much Mary Christine — I will send you an email asking for your pie recipes. Pastry is not my forte, but I like doing a pie every now and again.
I think that the feast would be good too. You can have watermelon on the side and a salad. The butternut squash is great. Cook and then saute with butter, add sage, and then sprinkle a tablespoon of the SABE BHARAT. It is really good.
Syd I think your Sabe Bharat is what I know as Tunisian Baharat and very close to Ras el Hanout, with a mix of Grains of Paradise, allspice, black and white peppercorns, ash berries, cardamom pods, cassia or cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, nutmeg, dried red chili peppers or paprika, orris root, dried rosebuds (I dry the unsprayed small buds of musk roses which are closest to damask roses).
The difficult part of making this is to get the proportions right so that it is not cloyingly sweet or too peppery. Much of the cooking in east and north Africa has a strong Arabic influence.
Love your blue hydrangeas. I planted four pink bushes this week just in time for the rains. Turkey not sure if it works in the heat but my Central American friends enjoy it and it gets roaring hot down south.
Cranberries are such a perfect side dish.
Hi Dee– if I put hydranea cuttings into a pot of alkaline potting soil, the flowers come out pink, but the soil at the back of the garden is very acid and so the blue is intense. I also grow white hydrangea lace caps with the oak-like foliage, H quercifolia.
Many expats or families of Dutch or German, English etc origin here cook roast Christmas dinners in the heat. I just find them unappetising and prefer something lighter.