#21 Family's traditional winter holiday food

Well, let's see, there's the standard-ish stuff: every year my mother makes fruitcake and Christmas puddings, very kindly leaving out glacé cherries because I consider them an abomination, doing the marzipan and royal icing herself; Teebäckerei, whose recipe I have unaccountably failed to type up, which are biscuits with much of the flour replaced by ground nuts (usually a combination of walnuts and hazelnuts though almonds are also acceptable) and a small quantity of grated dark chocolate; as mentioned, my father makes around twelve dozen mince pies every year.

There is a Thing my mother and I started doing when we went hiking the summer after I turned 18, the summer before I went to university, the summer I decided I might be a geologist: we collected a small handful of cranberries and brought them back with us and froze them, and then come the Solstice and such we boiled them up with bought cranberries, on the general principle of holy water. (Er, for those less steeped in this stuff than I am: you add any amount of holy water to a vessel containing water that has not been blessed etc and the whole lot is rendered sacred. (This is a thing that never made any sense to me about Buffy: why would anyone buy multiple bottles of holy water! You just... add some more to the stuff you got out of the tap! Or like add it to the reservoir and BOOM. As it were.)

Other than that, the main traditional food is non-veg and as such I haven't eaten it in years. ( Discussion of meat preparation. )

Satsumas and clementines are a thing, from Heiliger Nikolaus on. Increasingly, cheese & crackers & port (my mother keeps getting asked to play the organ at weddings, which she detests because she is not terribly good at it, and being given nice port in payment).

Nusspotitze! That is also a thing that we make fairly regularly at this time of year.

And that is more-or-less that. If you would like me to elaborate on any points or discuss things I've failed to touch on, let me know! ♥

#22 Something cheerful

Sorry that this is going up so late, cosmolinguist <3 I think probably it is going to be ten-good-things format, because that is easy on my brain and because I have a lot to be pleased about at the moment.
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Pear & chocolate cake

P's mother and I made this on Friday night, taken from the Graun, and it was super tasty. So! Recording it for posterity.

5 under-ripe pears
180g dark chocolate
250g butter
6 eggs
175g sugar
100g ground almonds
2 tbsp Poire William liqueur

Peel, core, and cut the pears into eighths. Arrange them artistically in the bottom of a lined, greased tin (large! deep! 23cm!).

Melt chocolate and butter together. Meanwhile, beat eggs and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add chocolate to egg mix; stir well.

Fold in ground almonds.

Pour into tin; bake for around 45 minutes at 170degC. Pour on the booze (if using) immediately after removing from the oven, while permitting to cool. Once cooled, do the magic inverty thing (stick a plate over the top of the tin and flip it).

Nom!

I note that while we were putting it together I was a bit dubious about the omission of e.g. cinnamon. I was wrong. This does not need cinnamon. It might play nice with a tiny amount of cardamom, but you really really don't need to bother.

hold on when you get love & let go when you give it (ten good things!)

1. Okay, hold onto your hats, folk who've been around for a while: middle brother and I haven't argued yet. Not only that, we have cooperated in moving furniture for my mum (and despite having worked construction over last summer he didn't think crippy ol' me was totally useless, which was nice ;) and have managed to talk about science in a way that didn't end in bloodshed! I am... kind of astonished, and really hoping it manages to hold for the next few days. (I leave on the 27th, you see.)

2. I swung by college when in town running errands earlier, and spent a little while sat in the chapel and a little while sat on the back wall swinging my legs over the river. Seven or eight years ago I stood on that bridge and looked into the library windows and said "I'm going to be one of them"; it turned out the floor I was looking at was the sciences one. So -- yes, I sat on the wall with my legs over the river and the punts dry-docked behind me and watched people walk over the bridge and listened to the single solitary punt guide and -- yes. This, too, is home.

3. DRD HAS PUBLISHED THAT ONE PAPER I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR HIM TO GET AROUND TO PUBLISHING. Seriously pleased about this. It is A Big Deal in terms of mantle plumes, and I think his work is solid.

4. I have played the piano some! Really badly, but less badly than I did this weekend. My hands and elbows and shoulder blades really bloody hate me and, well, this is why I don't play any more, and it's extremely bittersweet to be stumbling over playing stuff that is fundamentally still in my muscle-memory and completely incapable of sightreading, but -- I made music, I made music, and I didn't end up crying on the sofa like I did this weekend just gone, and -- it is a comfort and a blessing that I still have this. Also, I am starting to remind myself how to sight-sing.

5. I have had a lovely time interacting with baby brother also. We have been being gently rude at each other and very affectionate (hugs! hair-ruffling! sarcasm!) and he popped his head round my door earlier to be all "SO I thought of a PRESENT for you do you want a slow-cooker" and I was all "that's very sweet but thank you no my housemate has one" and he was all "awwwwwww I was gonna say, coz I want a blender, and if we both just had to go to the same shop..." -- so I provided him a list of DVDs I'm after in decreasing order of priority (and I think he's picked up lots of them?!) and then I was mildly profligate but it is a blender that should last him a good long time, so. I also acquired gjetost for my mother and consequently we have a mildly ridiculous cheeseboard, which makes me very happy. (It is my major contribution.)

6. My mother is making tiramisu as we speak. :-)

7. I am hoovering up Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series courtesy of my housemate's copies, and am Forming Several Opinions. Some of them are favourable; some of them are really not; but I am at least enjoying thinking about them.

8. I appear to have been wearing Liminal and only Liminal pretty solidly since Friday. It feels right for this time of year, and for reorienting myself and taking a moment to be inwards, and so on.

9. My mother made a somewhat involved and very tasty dinner, and we had it with wine from one of my favourite Austrian grapes that I very rarely actually get around to drinking, because it's not really worth getting a bottle when it takes me well over a month to get through one if I am working at it, and I think of it as A Special Treat To Be Savoured because it's slightly hard to acquire and therefore wince at people gulping it; perhaps the moral of the story is that I should host more dinner parties, but in any case, it was tasty and I am happy and contented.

10. Kinda intimidating emotional work/conversations have been going well, and it is a relief and a comfort. AND I SOLVED AN ENTIRE GRAUN CRYPTIC CLUE ON MY OWN. ONE WHOLE ONE. Now to try for a few more. ;) (Why do I list them together? Partly because I have run out of ten, but also partly because they feel like similar amounts of thinking sideways around a corner to work out solutions.)

♥

#23 Reflections on a year in poetry

Per the tag, this year (after jjhunter) I aimed to write fifty poems, one a week with two off. The tag currently stands at 53, which is a slight underestimate (posts that contain multiple comment-poems only add one to the total).

Poetry is a thing I come back and back to. I fell in love with it, properly, during my GCSEs: Keats, who showed me how to write a certain quality of light; Carol Ann Duffy, whose poetry pointed out to me that I'm an abuse survivor; Stephen Dunn and Simon Armitage and Monica Ali and on and on; close analysis didn't kill the poems for me, it made them more alive. It taught me to look at the world differently. It taught me the value of saying & meaning two things on their own, and both at once. It made me more okay.

And then I picked up a copy of Staying Alive, and that was... more-or-less that. In it I found - among many, many others - Machines, which is significant enough to me that I'm going to get the final couplet as a tattoo; I met Mary Oliver's Wild Geese for the first time. The reason I am so drawn to "beloved" as a term of endearment is in large part due to Late Fragment.

We were encouraged to write poems during GCSEs, and I wrote a few. And then I... stopped, pretty much until the year I took off from university: I was scared of failing, to the point of shying away from making the attempt - but poetry (like so much else) can only be committed by those

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

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The greatest gift of all, though, is this: how often it is, these days, that I find myself reaching for a poem to express my thoughts and emotions (because by using poetry instead of my own prosaic present I get to call on the layers and the nuance and the intertextuality, and the meanings that flourish in the distance between author and readers) I realise that the poem I want is one that I have written.