January ice cream

It's a new year, I've had my birthday, and maybe I should prove that I haven't actually abandoned this blog? So, how about a recipe, though not a particularly seasonal one, given the heavy frost and heaved ground here, alternating with grey clouds and sleety rain.
Last summer I found a Donvier ice-cream maker on usedvictoria.com, where I have also found lots of fitness equipment, bookshelves, and other useful things. It came with a nice little recipe book, and soon I was using up frozen blackberries and blueberries from the summer before, squeezing oranges and limes, and generally filling up the freezer.
I'd made buttermilk scones, and had buttermilk left over (which I can't drink, because of the texture). Hmm, wouldn't buttermilk and butterscotch go nicely together, I thought. I bet the slight acidity of the buttermilk would balance the sweetness of the butterscotch. Let's fire up the internet and find a recipe.

Some Time Later....

I have found buttermilk ice cream recipes.
I have found butterscotch ice cream recipes.
I have found buttermilk-butterscotch sauce for ice cream.
I have found not one recipe for buttermilk-butterscotch ice cream.

Why? Would it actually taste really bad? I can't believe that. I decided to be a pioneer and make the experiment.
So, examine several buttermilk ice cream recipes, then several butterscotch ice cream recipes. Figure out which were the necessary steps, and combine them. Ice cream, fortunately, is a pretty forgiving medium. Eggs, no eggs, cream, milk, or yogurt, fruit puree, juice or whole, you generally end up with something people will eat straight out of the ice cream maker as soon as it solidifies.

This is what I came up with:
In a medium saucepan, put
1 cup brown sugar (demerara might be good too)
2 tbsp butter (real butter here, not margarine).
Simmer until the brown sugar is melted and bubbling - stir occasionally. (This is the butterscotch part.)
In the meantime, in a mixing bowl, whisk
3 egg yolks (you can use more, but I'm stingy with eggs)
1/4 cup brown sugar.
Add slowly to the saucepan
1/2 cup cream (or light cream or milk)
1 tsp vanilla (or more if you like vanilla a lot).
Stir and continue heating until any little crunchy bits of brown sugar have melted back in (though they might be nice little crunches in the ice cream, so it's up to you).
Take 2 cups buttermilk,
Pour 1/2 cup into the mixing bowl and whisk up.
Pour remainder, a little at a time, into the saucepan and mix well.
(You can try putting all the buttermilk into the saucepan instead - I wanted to dilute the yolks and avoid them cooking into lumps in the next step.)
Slowly pour the saucepan contents into the mixing bowl, whisking as you go. If you put all the buttermilk into the saucepan, apparently it helps if you pour the hot mixture along the sides of the mixing bowl rather than right into the middle. I haven't tried it.)
When it's all mixed up nicely, you can either take it straight to the fridge, or pour the lot back into the saucepan and cook it down further. I've done both, and the only difference I noticed was a darkening of the colour (but I did not do a scientific taste comparison).
Cool overnight in the fridge, covered.
Put mix into your ice cream maker and proceed as directed by your instruction manual.

And I was right. The tangy buttermilk balances the sweet toasty butterscotch very nicely. It is particularly good with a hot apple crumble. Or an apple-quince crumble as below.

Can I post photos, though?

This is a test post, my dears. I have this iPad, you see, and it has ever so many photos on it, but so far it hasn't let me actually post them to my blogspot. This app promises it will help. So, with luck, I will be able to post a few photos of, oh, how about Christmas baking?

Or the bird that crashed into our window?

Okay, allegedly I have two photos, which are sitting at the bottom of the screen. How do I get them into the actual blog? I may have to hit Publish and see what happens.

ETA: On another computer, and not using the blogger app, I have moved the pics from the bottom of the post to the correct places within the text.

Merry Christmas!

Apparently I have not posted anything at all this month. My virtuousness was confined to getting my Christmas cards sent, my charitable donations mailed out, presents bought, and cubicle decorated excessively. There was no virtue left over for posting. Or for decorating the house beyond a couple of door wreaths.
I thought I was so well ahead that I'd have lots of time for baking, but the days did that inexplicable shrinking thing they do as dates draw closer, so I am behind on my baking unless I were to only count shortbread.
I'd like to post some lovely artistic shortbread photos, but I'm on the iPad and it doesn't get along with  Blogger, so that will have to wait. But I thought I'd let you all know I'm still around.
More later, my dears!

labours of the months, 1371

Our Living History Week is over for this year. A new campsite, just down from our previous one which is now becoming a Garry Oak meadow. I was a bit apprehensive, but it worked out nicely. So, a few pictures of everyday life in the 14th century, below.

 Isabeau at the churn. Behind her you can see information booths for some modern enterprises. She's actually quite close to the kitchen, which is just out of the shot.

I love this medieval style iron-shod spade. Unfortunately we aren't allowed to do any real digging onsite, but I got Mark to pose with it as a model for a potential calendar of the labours of the months. 

Ditto with Havise, performing one of the labours for November (rather ahead of time)--baking bread. This is a labour for every day, to be accurate. Yes, we had fresh-baked bread from the oven and fresh-churned butter. Life in the Middle Ages was nasty, brutish and short, and everyone was starving and clad in rags, don't you know?

Alicia card-weaving. Ingeniously, she is able to adjust tension by turning the tent-pole her work is fastened to. I have a video as well, but given my past lack of success at posting them, I'll wait to attempt it this time. 

My studio this year. I found the big easel at a consignment shop and snapped it up right away. I managed to finish off the two paintings on it, and begin a new one. The smaller one in front is, yes, baking bread as the Labour for November. 

A final picture of the oven, with two loaves of bread successfully produced. Beside them you can see the ashes of the fire that heated the oven and was pulled and swept out so that the loaves could be put in for baking.

Western skychair is up

 The boy and the girl came to the Island last weekend, for Mother's Day. Chris brought maple snap cookies, which as he said are not 'snaps' in the sense of gingersnaps, but round soft cookies, rather like the honey cookie from my tiny Evelyne Johnson Cookie Cookbook, but sweetened with maple syrup instead. Good choice for a Mother's Day present. (pause to get another cookie)
 I made a pan shortbread, using the method (but not the recipe) from Cooks Illustrated. Later I made a pan of chocolate shortbread, since I've finally found a recipe that doesn't involve icing sugar or cornstarch but still keeps its shape nicely. And because my child shouldn't leave my house without baked goods.

Besides baking cookies, Chris was helpfully tall, and hung up my basket chair to take advantage of the warm clear weather we had all weekend. Just gorgeous. And here is the very chair. 

 In the midst of lilac blossoms.

I always forget how brief blossom time is. The plum and pear have lost all their white blooms, and the Spartan tree's white is stained with brown edging. The Transparent was heaped with white froth for a little while, and now it's only green, with some powdery mildew mocking me. Also the horrible invisible caterpillars have done their usual trick of chewing through the bud stems so that the infant incipient apples fall away when you brush a hand over them.
 Chris and Shannon and I wandered about in the backyard and spent a little while finding the green caterpillars curled in folded leaves on the pear and apple trees, allowing one to squish them inside the leaf in a most satisfactory and sanitary way.

On the Sunday we hit the Times Colonist charity booksale, and I managed to restrain myself to two bags of books. Mark found another copy of the big book on stained glass that we have, so I can give it to my apprentice (yay!) and I found a few for Christmas and Twelfth Night presents as well as disposable reading.
Actually, I probably would have bought more books except that I went off with the kids for a late lunch at John's Place, which turned into a Mother's Day brunch (is it still brunch at 2 pm?) because the special omelette looked so enticing. Plus two free slices of cheesecake which worked out just right between three of us. And that took out at least 3 hours that I could have been using to go through the poor neglected hardcover fiction section, not to mention crafts and hobbies.
Just as well I suppose, though.

So it was a good weekend, though not as writing-productive as it could have been. I haven't posted as much this month because I'm trying to get that last burst of wordcount on, to get Storyline Two settled by the end of the month. I'm gearing up for the Kaiju Big Battel with the vampires, and I need to be sure who all will be there for it. Also I wrote a 'fen blow' into an earlier section to liven it up, and that means there needs to be a fen blow at the climax too. Argh. Well, more excitement, anyways.

I leave you with a picture of shortbread, this lot made with demerara sugar. 

missing the moon

Last weekend, you probably know, was supposed to be a spectacular moonrise, a supermoon. But it was cloudy or something, because when I went outside at nightfall, I could not find the moon. It's usually somewhere in front of the house, behind the city trees. But no.
Mark looked for it with the help of his cool IPad planetarium viewer, but it wasn't there either. Perhaps it was just too low in the sky when we looked.
Then I fell asleep. (I vaguely recall a time when I could stay awake all night. That time is not now.)
However, I rise early, and here is what remained of the moon about 5 in the morning.

 Still fairly striking. I climbed up the small stepladder and took this photo through the branches of the Spartan apple tree.

 And because I liked the cheerful colour of it, here's the first fresh pie of the season, a strawberry-rhubarb that's in the oven now (with top crust added)

Rhubarb is ours, strawberries are from BC but boughten, all shaken up with flour and sugar. I hope it tastes okay, as I can never convince myself to put in as much sugar as the recipes call for.

In other news, I have recently done 3 sets of 25 crunches, at the end of my weights circuits (free and machine). The total leaves me somewhere between astounded and appalled.
Yesterday I didn't exercise, which gave me another hour-and-half to write with, and to have a second cup of tea in the morning. Then I spent a good part of the day wondering if I could fit in a make-up session at lunch or the end of the day (answers: a)no, you have a meeting, b)no, you have to go home for dinner).
This is a worrying development, to find myself seeking out exercise and regretting missing out on it. Next thing you know, I will start believing that there is such a thing as a runner's high.

nice smells

 The first two loaves from the bread machine. One white, with a slightly milky nutty flavour and very light fluffy texture. The other French, with more sturdiness and less distinctive flavour.
I'd been thinking of getting a bread machine (used of course) to try making gluten-free bread for our non-gluten or celiac friends. Then we were given a Sunbeam Breadmaker, by one of said non-gluten friends (Marie-Claude), in a grand passing-on of GF flours and baking supplies.
So I guess bread will be this year's New Baking Thing, like last year's jelly making, and pies the year before.
Now I just need to find a GF bread recipe that doesn't require more than 3 different hard-to-find kinds of flour.

And outdoors, the apple trees are blossoming, with the Transparent (which fruits in August) being the first to open. The scent is faint but sweet.

I brought some of the pruned twigs inside and put them in water, but very few opened. Instead I discovered... (cue chords of doom)
caterpillars.

Do you see any caterpillars in that picture? The little buggers are there, though, invisibly working their nastiness. I've cut three small tents off the Spartan and the Golden Delicious, but not all of them announce their presence so clearly. Some curl up inside leaves and blossoms, and the first you know is that the leaves are eaten to lace or the blossoms drop from broken stems.
I'm anxiously watching the plum tree; so far no sign of renewed canker, so my fingers are crossed for luck.

Tomorrow Mark will be running in the Times Colonist 10K run. I will post about that, possibly with photos, though I will be holed up somewhere drinking tea and writing, because I am not a runner.
Now I must go and work on the Rescue from the Vampire Care Home scenes, if I can just get my characters out of the pub. I hope my story is not infested with caterpillars, eating out plot holes and chewing characters to cardboard.

one-step, two-step progress

Storyline Two chugs along, slower than I would like. I haven't hit the estimated-halfway-wordcount yet, which disappoints me, and the characters seem to talk an awful lot. And go to the pub to talk more.  Maybe this is wish-fulfilment on my part, since I'm supposed to not drink alcohol or carbonated beverages? They're drinking all the cider I can't have. Now I must infuse those scenes with all my thwarted passion!

I have to remember that my agent told me it doesn't have to be perfect, it's a first draft, and that she will want changes anyways, so a fine polish is not required.
And maybe Storyline Two won' t be 50k in the first draft. Maybe it will be 30k. I wonder how much wordage it needs to balance out the estimated 150k of Storyline One?

As far as actual measurable achievements go, I've frozen three bags of rhubarb and made a big batch of gluten-free cookies (this recipe from Make It Naked blog) for a birthday present. And on Thursday I did 15 real (not girly) pushups, and three sets of 22 crunches. Which is a lot of crunches.
With which I must be content for the moment.

Happy Year-End!

Oof. Half a bottle of wine, a glass of cider, and a slice of rum-soaked Christmas pudding with rum butter, and I am not firmly anchored to the turning world, I must say.
So I will post some pics, which will not risk spelling or syntactical errors.

 An artistic shot of one of our saffron-producing croci, beside the front gate in November, taken by Mark.

 Me icing my birthday cake, with the icing left over from doing Christmas cookies. Also taken by Mark. He took about a dozen, but I kept moving at the crucial moment and coming out blurred.
The overall icing is butterscotch, melted butter, cream and brown sugar. The coloured icing is basic butter icing. The red behaved much better then than it had for adding holly berries and suchlike to the cookies, but I don't know why.

Baking tally, hmmm...
Two batches of cake gingerbread
1 batch of gingerbread men
4 pans of 'petticoat tail' shortbread
1 batch of rolled shortbread
2 pans of oatmeal shortbread
2 pans of chocolate shortbread
1 pan of domino cookies (choc shortbread with white choc chips)
1 batch of cardomon sugar cookies
1 batch of honey cookies
2 batches of rolled & cut Christmas cookies, iced
1 batch of caramel sandwich cookies
2 batches of cheese shortbread (1 spicy, 1 plain)
2 batches of butter pecan shortbread
3 pounds of sugared walnuts
3 pounds of candied grapefruit peel

Tomorrow I may do butter tarts.

For Christmas dinner I made a spinach and feta pie for the boy, who has gone vegetarian, the pastry done with a veg shortening called Fluffo (which makes me laugh). Mark very very kindly dealt with the stalks and washing and stir-frying of the spinach, to spare me from the cooking side of things. I get somewhat nervous when I have to jigger a recipe the first time  I use it, so his prodding was more than a little helpful. 

The duck was dinner for the carnivores. Mmm. And made into curry, it fed another ten diners (two to four at a time).
I got to try out my Christmas present of an ergonomic potato masher, and very effective it was too.
Other cool presents - a long-handled pruning hook, with saw, so that I can Deal With that tree that's overshadowing the roses in the front.
And a Kobo e-reader. Which I am still learning my way around, after helpful lessons and work-arounds from Chris.

 A definitive sign of Christmas being over, I reckon. A flat Santa. (photo by Mark)
By the way, while I understand several of the Christmas totems (nutcracker soldier, reindeer, Santa in a prop airplane), I am stumped by the cartoon owl with Santa hat. Is it from some animated Christmas special I've missed? From the back it looks like a monstrous baked potato with a Santa hat, which is less Christmassy than one might think.
I prefer plywood to inflatables, but that's probably just my failure to move with the times.

A cute cat picture to see you to year's end. At present, Priss is squished between my breastbone and the back of the Capisco chair, relaxed and purring. Here she is at the kitchen table, preventing me from doing anything useful.
Though in cat terms I'm probably doing the most useful thing of all, providing aid and comfort to the cat. 



all photos by Mark, it seems!

making our own fun

Last weekend I helped build a clay oven, in hopes of using it during our upcoming Living History Week. We've had ovens from time to time, the first being built of broken bricks on site, covered over with clay and straw then disassembled with a hammer at event's end, the later one being built of clay over a tall basket and fired by burning the basket inside it. That one lasted a couple of years but was a bit delicate for moving back and forth to the site. Eventually its makers smashed it up cathartically.
After that we did without. But an oven is such a handy thing to have, and opens so many possibilities, that the idea was never quite given up. At last Joan bought clay and offered her patio as an assembly site, and Ina, fresh from a course on cob-building, offered her expertise.
I brought the basket.


Here Ina directs her two lovely assistants in preparing the sand-and-clay cob mix.


After the base has been covered in clay, the inner frame of the oven is established. Rowan is eagerly squishing clay into a sheet to begin covering it.


Halfway up with the first layer. Ina works up more clay and sand. We covered the frame with an inch-and-a-bit of cob mixture, then left it overnight. The next day we painted it with slip, then added a thinner layer of cob mixed with short-cut straw.


Some decoration to the top, as with some of the English examples, in a rope-twist pattern, and the youngsters could not be deterred from painting it over with slip once more.
It has to dry for a couple of weeks before we even think about firing it. We'd like to be able to put on a hand-cart and wheel it around, but we might have to settle for standing it on a couple of trestles.

happy thoughts

Because I am grumpy and achey and the deer ate the new little branch my cherry tree had grown, here are some pictures of cheerful things.


The first fresh pie of this year: rhubarb from our garden, and strawberries from a winery / berry farm up-island. There weren't quite enough strawberries for a second (frozen) pie, so I filled it in with brandy-soaked raisins that happened to be in the pantry. I have no idea how a rhubarb-strawberry-brandied-raisin pie will turn out, but I will report whenever we get around to it.
Is it just my frame of mind, or is there a goofily distressed face in this pie?


Dining al fresco in the back yard: a light salad, a jug of wine, and thou beside me. Not singing, though.


From the Vancouver trip a few weekends back. This is in one of the little ferries that go back and forth from Granville Island, Vanier Park, Science World, etc. Nostalgia time, as I used to take very-small-Chris on them when we attended the Children's Festival, usually with a firm handhold on the back of his shirt as he looked out the entry.
Now he is grown-up-Chris, and that's Shannon on the other side, and Mark taking the picture. We entertained ourself by seeing who could spot the silliest boat name as we rode by.

another new year

Which I can't say in sparkly shortbread, alas.

One of my Christmas presents from Mark was a membership in LibraryThing, which I fear will not enhance my writing productivity. Already I have discovered the joy of adding a book that no one else has, alternating with the joy of seeing who else has the same books. This with only 50 or 6o of my books added, and no adult fiction yet.

A shared Christmas present was a 2d-hand rowing machine, plonked now in front of the television. Mark is up to 40 minutes at a time, I'm at 20, and using it to catch up with the videos and dvds that I've bought over the last few years and haven't gotten around to watching. I'm favouring HK movies with subtitles, so I don't have to bump the volume up to hear them over the machine.

Much happy Christmas baking still remains, including rolled shortbread, pressed shortbread, iced cut-out cookies, chocolate shortbread, cheese shortbread, spicy cheese cookies, honey cookies, oatmeal shortbread, butter tarts, candied grapefruit peel, sugared walnuts, melting moments, bar shortbread, domino cookies, toffee candy (it was meant to be fudge), gingerbread snowflake cookies, one piece of birthday cake, gingerbread cake, butter pecan cookies and coconut macaroons. So if it were to snow for real and we were to be trapped at home, we wouldn't starve.

But now it is the New Year, and time to get seriously serious about finishing the revisions on Cost of Silver. This means writing more scenes relating to the draining of the fens, the English Civil War, and the witch hunts. There may have been cheerful things happening in the latter 1600s, but I'm not sure any of them will appear in the book. Angsty angstiness is the tone of the era, with occasional gallows humour.
Also: writing down actual comments for Anne's excellent slice-of-lowlife novel The Sleepy Teepee. And thoughts on possible markets.

food and family, that season

Not too much to say here, just enough to keep the photos from being too puzzling.
Chris came for Christmas, is now off at a cabin in Sooke (not our old home, but one with power and running water) and will be back for New Year's. He just missed connecting with my brother, my sister-in-law Laura (pictured here with Mark and the back of Cedric's head) and their kids, who came by on the 28th and filled the kitchen nicely, as you can see by the second photo below.
The hare hanging from the rack is plush, we are not aging our meat in the historic fashion.


These are most of my nephews and nieces on one side of the family, with a significant other for leavening (he's the one in the striped shirt).
We had to bring in a few extra chairs. It was raucous and cheerful, and the cat hid upstairs until everyone had gone.
Can I remember names? Um. Cedric, who sings opera; Jason, Piper's significant other; Piper who's supposed to look like me; Graeme, Ivan the youngest, Josephine the shy one; Helen whom you can't quite see, Hannah who has been carving Christmas dinners all week - and I'm missing someone, I know it.


Happily baking still, and just the other day finished decorating the cookies with this batch of golden bells. I'm quite taken with the little holly leaf sprig, as you can tell.
I do need to do another dozen tarts, because the pastry won't keep forever. Mark has asked that I stop at 3 dozen butter tarts, so I may do the rest as pecan tarts (that is, the same filling, but over chopped pecans instead of raisins), or look at some other tart recipes. If I'm feeling adventurous. Maybe there's one that can use up an apple or two.
We had roast ducks with wine & bitter cherry (correction per husband: sour cherry) sauce for Christmas. Duck curry the next two days. I took the leftover cherry-wine sauce and used it in gingerbread cake, but I have to say the water-from-boiling-grapefruit-peel is more effective. I suppose the spices and molasses overpower any weaker flavours.

And since I promised, here is my super-garish birthday cake!
It's a butter cake with butterscotch icing, ornamented with butter icing left over from the roll cookies in a festive design of stars and holly (or possibly, green bats with red eyes). Around the outside is happy birthday Barbara in sloppy red icing, or Barbara happy birthday, or birthday Barbara happy, depending where you start.

New Year Merry Christmas and Happy to you!

Merry Christmas

And Happy Boxing Day! Have some shortbread with sparkles.

last food post of the year

Really!

For Terri, the hot nuts recipe, courtesy of Kate (to whom much thanks). It may be Levantine, and is referred to as a mezzo:

3 tbsp sunflower oil
2 1/2 cups whole blanched almonds
1 generous cup light brown sugar
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp chili flakes
salt to taste
Heat oil over medium-high heat until hot. Add almonds, stirring with 3/4 of brown sugar. Toss nuts to coat, saute until caramelised. Remove nuts to bowl and toss with cumin, chili and salt. Spread on baking sheet to dry, sprinkle with remaining sugar. Serve warm or at room temperature. Will keep for a couple of weeks in a sealed container.


And in the What? dept., this dainty from Good Housekeeping's Christmas Cook Book 'selections to brighten the holiday season' (published 1958), from the Goody Greetings section:

Delightful Doughnuts
Old favorites presented in a new way. Stick a long skewer into a grapefruit; string doughnuts onto skewer. Wrap grapefruit in green cellophane, doughnuts in clear cellophane; top with a silver spray.
There follows a recipe for doughnuts rolled in sugar.

There are b/w photos on most pages, including 'Smoky Cocktail Spread' and 'Apricot-Confection Squares', but none of this construction. Anyone out there with expertise in '50s food: what is this supposed to look like, and why?

Christmas baking

This is what I baked for Christmas:
a pan of cake gingerbread (hot water recipe)
a pan of domino cookies (choc. shortbread with white chocolate chips, cut into 1x2 bars)
three rounds of pressed shortbread (the kind that makes 'petticoat tails')
two rounds of oatmeal shortbread (first time)
one round of spicy cornmeal shortbread (also first time)
one batch of cheese shortbread (sliced roll)
'checker cookies' (a roll of butterscotch and a roll of chocolate fridge cookies, cut into quarter-strips and reassembled - my own invention!)
three batches of butter pecan cookies
gingerbread cookies decorated with a snowflake pattern from white (flour & butter) decorating icing, which I've wanted to try for ages
two batches of chocolate shortbread
two batches of rolled shortbread cut in rounds
sugared walnuts, about 4 cups
6 dozen butter tarts
2 dozen sausage rolls
lots of cheese straws to use up the sausage roll pastry
cornstarch shortbread dipped in coloured sugar (the recipe on the cornstarch box)
12 dozen rolled cookies with icing
2 dozen roll cookies painted with egg yolk & food colouring, for people wishing to avoid the sugar hit
a butter cake with caramel icing, decorated with the remaining red & green icing, as a pseudo-birthday cake for me (Mark had already bought me a birthday cake, but it was carrot cake & I wanted something less virtuous) which I'll post a picture of when he uploads his pics next. (Done!)

Insert partridge and pear tree joke here.

Yes, I do like baking. People sometimes boggle at me for doing this, but mostly I find it relaxing, because, like ironing, I choose when and how much to do, and I can see the results of my work. I get a bit fussed over finding space to store the iced cookies while the icing hardens, before I can put them into the big tin, but that's not a terrible problem.
You should come over and have some cookies. There are plenty left.

ills that flesh is heir to, continued

Rheumatologist appointment this afternoon--made only this morning, so I suppose someone cancelled--and the tentative diagnosis is that I'm in the 30% of palindromic arthritis cases who graduate to rheumatoid arthritis.
Pretty much what I'd expected, since the second knuckle of my left hand has been swollen since February, unlike the usual palindromic thing where a random joint swells and goes down again within a couple of days (sometimes only hours). The right hand has been fine, so I wasn't symmetrical, but arthritis is just shifty and variable and unreliable. Though not as bad as lupus (It's never lupus) that way.

So, new drugs! Going to add methotrexate, which is such an exciting drug that the rheumatism website wants to show you an exclamation-marked video about it! It's on youtube! It is cooler and more exciting than me!
Methotrexate is a chemotherapy drug, but not to worry, because the doses for arthritis are teeny-tiny (a technical term) compared to the whacking huge doses you'd get for chemo. Oh, and they're not quite sure why it works for arthritis, just the way they're not quite sure why hydroxychloroquin (a quinine derivative) works for arthritis.
I think they may know why naproxen works. Maybe. It would be nice if I were taking one drug whose workings were comprehensible.
RA is a possibility I've been aware of from the first diagnosis, so I'm not upset. I'll just have to see what happens down the road, and cope with it as it comes (which is how life works anyway). Dr. Northcott seems pretty positive about the methotexate, which I keep wanting to call meths, and I tend to be lucky with side effects, so there's no point fussing.

What is more than a little annoying is that alcohol is pretty much out. One drink a week is what the pamphlet says. Of course this happens just as I've found a local cider that I like. I thought I didn't like cider (I don't like beer--it smells bad to me) until Mark got me to try a local still cider while we were in Suffolk, and it was lovely. Like what white wine ought to be (this will make no sense to you if you prefer white wine) and nothing like the fizzypop cider that comes in cases.
I stopped at Sea Cider on the way back from the ferries, caught their birthday celebration, and bought two bottles--Pippins, and Kings and Spies. Both were very nice indeed but I thought Kings and Spies had the edge.
If I can only have one drink a week, it had better be a good one.

In other news, I've almost caught up with the Transparent apples, and the blackberries have come in, forcing me to learn to make pies. Honestly, pastry intimidates me. It's one of those deceptively simple things, like gesso sottile, where the ingredients may be exactly right but all hope of success lies in having the right touch, and preferably decades of experience. So even though the pie looks okay, and the fruit sets, and slices can be cut and it all gets eaten, in some subtle way it can still be a failure.
Which is why I prefer making cookies. Pastry seems like a sneaking incursion of the imponderables of cooking into the rational world of baking, where if you follow the recipe you come through safely.
The third blackberry pie I've made in the last week is cooling on the baking centre now. This is not my fault.

comparative recipes

I like to bake cookies and squares. I'm not terribly adventurous or elegant, favouring the old standards like oatmeal cookies, peanut butter cookies, shortbread, and rolled cookies for Christmas. I have a small collection of cookie cookbooks, and occasionally add something from them to the repertoire.
Many years ago (thirty?) while in search of a recipe for butter tarts...

Pause to provide butter tart recipe:
-Melt 1/3 cup butter, remove from heat
-stir in 1/2 cup brown sugar,
1/2 tsp vanilla
pinch salt
1 egg, slightly beaten
1/2 cup or more raisins
-fill tart shells about half full, bake at 400 until brown and bubbling.

I found a little book called Chocolate Cake and Onions (Horizon House 1976). Also in this book was a recipe for
Economy Oatmeal Squares:
-Melt 1/2 cup margarine
-stir in 1 cup brown sugar,
2 cups oatmeal
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- press into ungreased pan to about 1/4 inch thickness, bake until brown. It will harden as it cools.

Despite the vague baking directions, which I eventually worked out to 350 for 20 to 25 minutes, this became a favourite. (I'll point out that when something consists largely of brown sugar, 'until brown' is not a useful marker.)
The thing that puzzled me, over time, was the purpose of the 1/2 tsp baking powder. There's no flour, so what is it leavening? Also, while I'm no kitchen chemist, didn't baking powder require moisture to work? Most cookie recipes used baking soda, except for oatmeal cookies, which had a tablespoon of milk in the recipe as well as baking powder. I wondered whether Marilynne Foster had left out part of the recipe, or copied it incorrectly.

My mum's cookbooks were among the things (like Christmas decorations) that weren't kept in the move, and which I regretted mightily. When I was able to buy a copy of The Canadian Cook Book (Ryerson 1953) I was quite excited, even though it naturally wouldn't have all the pasted-in soup-tin recipes and so on that my mum's copy had.
I got all nostalgic over the photographs, and 'oh, there's the cake recipe that always turned out kind of chewy because I dawdled over the mixing' 'there's the crepes recipe, mmm'. Then I found
Oatmeal Butter Squares:
-Mix 3 cups rolled oats,
1 cup brown sugar,
1 teaspoon baking powder,
dash of salt.
-pour over 7/8 cup melted butter, mix thoroughly
-pat into ungreased 8x12-inch cake pan
-bake at 275-300 until golden brown, cut into squares while hot.

There it is, recognisably the same in kind, in a for-real published by a major company cookbook, and still with the baking powder and no flour and no milk. Oh, and again the vague baking instructions, though this time with a temperature.
Well, maybe it was a Canadian regional treat, like butter tarts and Nanaimo bars. Maybe Marilynne (or her mother) got her recipe from The Canadian Cook Book and altered the quantities.

But there's the undeniably American Better Homes and Gardens Homemade Cookies Cook Book (Meredith 1976), and its recipe for
Scotch Teas:
-Melt together 1 cup packed brown sugar,
1/2 cup butter or margarine
-stir in 2 cups quick-cooking rolled oats,
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/1 teaspoon salt
-turn into 8x8x2 inch greased baking pan
-bake at 350 for 20 to 25 minutes, cookies will harden upon cooling. Cut into bars.

I will mention that my dad's family was Scots, and I'd never heard of 'Scotch Teas' (insert joke about drinking tea with Scotch here). Anyway, here it was again, in another for-real, major-publishing book, with baking powder and no flour.

Another Scotch Teas recipe, slightly different proportions but same ingredients, was reportedly a prize winning recipe at the 1976 Texas State Fair. Googling brings up another from the C&H Sugar Kitchen, requiring you to use C&H Brown Sugar, and of course, baking powder (brand left to your discretion). Doubtless there are more, perhaps under different names. But all that I've found have no flour and no moisture (unless melted fat counts as moisture?) but do have the baking powder of no apparent function.
Is it totemic? Apotropaic? The remnants of a long-forgotten ritual to hold back chaos?
If I leave it out, the next time I bake ... what will become of us all?