Lucy and her friend Olivia singing along in the car to “Ants Go Marching On” and “I’m Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee”
Bugsy Singalong (2:23 minutes MP3)
Lucy’s favorite music to listen to in the car used to be John Denver and The Muppets “A Christmas Together.” I could do a complete performance of that album from memory (so could Moya). We listened to it every time we were in the car for over a year.
Then a friend of Lucy’s handed out a mix CD called Bugsy on his last birthday (made by his dad) and now we listen to that every time we’re in the car.
I prefer opera and blues and pop music but I’m not in the booster seat.
This morning I spotted a pint of heavy whipping cream in the fridge about to expire. I was browsing twitter updates and saw a link to a recipe for Homemade Bailey’s by @mizmaggieb. Lightbulbs in my spacecase mind! I could double the recipe and use the whole pint of cream and then bottle up the result and give it to friends.
I dropped Lucy off at school and picked up some instant coffee from Starbucks. Then I walked down to Bi-Rite Market to get some pastured eggs – they are the only store I know around the neighborhoods I walk (Mission, SOMA, FiDi, Castro) that regularly have pastured eggs in stock. I expected to find eggs from Eatwell or Clark Summit or Soul Food Farm or Marin Sun Farm, and then was pleased to find pasture raised eggs from farms I’d never heard of: Lazy 69 Ranch and Sinclair Family Farm.
I picked up a bottle of Bushmill’s whiskey which reminded me of meeting Moya in 1997 and of marrying her for the 3rd time in 2008.
Irish tradition (I married an Irish gal)
I got another can of sweetened condensed milk which always reminds me of my fabulously missed late grandma. And some Recchiuti extra bitter chocolate sauce which is probably heavier than the recipe requires, but it looked so much more delicious than the bottle of plain chocolate syrup. Why skimp when the ingredients list is already so decadent?!
I dumped all of the ingredients in the mixing bowl. It’s a simple recipe – you just whip together fresh eggs, almond extract, vanilla extract, chocolate syrup, instant coffee granules, sweetened condensed milk, whiskey, and whipping cream.
While I was scraping out the cans of sweetened condensed milk I was reminded of my grandma’s voice telling the story of how her mom would always use every last drop of sweetened condensed milk from a can by pouring coffee in the can and dissolving the last bits of sweet milk with the coffee.
every last drop of sweet
I don’t like milk in my coffee but I’ll drink coffee out of the remains in a can like this.
Here’s the finished product ready for a label:
Store in the fridge, not by the tree
Pre-mixed Winter Tale Cocktail
I’m going to label and decorate and gift these within the next couple of weeks. I wish I’d made more! I don’t remember the size of these bottles but I think they hold 12 ounces.
I considered just mixing the vodka with the syrup and giving lemons on the side with a recipe so the lemon juice would be more fresh in the final cocktail that is shaken and strained and sipped. Then I figured this would be drunk up rather quickly and the ease of just pouring, shaking, straining (or just pouring over ice and stirring), would be nicer for the gift recipients than giving them the additional task of juicing lemons.
I didn’t know what to do with the vodka once it was infused. I rummaged through our kitchen looking for ideas and inspiration. We have a bunch of unused spices that we “inherited” from a friend who died a couple of years ago and I like to try them out in new things. One of them is Penzey’s Mulling Spices. We have lots of citrus in the fridge (limes, lemons, oranges, tangerines, clementines). I smelled the mulling spices, the infused vodka, the clementines, and I was inspired.
Here’s the recipe for the batch that I made:
Cranberry cinnamon stick vodka:
- 1.75 L vodka
- 2 pints fresh cranberries
- 1 vanilla bean
- 6 cinnamon sticks
Mulling spice clementine syrup:
- 4 cups sugar
- 2 cups water
- 2 T mulling spices (I used Penzey’s)
- 2 clementines with leaves attached
Mixing:
- a lot of lemons
- 2 weeks of time
Infuse the vodka:
- Crush the cranberries. I meticulously cut each of the cranberries in half and then used a potato masher to mash them. I considered blitzing them in a food processor but thought that might make them too mushy.
- Split the vanilla bean lengthwise
- Pour the vodka into a large jar (I use a 3 L jar)
- Add the crushed cranberries, vanilla bean, and cinnamon sticks
- Shake or stir and store in a cool dark place.
- After 1 day, remove the vanilla bean.
- Shake or stir daily.
- After 6 more days, remove the cinnamon sticks.
- Shake or stir daily.
- After 7 more days (or taste daily and stop when you like the taste), strain out the cranberries and anything left behind from the cinnamon sticks and vanilla.
Make the syrup (this will make a bit more syrup than you need for the batch):
- Use a peeler to remove the peel in long strips from the clementine.
- Tear the clementine leaves
- Heat the sugar and water until it dissolves.
- Remove from heat and add the mulling spices, clementine peel, and clementine leaves.
- Cover and let it steep for approximately 12 hours.
Mix the cocktail:
- Juice a lot of lemons if you’re going to make a batch – I probably juiced 15-25 lemons to make this batch
- 2 cranberry cinnamon stick vodka
- 3/4 mulling spice clementine syrup
- 3/4 lemon juice
I’m not the person in our family who usually has insomnia – that’s my wife. But for the past few weeks I’ve been awake in the wee hours of the morning. I wake up with the task of my dream still at hand.
One early morning I was dreaming that I was trying to clean ants out of our house (those hardworking persistent non-native San Francisco ants that we haven’t had in our house in years, but I still fear their return) and I woke up and went to look for a sponge to use to wipe/clean them up.
This morning it was 4:10am when I woke up convinced that I was holding a mouse I had just found and I needed to find a box for it. I could feel the tiny scared animal’s heart beating in my fingers and I could see the nest of paper bits it had made in a corner of the room. I put my glasses on and realized there was no mouse. I’d seen a tiny mouse on our patio a few days ago. Now it’s in my dream house.
Since it was just after 4am and we try to all get up around 7am on weekday mornings I decided to stay awake and get things done. I started to make lunch for Lucy’s school lunchbox but I was pacing around and being too noisy. I decided to sit. in. one. place. and look over our 2008 Christmas card address spreadsheet and make updates for 2009. I was anticipating updating addresses of friends who have moved and adding addresses for some new friends.
Then I saw a line in the spreadsheet with my grandma’s name and address. I was casually organizing the list and thought, “she’s not around anymore, so remove the row,” and then I just fell apart dripping big huge tears all over the cat and the laptop keyboard.
Since she died in March I have grieved her loss the most when I think of calling her or sending her a letter or visiting her or telling her about something. When Lucy’s official Kindergarten portrait was delivered, I wanted to send one to my grandma because I knew she would love it. When Lucy announced that she wants to be a “bug scientist” when she grows up, I wanted to tell my grandma because she loved to encourage women to be scientists. When I have an interesting project at work I like to write to my grandma about it because I know she likes to hear about it.
She was my “look at this!” go-to person who would almost always respond with love and support and attention. I always wanted to show her things or share things with her and I always wanted to impress her.
I have a file drawer full of photos from her collection and I’ve been scanning them and hope to create and print a book of her photos for my siblings and parents. One of my favorites was probably taken while she was at Wesleyan in the late 1920′s or early 1930′s – such dashing women:
Harriet, Queenie, Evelyn, Margaret, Frances - early 1930's or late 1920's
