kirkcudbright | Entries tagged with xmas

Brought the roasted nuts & coffee over to the parents', but forgot the coffee grinder, so I had youngest brother bring one over. While I was grinding, Mom brought out a pound of Other Stuff for me to grind. There's this Episcopal missionary in Yunnan Province in China, only China doesn't allow purely missionary activity, so he's officially helping the locals establish a coffee export business, so the parents bought a pound of coffee to support the effort.

Yunnan grows a lot of tea, but I've never heard of cofee from Yunnan, or any other part of China for that matter. So start with a questionable origin. Plus it was either processed haphazardly, or roasted haphazardly, or both, because it was a mix of charred beans and yellowish beans (either under-ripe or under-roasted). Plus they'd had this coffee since last Christmas, and hadn't bothered to get anyone to grind it for them.

All in all, I can't imagine this is going to make anything other than a nasty cup of coffee. I should have just thrown it out for them, but I soiled my brother's grinder with it, and washed my hands of it (literally).

I've been feeling super-broke for a while (credit card debt far exceeds cash in the bank, and continues to grow at an alarming rate). So I decided to make xmas presents where possible - coffee and nuts for everyone. Of course, the downside to the money-vs-effort tradeoff is that I have to put in the effort.

The nuts (roasted, then glazed and spiced) are bit pricy for the raw ingredients, but are relatively quick and easy to make.

The coffee is stock that I already had (from a big order last summer), but somewhat time-consuming to make. My roaster is optimized for 1/3 pound batches (I tried roasting a 1/2 pound to save time, but it didn't circulate well, so the beans near the heat burned, and the beans further away were under-roasted). Furthermore, each batch loses about 1 oz of water weight in the process, so I end up with 4.3 oz. I want to give everyone a pound+ of roasted coffee, so that's 4 batches per person.

The roaster creates too much smoke to use indoors, so I'm sitting in the unheated garage, with the door open. It's a hot-air roaster, and the cold source air slows things down considerably, so it's taking about 20 minutes per batch, to set up and roast. I did 8 batches last Monday, for 2 mailed presents. I'm doing 12 batches tonight, for the family I'm visiting tomorrow. Plus we need some for our own consumption. I'm currently on #9.

At least it's not too cold, and I have a bottle of Trois Pistoles. And every time I go up to the kitchen, I'm greeted with the smell of duck stock simmering.

Last night:
roast pork loin stuffed with dried apples, cranberries, and almonds
brussels sprouts browned in garlic butter and braised in cream
mashed potatoes with cream cheese
tasty pastries from George's Bakery

Today:
roast duck with duck liver gravy
cauliflower soup
assorted xmas chocolates

Tomorrow:
My mother is cooking a turkey with a backstory - I didn't ask, I didn't want to know, but this has been in the freezer since last Thanksgiving, because my ex-sister-in-law pre-empted her with the complete fixings (courtesy of her employer). Oh, and there are a couple of frozen pies, which might be from this year.

I love my mother, and I grew up big and strong on her cooking, but I didn't learn to cook from her.

We first learned this word a few years ago. Now I look forward to the end of the Christmas season, just so I can use it.

(Today we danced the christmas tree out to the brush pile. That is all.)

I blew off today's aikido seminar, for reasons already discussed. (Plus sleeping late, and blueberry buttermilk pancakes...)

Instead, we picked out our Christmas tree at the local (20 miles away) cut-your-own tree farm. You can pick out a tree, and pay for it, as early as...well, yesterday, and come back and cut it sometime after Thanksgiving. Since we got there 30 hours after tagging began, all the Good Trees were already claimed (pout), leaving hundreds of...other good trees. Really, they have a good product, as the marketing folk say.

This year, we picked out a Noble Fir, not a variety we've dealt with before, just because it was different and kind of funky. It's very full, but in layers, leaving a lot of room for dangly ornaments. It should be fun to decorate, but we may have to be more careful and deliberative than usual.

On the way home, we stopped at Dover Saddlery, formerly State Line Tack. I got a pair of half-chaps to replace the 20 year old ones that are starting to fall apart. But then I didn't have time to ride by the time we got home. Oh, the irony!

Closeup of a Fraser Fir, under harsh late-afternoon sunlight.