Happy New Year

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Orange Flowers

New Year's Resolutions

To be more patient; to willingly move more slowly

To cook with lavender more

To rent the bike I talked about this year

To find out what’s in the white sangria at the Oaxacan Kitchen (lovely, with pears)

To be all I can be, and not give in to the constant diminishments

To take part in the dig at Hadrian’s Wall

To get my two novels published, and write the Mallorcan mystery

To love every day I have, and every friend

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Boat, Crete

Dessert with Bonnard

A low-calorie treat for the holidays. I must have more of these for my new year’s diet!

image: Pierre Bonnard, Dessert

Christmas

A quiet day, spent baking lemon scones (in the toaster oven I spirited away from the office) and reading A Child's Christmas in Wales. Wishing for a fireplace and fragrant piñon logs from Jesus Rios's woodyard on Camino del Monte Sol, but otherwise content to be. Here. Now. Satsuma tangerines and Andrea Bocelli's The Lord's Prayer and my blue Yellow Submarine socks.

Life is good, and I am so grateful.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Flora2

Christmas Eve

Lessons from Thendara Lane (while trying to cook for a Creole Christmas Eve party):

Never make Tangerine Butter in the winter. “Whisking” room-temperature butter the density of quartz is neither fun nor pretty.

Do not think you can listen to the Santa Fe Desert Chorale while baking Pecan Cornbread with dark rum and vanilla. The oven and cassette player will clearly short each other out.

Do not attempt to melt 5 Tbs. butter in a cast-iron skillet per the recipe instructions while cheering up the living room with the Christmas tree lights. The burner and the lights will clearly short each other out as well. You knew that about the burner and toaster, so shouldn’t you really have known better?

Don’t be silly. How can you imagine that you can turn on the oven and the oven timer at the same time? Turn the timer on after the oven’s safely off. This, too, will obviously overload the circuits. Where do you think this is—the Los Altos Hills? Never mind the blaze of outdoor lights on the mansion next door that makes you think of some Las Vegas casino. Like Las Vegas, it’s only a desert mirage.

Consider stationing a family member at the fusebox with a book, standing ready to turn the switch back on every five minutes or so during times of heavy cooking—such as boiling water in the teakettle for coffee.

Forget the oven. People can and do subsist quite happily on Gator Guacamole (lime and mint and black beans) and dark rum. All this new-age stuff like lights and heat is vastly overrated, after all.

image: Christmas tree in Piazza Portanova, Salerno old town, Italy. Christmas 2008., SOLOXSALERNO

Places I Would Rather Be Today

Wouldn't it be grand?!

Vivaldi in the upper reaches of a chilly stone palazzo
for Christmas; a good, hearty fish and potato stew; a string of gold-painted glass beads for counting off prayers for the year ahead; the irresistible lure of a little side canal . . .

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Venezia

Twas Three Days Before Christmas

I keep saying that one of these years I’m going to take December off, and actually appreciate the charms of the season. As it is, I have nearly a hundred Christmas cards left to write (and won’t have the five-hour flight to Kona on which to write them); spent all of Sunday in the office working on award nominations for books which don’t deserve the effort or the recognition; have two more days to despair of finishing myriad things with end-of-the-year deadlines . . . O deadening December!

There have been moments of cheer—making Creole Jambalaya with sausage and bay leaves; slicing oranges, limes, and lemons for Spanish sangria with rum; discovering Allegro French Roast decaf; hearing the golden-voiced Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja; visiting with a young friend who has happily launched into geology; turning on the Christmas tree lights every morning and evening; opening windows (mostly details from Dutch paintings) of our advent calendar.

And now on with the Christmas cards!!

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Reflections (Christmas Window, Rockefeller Center)

Duet

This is to mark the sad passing of a dog with noble heart and spirit, lovely Duet, two months beyond her fifteenth birthday. A dog who liked clam chowder, who was known to levitate on the cliffs over the ocean at Half Moon Bay; in whom the notion of play was amazingly advanced—yet who loved her quiet hours with the best of us. A dog I shall always remember as a favorite friend, a fellow being full of love who brightened every day she encountered, and whose reaction to the world was often as not joy in every bone. We shall dearly miss her.


image: black Labrador Retriever

Places I Would Rather Be Today

TIgerskin and cherries—what a luscious life!


image: Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Cherries, 1873 (private collection)

O Christmas Tree

The Christmas tree is up and hung with lights and clear glass balls like soap bubbles and smaller balls in hues of gold, copper, and bronze. (And then, of course, the California Quail instead of a Partridge, next to the Venetian blown-glass bell.)

Christmas trees have always seemed not just festive but a comfort, a benign spirit keeping watch over the month and me. When I was little and afraid of noises in the night, I somehow knew I didn't have to worry when the Christmas tree was standing guard in the front room; I felt perfectly safe and happy in its care.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, A Quail in a Pine Tree

Bright Moments in a Dark December

French Roast coffee in my little Cretan espresso cup

a bulldog tied to a signpost outside the California Avenue shops

warm spiced cider in an orange-cream bowl

students leading horses off into the dark

a pine wreath on the radiator of a fire truck

ropa vieja simmering in the crock pot

croissants at Douce France (and the thought of butter and strawberry jam)

a rain-washed red geranium—Venetian red, alizarin, or crimson


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Espresso Cup

Preserved Lemons

Someone has just been telling me about preserving lemons, in the heavy-lidded jars. Lemons layered with kosher salt. A warm thought for a frosty day.

Preserved lemons sold in the souks of Morocco . . . drenched with color and taste, texture and tangy smell. Lemons then used in salads or tagines.

(And while I was off researching lemon recipes, I came across the tempting trail of a Prune and Armagnac Tart! Thus do I get seduced.)


image: Mature spanish lemons, Johannes Pribyl

Places I Would Rather Be Today

Need I say more, as I look out at the darkness and the rain?

Perhaps the place I'd really like to be is just-about-summer, mid-May—my favorite, hopeful time, with promises of everything ahead. A place of mind, a place of heart.

Sitting quietly in a room is all well and good, but why not a whitewashed room, a room opening out on a small Greek harbor, so one has no need to go seeking aesthetic pleasures elsewhere? Drabness and gloom does make me restless, despite good books and Indian curries and visits to my favorite old Black Lab, settled contentedly, determinedly, on her own carefully-guarded pillow in the warm laundry room.

image: View of the church and a few yachts at Vathy Harbor on the Greek island of Siphnos (Takeaway)

Thought for a Winter's Day

Most unhappiness comes from not being able to sit quietly in a room.
(Pascal)


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Waiting for Thanksgiving Dinner

Thought for the Day

"Nothing can deflate a pretentious cocktail faster than a sharp poke with a paper umbrella."
(Pete Wells, Staging a Rum Rebellion, NYTimes.com)

From the same article, I also particularly like the following description of a drink that I would be glad to be sampling about now, leaves or no:

Adam Bernbach, who manages the bar at Proof, a restaurant in Washington, [says] that rum makes him think of colonial taverns, which led him to blend aged Martinique rum with maple syrup, orange zest, and chocolate bitters in the New England 1773. It calls out to be drunk after the leaves are off the trees.

Drinking December!

image: Cocktail Umbrella (Kona, Hawaii), Adam (AZAdam)

Yellow Leaves

On my way back from campus, a fine flurry of yellow leaves.

Dissettling December . . .


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Leaves in Fountain

December

It's shaping up to be a

Daffy December

Dastardly December

Deliquescent December


image: Hasegawa Tohaku, Pine Trees, left-hand screen of a pair of six-folded screens, 16th century, ink on paper, Tokyo National Museum