The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Sangria is one of the most delicious drinks of the holiday season.  Use white wine for a crisp, new-years-y feel.  

White wine sangria makes a great signature drink for your holiday cocktail party: fresh, crisp, boozy, and you can make the mix the day ahead.  Added bonus: fights scurvy...

Make-Ahead White Sangria Mix for your Holiday Party

Take advantage of the peak of citrus season and use fresh-
squeezed ingredients.

Get the mix ready the day before or the morning of your party.  

1 meyer lemon, sliced
1 lime, sliced
2 clementines, sliced
4 oz brandy
juice of 1-1/2 meyer lemons, 1 lime, 3 clementines

Put the sliced fruit in a pint-sized mason jar.  Add the brandy then top with the citrus juices.  This should almost exactly fill the jar.  Make up one jar of mix for each bottle of wine you anticipate turning into sangria.

Take a moment to marvel at how beautiful those jars of citrus fruit look, then put them in the fridge until you are ready to use.  (If it's a cold enough winter, you might be able to store them in your shed or a closed in porch... if you aren't sure, don't take the chance.)

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Each pint-sized mason jar of citrus-brandy mix will do one 750 mL bottle of wine.  Use the jar to measure your sparkling lemonade, mix it all together and illico presto, you have sangria.

White Wine Sangria Instructions

Make sangria in a pitcher or punch bowl (depending on the size of your party and your aesthetic sensibility) with ice.  Since it's all pre-measured, you can start with as much as you want and easily top it up as needed. For each jar of sangria mix add:

1 bottle of crisp and bright white wine (like sauvignon blanc or pinot grigio)
2 cups* of decent sparkling lemonade**

*don't bother with a measuring cup, just fill your empty mix jar to the neck
**this saves you from having to make a syrup and figure out the right ratio of syrup to soda water, and still lets you avoid the HFCS pitfall of most soda pop 

...give it a stir and you're on! 

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[Hi, Mom!  You can skip this paragraph, I won't be offended...]  A million years ago when we were undergrads living in a student apartment with a then-new-friend who is a now-old-friend, we had the occasional sangria party: everyone brought a bottle of cheap red wine and piece of fruit.  A big bucket was filled with the various wines of suspect origin, some cheap brandy or maybe whisky (or whatever was handy) was tipped in, grapefruit-ish Wink soda to dilute and sweeten, and masses of uncoordinated fruit were chopped and tossed in for good measure.  When the sangria ran out and the fruit mostly consumed, anyone left standing was likely to go out for breakfast.  This bucket-of-sangria fun, I must point out, was started by previous tenants of that apartment long before we moved in... a tradition that was inherited with the apartment.  A tradition that should undoubtedly stay with the apartment, because anyone over the age of 25 is probably not immortal enough for the consequences of such an event.

If I recall correctly, sangria parties were generally spring events, something to help shake off the long cold winter.  So for the longest time, I thought of sangria as a spring or summer drink.  Bubbles, fruit, ice... what's not summery about that? 

But, lo and behold, I was wrong.  

A few years ago, I was talking warm weather drinks with a Portuguese-immigrant friend who found it amusing that I associated sangria with summer because, so far as she is concerned, sangria is for Christmas.  What an epiphany!  Even without thinking too hard about it, I am happy to defer to the Portuguese on this.  

But think about it anyway: of course sangria is a Christmas drink.  Citrus is available year-round, but December is when it’s at its peak season.  It’s the time of year we buy crate after crate of clementines and the end of the season for boxes of mandarins wrapped in thick purple paper.  Meyer lemons and early blood oranges appear on the shelves, limes become so inexpensive you can buy them in dozens without having a panic attack at the till, and heavy boxes of grapefruit pre-ordered as fundraisers for school bands finally materialize.  It’s the most wonderful time of the year indeed.

So make sangria during the holiday season.  (In a pitcher or punch bowl.  No buckets.***)

***Unless, of course, you are a student... 

And a happy new year!

The advantage of fresh but pre-measured sangria mix could become abundantly clear as
the evening progresses... 

Hurri-cake Season

When it's too windy to get any outdoor work done, there's not much left to do but make cupcakes.

Summer is for outdoor projects, but hurricane storm systems occasionally make that impossible.  Unprepared for serious indoor work, all there is left to do is bake.

Spruce Drizzle Cakes

(adapted from the pancake princess)

4 tbsp hand-crafted butter (okay, or commercial butter if you must)
3/4 c. spruce sugar (see below)
4 egg yolks
1-1/2 c. all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1-1/2 tsp salt
1 c. buttermilk (see?  might as well make your own butter...)

for the drizzle:
juice of 1 lemon
3 tbsp spruce sugar
2 tbsp icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 325F.  Grease a muffin tin/ cupcake pan (or any pan made for baking 12 little cakes).

Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.  Beat in the egg yolks one at at time, mixing until the batter is smooth.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  

Add the dry ingredients and the buttermilk in alternating additions, ending with dry ingredients.  Mix until smooth.

Divide the batter across the 12 cups in your baking pan.  Bake for 15 minutes or until done (cake is firm but springy to the touch).  Let cool for 5 minutes before removing from the pan.

While the cupcakes are cooling in their pan, mix the lemon juice, spruce sugar and icing sugar together, stirring until all the sugar is dissolved.  

Turn the still warm cupcakes out of their pan and arrange on a plate or tray in a single layer. Pour the drizzle over top.  When you eat them, feel free to dredge them in the excess drizzle that collected on the plate...

The lemony drizzle for the spruce cupcakes will drip and collect on the plate.  If I were you, I'd go ahead and soak some of that up with the cupcake I'm eating...

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How to Make Spruce Sugar

(adapted from Along The Grapevine)

Infusing sugar with ground spruce is a fantastic way
to preserve spring spruce buds for the rest of the year.

1 cup spruce tips, papery caps removed
1 cup granulated sugar

In a spice grinder, working in batches as necessary, grind together spruce buds and sugar.  The spruce buds are moist and sticky, so you want to clean your spice grinder immediately after you've finished (ask me how I know... it may be months before our spice grinder recovers from an unfounded belief that somehow it would be easier to clean when the spruce sugar remnants had dried into a cement-like crust on the bowl of the grinder).  

Spread the sugar-spruce mixture onto a baking tray and dry in a 150F oven for about an hour.  If you live in a dry climate (we definitely do not), you might get away with air-drying.  

Store in a clean jar, breaking up large clumps as you fill.

This recipe is easily scaled larger or smaller (one part spruce bud and one part sugar by volume).

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We're in the midst of fence-building chez The Moose Curry Experience.  This has been a long process involving measuring tapes, string, a million sketches, tearing down the old partially-rotted-but-surprisingly-difficult-to-destroy fence.  Oh, and the chatting with the neighbours about The Fence Project.  

We live in a small town.  Instead building a fence that looks exactly like what we demolished, we are building something different.  In a small town, these kinds of unnecessary changes can make people nervous.  We have enthusiastically described our beautiful mid-century modern vision to assure them it will be alright.  Somehow, this does not seem to put them at ease.  Just wait until they find out we intend to stain it blue...

We had a lot of work to get done today.  The wood is here, so holes need to be dug for fence posts.  The lawn needs cutting, the early greens desperately need thinning, the third sowing of lettuce needs doing, tomatillos need transplanting... but no luck.  

Well, not exactly NO luck.  We were lucky enough not to be in the direct line of the tropical storm formerly known as hurricane Arthur, but we are on the edge of the system. (Spring arrived too late this year, hurricane season has started too early.) 

It's windy enough that our deep and well-protected harbour is choppy.

It's really windy.  It's the kind of windy that blows around you in circles making you feel crazed.  The kind of wind that means you need a lid for the container you are attempting to fill with garden greens, lest they get swept away.  The kind of wind that means you spend a lot of time shouting "I can't hear you!" to someone who is a few feet away probably shouting the same thing.  The kind of wind that blows the dirt from your fence post holes into your mouth and nose and eyes... and, well, back into the hole.

Eventually we had to admit defeat.  Faced with no indoor jobs on the list, there was nothing left to do but bake.