25 February Saturday

Hot Cross Buns! Pictured above, the pre-washed buns. I like to lightly glaze them with powdered sugar and water before thickening it to make the crosses .

They turned out. I am sad that after three grocery store visits, I could not find candied orange peel. I really should just make my own. In the meantime, raisins and currants will do. I toyed with the idea of adding candied ginger, which I do have, but it would have overwhelmed the mellow spices that are tingled by citrus peel.

There they are, all finished. Oh yes. Oh yes. I just ate one. They are like wonderful spice doughnuts, taken to new heights. These are really yumbo jumbo. There are many people who don´t really care for raisins. I understand if these little dried-up shriveled rat turds appear on a kindergarten snack spread. But cooked in a thing? They change. They bloat with innocent joy.

While these buns were a-bakin, I was a-boilin a whole mess of spices and salt and sugar in a pot with water, because brisket was on sale, inspiring me again to make corned beef for St. Patrick´s Day. Mustard seed, coriander seed, clove, cinnamon, allspice, bay leaf, salt sugar, soak it for weeks. Almost three weeks in this case.

Wow, spring is really comin-up real quick. I saw fresh local asparagus at Bi-Rite, the local local market for local produce, produced locally. Locally sourced, to coin a phrase.

I also got cabbage for cabbage rolls, Slovakian Farmers Cheese, which I found handily at Gus´s for the pierogies. The recipes for these are taken from a cookbook that my mother wrote, gathering family recipes, particularly those she ate at the family farm in Southern Ohio. A number of these recipes- stuffed cabbage, peppers, kielbasa, sauerkraut, appeared on a semi-regular basis in the dinner rotation when we were kids. I was always surprised when I lived in Atlanta and London that some people had never heard of these foods let alone eaten them. Sounds like everything is set for the next week of eating. It´s been fun to use a lot of hyphens too.