Season's Greetings and Scenes from my Tree

The vanillekipferl, the cinnamon stars and the marzipan fruits are all baked. The gammon is cooking, the food shopping is done, the tree is decorated and the presents are wrapped. The weather is unseasonal - thunderstorms to start the day which have now given way to blue skies and fluffy clouds - I'm not complaining, it's better than the sweltering 33 degrees C we had on Saturday. And so, as you can gather, I have surrendered to Christmas and have joined in the mania. I'm wearing my Santa beanie, humming to myself, smiling at all the frazzled and irritated shoppers and wishing the people working on the tills good cheer, good luck and Merry Christmas - and so I do the same to you.

I wish you a happy and festive and blessed Christmas and a peaceful and joyful New Year. May 2008 bring you good health, laughter, love, harmony and happiness and may all your dreams come true. If you do not celebrate the season, I wish you well and I send you love and laughter and joy.

Have a wonderful holiday season!
Merry Christmas to one and all!

You will notice that aside from the usual baubles and beads and whatnot, my tree is peopled with all sorts of folk who, when the lights are dimmed come out and celebrate the magic.

And here's what I've been humming to myself recently...

The Christmas Gift?

It has finally happened. We've turned into fowl. Atyllah would be proud of us. Or despairing. Time will tell.

So what, you wonder, am I wittering on about this time. Well, see, it's like this.

There was a tremendous squawking of guinea fowl earlier this evening - the sort of squawking that denotes an alarm. Then all fell silent for a while and then... the most strident peeping started. We assumed that it must be one of the three babies who live in the garden who'd managed to lose itself yet again. So we peeked out the front door and found, running around like little wind-up toys, four tiny, newly-hatched baby guinea fowl. There was no of evidence of a parent in sight and Outstanding Feather (the father of the other babies and named because of his one feather that insists on sticking out of his back instead of lying flat) was wandering around not quite sure what to do. He was alternately pecking the new babies and trying to round them up and they were simply out of control, whizzing back and forth across the driveway, peeping their tiny heads off.

I went off to get my camera to take some shots and as I came down the passage I saw a small creature dash into the kitchen (all the doors have been open all day because it's been a sweltering 33 degrees C). D gathered it up and took it back outside. The next thing, two more popped through the front door and scuttled up the passage to the bathroom. We gathered them up and popped them in a box. We searched for the third in the garden, caught it and popped in with its siblings. There was no sign of the fourth until very loud peeping advised us that there was a small bird under the Christmas tree in the lounge.

Despite hunting high and low, there was no sign of the parents anywhere. We even tried leaving the box on the patio so the mother might come for them - but it was already getting dark and guinea fowl retire early - the other lot were already roosting up in the flowering gum.

So D has now officially become the mother hen. The babies are tucked up in a box with a furry dog hot water bottle (water at blood temperature) and a teddy bear under which they're nesting. Whether they'll make it through the night remains to be seen but at least they're safe and warm.

We reckon they're no more than 24 hours old as they still have their egg tooth and their wings are mere stumps. The reality though is the mortality rate for these little birds is very high and they're subject to all sorts of pathogens. The shock of losing their parent and finding themselves in a strange environment - though they do seem to think D is mum - may well be too much for them. So we'll see whether they're still with us in the morning. If they are... then it will be a feeding regime, hand-rearing and... well, look, just don't call me Chicken - that's Atyllah's territory, not mine.

Seasonal Blues and a VanilleKipferl Recipe

This the season to be jolly, tra la-la la-laaa... and bah humbug. For a multitude of reasons this is not my favourite time of year and as the happy day draws closer so I am getting more stressed and more gloomy. Frankly, I think next year I'm simply going to cancel the entire event!

However, that said, as much as I think the Christmas plot has totally been lost in a glut of consumer frenzy, the felling of thousands of little trees, the general stress and mayhem to be experienced on the roads and in the malls, and prolific over indulging, I am, nevertheless, trying enter into some of the spirit. Though frankly, I'd sooner some spirit would enter me (whisky, vodka, brandy would do fine - if only I drank).

To this end, I've decided to do some belated Christmas baking and, in memory of my grandmother - see post below - I'm going to be baking a few things that she used to treat us with at Weihnacht (that's Christmas in German). I thought I'd share one of the recipes with you. Admittedly, it's not my gran's recipe - this one comes from a friend - but the biscuits taste just the same as the one's my granny made.

Evelyne’s Vanillekipferl

250 gr flour
220 gr butter (preferably use salted butter, it gives a better flavour)
100 gr ground almonds or hazelnut (I only use almonds)
70 gr sugar
a few drops of vanilla essence to flavour the dough

1. Mix all ingredients and roll into a ball.

2. Leave to rest for about 1 hour or so.

3. Form crescents by first rolling a little ball in your hands, roll into a sort of sausage and then voilà you form the crescent or half-moon. (This is a recipe originates from when the Turks almost laid siege on Vienna in 1683 or thereabouts, therefore the half-moon.)

4. Bake on an ungreased baking sheet (the dough is greasy enough) at approx. 180 ° Centigrade for about 30 to 40 minutes.
You'll notice when they are done by sticking your finger into the nearest Kipferl. If it gives way, it isn't done yet. They should have a light colour when done, brown is not good.

5. When they are ready take them out of the oven and IMMEDIATELY roll them in sugar. Don't use castor sugar, it just becomes sticky, and normal sugar is a bit too large-grained, so if you can possibly get icing or confectioner's sugar, use that.

6. Store the Kipferl in a tin, they will happily keep for about 4 - 5 weeks.

These little biscuits are decidedly more-ish - the last batch I baked lasted less than a week - never mind how long the kipferl were willing to last in their tin!

And once I've made the kipferl, I'm going to be making zimtsterne - cinnamon stars - and marzipan "fruits". Well, that's the intention anyway... Mice, men, best laid plans, ho ho ho hum.

NOTE:
Posts and blog visiting may be a bit haphazard - my ISP is playing up something horrible and broadband capacity seems to have slowed to a snail's pace - in fact, I'm remembering the days of dial up... Do please bear with me.

The Storyteller

Julie, from a Virtual Journey, having reorganized her photos, came up with the idea of a Gallery Meme.

She said, in her post: Choose an image(s) of any kind (photo, art or graphics - your own or attributed) - then write a description, poem or 'scene' about them as you please, and say why they are meaningful to you. These can be on separate posts if preferred; open ended as to when you place them.

The photo below of is of my paternal grandmother and judging from the writing on the back was taken in 1921 in Vienna. Aside from the fact that I love old photos, ones that contain family members strike me as having a special kind of magic – containing faces that reach out to you over time and space.


What amuses me about the photo is it paints a picture of a demure, thoughtful young woman, but by all accounts, my gran was anything but that. She was evidently the life and soul of the party.

My grandmother was born in Bregenz in Austria at the turn of the last century and, after her mother starved during the war, she ran away from home. It was about 1917 and she must have been about 16 or 17 years old. She went to Zurich where she first got a job washing dishes and then trained as a hairdresser. It was there that she met my grandfather, a man born in Vienna of Hungarian parents. He was evidently taken with her and told her he’d soon be leaving for South Africa to open a hairdressing salon and could he send for her. Ever an opportunist, she agreed.

She soon found herself with a backpack and a guitar on a ship bound for Cape Town. She often told me about the wonderful time she had on the ship, playing her guitar and entertaining the other passengers. She loved, she used to say, to dance and sing and make people laugh. When the ship docked in Cape Town, she was having such a good time that she decided to stay aboard the ship. The sailors gave her some of their clothing and she hid until the ship departed for Durban. My grandfather, however, well-peeved that the lady had not landed in Cape Town sent the police after her and my gran soon found herself on the way back to Cape Town. Docking in Cape Town, however, the authorities refused to allow her to disembark as she didn’t have the correct papers and so my grandfather came aboard and said he would marry her. They were married by the ship’s captain and to the day she died my grandmother swore that she never knew she was getting married as she couldn’t understand a word the captain said… The fact that she is likely to have understood everything my grandfather said seemed to have conveniently slipped her mind!

So it was that she found herself married and living with her new husband and her mother-in-law whom she detested. Although my grandmother worked for my grandfather in his salon in the centre of town, her views about her marriage never changed. She used to tell me that my grandfather kept her like a bird in a golden cage. She wasn’t allowed to look at, let alone dance with or talk to other men. He was, she would say, supremely jealous and his mother was an evil old gypsy!

When my father was a young boy my grandmother took him and his younger sister to Austria for six months. There she met up with a younger cousin and fell in love. She was loathe to return to South Africa but when her cousin said he would return with her, she agreed. And so my grandmother embarked on the love affair of her life. Although she attempted to be discreet about her relationship with her lover, it was clearly one of those things that couldn’t be hidden and divorce proceedings were soon instigated. My grandmother left Cape Town for Johannesburg taking her daughter with her – accompanying her was the man I grew up knowing as “gran’pa”. My father was left with is father and grandmother in Cape Town and I don’t think my father or my grandmother ever got over being parted.

When he was sixteen my father ran away to join his mother and in order to have her son legally live with her, my grandmother finally married her cousin.

So, despite the demure looking young woman in the picture, my gran was clearly pretty progressive for her time!

I loved her spirit of adventure, her sense of fun and above all her ability to tell stories. We would sit together in her “bauernstube” (her traditional Austrian farmer’s style dining room), drinking tea and munching anchovy toast and she would regale me with stories about her life. I have no doubt that it was from her and her love of story and story telling that I inherited the same love.

On Beauty and Balance

Given that yesterday's road rage event (see yesterday's post) has left a bad taste, I decided to follow up with something altogether nicer and brighter. Nothing like trying to find and keep the balance which is feeling decidedly wobbly at present.

These are some recent photos taken by way of trying to find a creative solution (following on hellish medical expenses last month) to some Christmas gifts!

With apologies to my US blogging friends

I’ll be perfectly candid, until such time as I started this blog and for some years, I held a pretty dim view of US citizens and all things USA. Yes, of course, to take such a view is to generalise and we all know generalisations aren’t generally fair. My view was fostered and supported by several factors of which all thinking people are well aware. However, since starting this blog I’ve “met” some really great people from the US, whom I’ve been delighted to get to know and who restored my increasingly flagging opinions of all things US. Today, however, my view has taken another serious nosedive and while I realise this may be unfair, it strikes me that what I experienced today is the kind of behaviour that has given the US the increasingly pariah international reputation it has wittingly created.

Aside from the fact that crime and violence have increased (as they do every year at this time) along with the arrival of the stressfully silly season, and the governing party are at each others throats at their annual conference where the fate of the nation will be decided, and the markets are wobbly and people are generally feeling twitchy, I was feeling fairly chilled and was tootling along the motorway – mostly courtesy of the fact that it’s a holiday here today and I’ve got all my Christmas shopping done. The motorway, I should point out, isn’t really a motorway or a freeway, but a two lane road the travels from the outskirts of suburbia to the city.

I had just overtaken another car so was in the “fast”/right lane when a fellow in a blue SUV roared up behind me. Since I was too close to the other car to cross back to the “slow”/left lane, I stayed where I was. The fellow edged towards my exhaust and then, in a fit of impatience, swerved out from behind me, cutting in front of the other car, roared off, cut back in front of me and chased off down the road - only to find himself having to stop abruptly at a red light at an intersection. I chuckled, as I often do when people display such idiotic behaviour. They seem to be in this terrible haste but fail to account for the fact that that particular section of road is littered with traffic lights and progress is invariably slow as a result.

I pulled up behind him. He glowered at me in his rear view mirror and proceeded to indicate with a circular movement of his finger to his head that he thought I was crazed. So I do what I frequently do with stroppy drivers; I shook my head and gave him the finger. He flung his door open and bellowed, “Don’t you fucking give me the finger.” Needless to say I did what any self-respecting woman who doesn’t take shit from oafs would do – I gave him the finger again. He leapt from his vehicle – ignoring the fact that the lights were changing, and rushed over to my car. He was, I noticed, sporting a straw cowboy style hat and had a beer gut that drooped unattractively over the top of his shorts. He waved his hands at me and screamed in an unmistakable US accent, “Don’t you give me the fucking finger you fucking whore!”

Nice man. Not.

I locked my car door and tried to figure how best to get away from the deranged clod. I might be cheeky but I am not suicidal. Traffic was streaming past us and was backed up behind me. People were hooting and I suppose in one way it was a good thing it was a holiday and traffic was light. Mind you, on the other hand, had it been busier perhaps someone might have leapt from a car and belted him, deservedly, on the snout.

As the bulk of the traffic passed and as he leapt back into his gas guzzler, I started to manoeuvre past him. But what did he do as I drew level with his rear passenger door? He swung hard and cut me off – deliberately trying to force an accident. The word “fuckwit” sprung to mind. Fortunately, having figured that he was sufficiently doltish and demented to do what he did, I braked and swung back into the right lane. He swung back in front of me and roared forward. Needless to say I was, by that stage, somewhat incensed. All mantras, notions of peace, love, brown bread and interconnectedness had flown from my being. He swung to the left lane and I accelerated, only to find that he did so too and swerved again to cut me off and then blocked my passing him by driving on the white line. Such etiquette. Such style. Such exemplary behaviour. Very definitely not. Of course, he not only blocked me, he blocked every other motorist on the road. So I slowed down and loitered and he, his fury no doubt boiling over, roared forward and I managed to tuck myself away three cars behind him.

Now here’s the thing: it is this sort of arrogant, aggressive, boorish behaviour that gives the US such a bad name. This guy is not a local and god knows, despite the fact that there is some seriously aggressive driving on local roads, I have never encountered anything like that here, not ever. People just don’t bother to get quite that offended, despite the levels of stress with which we all live. They may hoot, they may drive up your backside, they will inevitably give you the bird, but I have never seen anyone do what this US fellow did. And it struck me that he dealt a blow to that generalised view that has increasingly made the US a nation so despised and destested by so many of the world’s people. Diplomatic relations, let it be said, took a serious plummet today.

And this is the funny thing about us humans, isn’t it – we tend to notice and focus on the bad people do, rather than the good. We tend to remember the insensitivity and the arrogance, the bullying and the brashness, the ignorance and the aggression. We look at the Bush administration and shake our heads and say, “Yeah, well, no wonder, what do you expect.” Oh well, no doubt the bloke’s own karma will get him and he probably took himself a few years closer to a heart attack. And so much for my quiet tootle to the mall and my carefully cultivated equilibrium.

More Than Just Capering with Guinea Fowl

There’s been a lot of shagging going on this season. And much of it has been happening in my garden. The guinea fowl, it must be said are going at it with tremendous zeal. Although I’ve never quite seen how it starts or ends – though I can guess at the latter – the middle bit is nothing short of hilarious.

Take one female guinea fowl who hurtles around the garden with a somewhat startled look in her eye which seems to be saying, “Got to run, got to get him off my tail feathers. Oooh larks, he’s gaining on me - legs go faster!” Hot on her heels is the male with a maniacal glint in his eye. It’s one women the world over recognise. The fowl tear across the lawn, bound over the wall, hurtle up the driveway, flap over the back wall, chase through the yard, belt around the pool and whizz over the lawn again. Woe betide any other guinea fowl, dove or squirrel that gets in the way. Sometimes she gets crafty, and weaves her way, at speed, between the legs of the patio table and chairs. This usually results in him banging his head at least twice. If she’s really sneaky, she’ll duck under the sun lounger, leaving him having to adjust angles on the run. Should he catch up with her, he’ll do his best to viciously (or is it amorously?) remove a few feathers from her back. It is a demented and manic business in the extreme.

Watching all this a couple of days, biting our fingers because the baby guineas were right in the path of hot passion, we ended up doubled over with laughter.

She, we learned, is clearly more in charge of things than he is. First of all, she managed, without fail, to avoid the babies pootling around on the patio. And she managed to throw in an extra devious move. She flapped over the pool. He, running at full tilt took notice too late and nose dived straight into the water with a resounding splat. Guinea fowl, it must be said, are not waterbirds. He, inelegant at the best of times, paddled and flapped, stranded and stunned for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. Guineas, you must understand, do not do the take off thing lightly – either from land or water. It is usual for them to survey, with quizzical looks, the object which they wish to reach – wall or roof or bird bath – for quite a while before doing an impression of jump jet which looks more like a cargo-carrying Hercules. And so Casanova did just the same and landed, very wetly, on the patio. She, meanwhile, had carried on running and as she came by for the second pass, she gave him a resounding peck as if to say, “C’mon, whaddayawaitin’for, you panting no-good soggy git?!” He was about to give chase once more when he was distracted by our uncontrollable laughter. For a moment he looked nonplussed before giving himself a very damp shake. He took off after his lady love, but when it came time to pass by the pool again – and we were still doubled up laughing – he came to an abrupt halt.

He looked at us – a mixture of bemusement and sheepishness on his face. She shot past, gave him another swift peck and kept going, only to realise, moments later, that he wasn’t hot on her tail. He was still staring at us, his head cocked as if to say, “Aw, c’mon guys, it wasn’t that funny, why’re ya still laughing?”. We had, it seemed, dampened his ardour with the ever successful well-timed laugh at the male, um, ego. She squawked and he turned away and scuttled behind a bush. Whether the deed was ever done I have no idea, but if ever a fellow had a cold shower to cool his passion, our bird was certainly the one! Time will reveal if the afternoon’s entertainment results in this…



I should add, by way of conclusion, that the fellow who starts the chase is seldom the one who gets the pleasure. He's usually too worn out after the hot-blooded pursuit, and it's another more sneaky bird who steps in at the last minute to claim the lady, while the first chap is left panting and gasping on the lawn. Who said all was fair in love and war, eh?