Monthly Archives: December 2008

I won’t lie, Fridays have taken on a new life with the advent of our new jobs.  Where I used to want the weekend so badly that my eyes crossed, now it’s something that arrives sweetly and seems to go on forever.  As you may remember, Drew worked weekends in the hospital for about 6 months during his final semester and so in addition to my somewhat stress laden longing to be away from work, I would flop into the weekend and not have that fella around that I like so well.  We paid our dues though, and now Drew is generally off Friday-Monday, I can work from home or on the weekends, and everything feels so well paced.  We’re lucky.  So it’s Friday morning, and I’m getting a little work done and getting a post up and sipping on a really good cup of coffee, and all’s right in the small Walton world.

Here are some pictures that I took this morning on Grace’s constitutional of the last signs of Fall and the clear signs that Old Man Winter is hanging the curtains.  The Magic They were wrong again about the snow, but it’s been such a grey week that I’ll take a little sun for today.

Aunt Pat just shared these pictures with us, can you believe it?  I think that Baton Rouge has more snow right now than we got all winter long last year!  The magical They are calling for around an inch of snow for our area early tomorrow morning, but I will certainly be surprised if it looks anything like this.  What do you think?  Global Cooling?  Global Warming?  A good time for a cuppa hot chocolate?

I have a cousin-in-law, Aileen, who makes wonderfully rich and delicious food.  Pretty much every time she makes something we all ask for the recipe.  And seconds.  Last year for Christmas, my aunt sent us all a really great collection of family recipes and Aileen’s mac and cheese recipe (which is so much more than just macaroni and cheese) was included, which was a major score for the rest of us!  Well it turns out the mac and cheese recipe is a great base for pretty much anything and so I’ve been using the basic recipe to make various gratins and casseroles, and I’m pretty sure that at Thanksgiving I found my personal favorite and thought that I would share it.

It’s a sweet potato gratin with spiced nuts and bacon–not for the diet conscious, but sometimes you just gotta let it fly and hunt down the bacon!  Also, as a side note, I wanted to add golden raisins to this and was vetoed, but I think I will next go round to see how it turns out.  Drew says gross, I say good, you can do it any old way you like.

What do you think I should call it?

Nutty Sweet Potato Gratin?

4 Sweet Potatoes, thinly sliced (or however many fill a casserole dish)

4 c. whole milk

6 Tbs flour

1 stick of butter

pinch of nutmeg

two garlic cloves, diced

pepper to taste

1 tsp cayenne (or more if you would like more of a kick)

spiced nuts (recipe below), coarsely chopped

2 c. each:

sharp cheddar

Asiago

Gruyere or Fontina

6-9 slices of bacon cooked and chopped up,

1/2 c. grated parmesan (from the shaker) OR 1/2 c. breadcrumbs tossed with 2 TBS melted butter for topping

***

Preheat oven to 350, grease large casserole dish. Place sliced sweet potatoes in a large mixing bowl.   Bring milk to a boil.  In another pan melt butter, add flour and whisk constantly to prevent lumps.  Add milk to butter mixture, stirring constantly, and then add cayenne, garlic, pepper, and nutmeg.  Bring mixture to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until thickened stirring constantly, 6-9 minutes.  Once thickened, stir in 1/2 the cheese (1 c. each) until melted.  Pour mixture over potatoes, stir to coat evenly, mix in nuts and bacon.  Transfer half of the potato mixture to the prepared dish, top with remaining cheeses, top with the rest of the potato mixture and cover the top with parmesan or breadcrumbs.  Bake for about 30 minutes or until the top is golden brown and juices are bubbling and potatoes are tender.

Nuts

About 1/2 c. to a cup of nuts.  I used walnuts because that’s what we had, but in the future I will do pecans simply because I prefer them.

1-2 Tbs olive oil (mmm, or melted butter!)

1 Tbs Old Bay

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp garlic powder.

Toss nuts with all the ingredients and toast until fragrant, about 5 minutes.

*Really for the nuts, just toss them around with whatever sounds good to you.  I just grabbed bottles and they seemed to come out ok, so have at it!

Also, if you just want to make the mac and cheese, cook a pound of penne until it’s al dente and place in a mixing bowl.  Follow recipe above, omit bacon and nuts (or not), and just before baking, top with 1/2c. heavy cream.  Divine.  This recipe also works well for broccoli cheese casserole, potatoes au gratin with red onion, and just about anything else you want baked in cheese…which for me is pretty much everything.  Happy eating!

I took this picture with my friend Kyle’s camera following a concert in an art gallery.  Those are the facts.  But, that’s not good enough because I’m pretty sure that this picture looks like a poem, and so I’m thinking of all of my past professors and their various writing prompts and wondering what story lives in this picture.  I can hear a push broom being whiskery and striking the ground.  Is there a single bead of sweat on the face that is out of the frame?  Does he wish that he could collapse on that chair and forget about this crummy night job and the graceless pay?  Is he surrounded by a crowd about to jump into a street performance version of Thriller?  Oh no!  Did he just remember that he…

And so inspiration comes.  Who knows, but I think that the root of poetry lies in being able to empathize with the imagination that lingers just below the surface of the ordinary and spring it to life.  It’s under the sweeping tendrels of a broom, in the way that shoes have personality when you look at how the laces are tied, and in all of different story lines that each of us would create looking at this picture.  I just know there’s a poem in that.

Our new neice!  Drew’s sister Ashley along with her husband Jeff and their daughter Caroline welcomed Charlotte Marie Beck into the world on November 29, 2008!  She weighed 6 lbs. 3 oz, and Drew and I cannot wait to go and meet her!  You can keep up with Ashley and her adventures with the girls at her blog and I bet that there will be many more pictures of both Caroline and Charlotte around here as time goes on.  Welcome to this nutty world Charlotte!

And one of my favorites…big siter Caroline with baby Charlotte

Our cat Mabel is not typical–not that I know what a typical cat might be, but I’m fairly confident that she’s got an atypical streak.  She likes crowds, she plays with the dog, she doesn’t know a single stranger, she’s enormously fat, and yet streaks through the house at least twice a day in a cat crack fit that makes most kittens look lazy.  However, there are a few cat stereotypes that she has not avoided, the least of which is her undying devotion to sitting on or preferably getting into anything new that we bring into the house.  Please pardon the mess, but this is how I wrapped presents Sunday:

Notice anything sticking out of that bag?  How about a closer look:

She was getting very fresh with me, meowing and walking all over everything until I realized and relented, took what was in the bag out and turned my back just enough for her to not feel sheepish about doing something so cat-like as to enjoy getting in a bag.  And there she stayed for nearly two hours.  Silly, charming cat.

It goes without saying that it’s been a while since I’ve published a piece of our life to the web, but after some help I was able to resolve my blog issues (and heartily recommend staying away from my previous host) and get back to it. The inclination is to feverishly write about everything that’s happened since August, but that might be a little dull so I’m just jumping right back in with the weekend and some photos and we’ll see what tumbles out.

We picked up our Christmas tree from the boy scouts this weekend and got it decorated and in the window, laughing about our Christmas tree being kind of like the charming but gaudy leg lamp from A Christmas Story. Admittedly, we are dorks about our ornaments, but we do both like getting a tree and have our collective families to thank for not having a naked pine in our house. We went through the typical and cathartic ohhing and ahhing as we pulled out the small balls and birds and stars and all the others and I tried to apply my mother’s touch to the light stringing process, though there might still be a few dark spots. Last year we didn’t put up a tree because we moved in December and it seemed a little more pertinent to unpack the towels and sheets before stringing the lights. Given this, we had forgotten some of our ornaments and were doubly excited to sort through them.

I think that my very favorite moment with a Christmas tree is just before bed when the house is settled and all of the lights are out and there’s this glowing, comforting and perfectly strange tree in the house, looking both slightly out of place and yet confirming all those sensations about what makes a house a home. Within the powers of nostalgia I can see my and my brother’s legs poking out from under the tree when I still had feet on my pajamas, I can smell scotch tape and pine, I can (sometimes regretfully) hear Christmas songs rolling endlessly in the back of my mind, and in all of that, I find great comfort. On Friday evening after the tree was decorated, some friends came over to our house and at the end of the night when everyone had headed out, leaving the sound of their laughter hanging over our sofa like a thought bubble, I stood in the quiet house with all of the lamps out just not ready to go to bed and turn out the tree lights, and silly and cliched though it may be, I did feel the peace that we talk about so endlessly during the holidays but rarely seem to find. While I think it’s mostly (hopefully) our good memories that fuel our desire to be in the holiday mode every year, there’s something to be said about the anomaly and absolute sweetness that is a Christmas tree.