All About Jane's Ranch

My daughter and son-in-law are arriving tomorrow for Christmas.

I’ve got trees in all the rooms, and everything is merry and bright!

When I saw how this picture turned out, I realized this was a perfect place for a family Christmas recipe, so here’s my little gift for you, dear readers. I think I might have married Dave just to get my mitts on these cookies!

Grandma Winnie’s Christmas Sandies

Ingredients:

2 sticks of butter
1 tsp. vanilla
1/4 cup of sugar
1 cup finely chopped pecans
1 tsp salt
2 cups of flour
Powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 325.
Cream butter and sugar. Add vanilla and incorporate. Stir in pecans and mix well.
Sift dry ingredients and add to butter/sugar/nut mixture about a 1/3 of a cup at a time until well mixed. (Don’t over-work the dough)
Form the dough into “fingers” about the size of your thumb, maybe smaller, and put on ungreased cooking sheet about an inch apart.
Remove from oven when slightly golden colored and roll in powdered sugar while they are still warm. Roll in powdered sugar again when cooled.

Bake for 20 minutes.

Happy Holidays from Jane

Pioneer Woman has what she calls her lodge — a place where she cooks and entertains — and so do I. Okay, so compared to PW’s lodge mine is more of a lodge-ette.

Most of the time (and when we don’t have guests), this place is sports central for Dave and his buds. Every Tuesday morning, you’ll find me vacuuming up the cloud of popcorn and chips left on the floor. What can I say?

However . . . once a year I gussy this place up and give a girls’ luncheon for some of my Sierra Mountain sisters.

I’ve spent the better part of a week decorating both houses, so consequently, no new chapters up. Sorry. ( See New Year’s Resolutions come January 1.)

I love the fireplace in my “lodge-ette”. It’s made from stones which come from the creek near my house. Talk about building local!

And here’s a picture of part of the view from . . . well, from THE LODGE. Maybe that’s what we’ll call it. See if it sticks! Up to now, it’s been called “the house on the hill” to distinguish it from what we call “the house in the valley”.

Anyway, for this luncheon, I made Paula Deen’s “Chef Jack’s Corn Chowder“.

Girls, I made it MINUS the addition of the extra butter. Just read the recipe and you’ll see why! For ten ladies, I doubled the recipe. While Paula Deen’s recipe says it serves 8-10, that must be 8-10 first course sizes. Just so you know.

And I did serve it with the suggested Chardonnay.

But my favorite part of the meal was the salad I served as a first course— Spinach Salad with Mandarin Oranges and Candied Almonds. ( Wine pairing : a dry Riesling from Washington State.) The salad is adapted from Pam Anderson’s cookbook Perfect Recipes for Having People Over.

Here’s the recipe!

Boston Lettuce and Baby Spinach Salad with Oranges and Candied Almonds

Ingredients:

10-15 cups of greens–spinach, arugula, Boston Lettuce, or a combination of them.
1 cup of sliced almonds
1/3 cup of sugar
3 small cans of mandarin oranges
1 medium red onion
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
3/4 cups good olive oil
salt and fresh pepper to taste

Directions:

Thinly slice the onion and soak it in the vinegar for a half an hour. No more! Save the vinegar.
Drain the oranges and add to greens.
Add the onions and the candied almonds. (recipe for almonds follows)
Toss with reserved vinegar, oil and salt and pepper.
Add more vinegar if it does not taste sharp enough. Add more oil if the greens are not nice and shiny.
That’s it. Serve immediately.

Candied Almonds:

In a dry skillet, toast one cup of almonds until fragrant and golden.
Mix 1/3 cup of sugar with 2TBS. of water until dissolved.
Pour the sugar water over the almonds and toss until coated.
Cool sugared almonds in a pie pan.

Here’s a toast to all y’all from all of us!

There’s a poem by the German poet Ranier Maria Rilke that begins “Lord it is time. The huge summer has gone by . . .” which I kept thinking about as I walked around the ranch looking for the cows.

The good news is that Big Mac is better.

The other news is we have a new female calf named Lightbulb. Here’s a kind of blurry picture, but you’ll understand the name.

She seems to be very happy these days with her little herd.

Anyway, about halfway up the hill I heard a meowing sound. It was Dudley the cat, following me on my walk. He wanted me to wait up for him.

It takes over an hour to walk around a little loop road we’ve carved out for ourselves. The road goes through a meadow, up a hill to a grove of blue oaks, down a path covered with buckeye, past a hill of ceanothus and bay laurel near the pond. There are lots of hiding places for bobcats and coyotes, and Dave even saw a mountain lion once, sitting on a rock cleaning his face with his paws.

I don’t really like Dudley to follow me this far because of all the wild critters, but I wasn’t turning back now. I figured I could just carry him through the wooded places.

Anyway it was such a beautiful, warm November day the two of us stopped in the meadow to take in the view, which is where Dave found us and snapped this picture.

I should be in my office adding more copyedited chapters to my novel for you all to read. You’re stuck on Chapter Five, I know. But, it was so beautiful out can you blame me? I keep hoping for a really rainy day.

Well, rain or no rain, I promise in the next few days I’ll have a couple more chapters up.

Meanwhile, here’s that Rilke poem I mentioned.

AUTUMN DAY

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

– Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

I’ve been a bit under the weather the past couple of weeks, so that combined with the longer nights gave me the perfect excuse to curl up on the sofa and bury myself in a great adventure novel.

Ever since this summer when I held a big tapas party on the lawn and we all stayed up ’til the wee hours drinking Spanish wine in the moonlight and listening to Paco de Lucia, I’ve been on a big Spanish kick—food, film, music, wine, and so on.

Spain, I’m told by people who know these things, is the new Tuscany.

I loved For Whom the Bell Tolls and have a soft spot in my heart for those brave folks in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the ones who tried to stop Hitler before he could destroy Europe. And who doesn’t love Casablanca?

So when Goodreads e-mailed me about this hot, new, word-of-mouth novel by Maria Duenas called The Time In Between, which is set in Spain and Morocco during the Spanish Civil War, I had to read it.

BTW if you are a book junkie, and you don’t live anywhere near Vroman’s, or Book Passage, Powells or Elliot Bay Books, get on the Goodreads site. Since I live up here in the sticks far from any great bookstore, Goodreads meets a lot of my bookstore-browsing needs.

The Time In Between is 600 fabulous pages long. Perfect for winter. It tells the story of Sira, a young Spanish seamstress forced to live by her wits when a passionate love affair and the Spanish Civil War strand her in glamorous, dangerous Tangier.

The rest you’ll just have to find out on your own.

It’s beautifully written and so sensual—you can feel the hot sun beating against the closed shutters, smell the orange bossoms at night and taste the ice-cold champagne at the El Minzah Bar (see the stairway on the left), which was the model for Rick’s Cafe in the movie Casablanca.

Here’s what the Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa had to say about The Time In Between: “A wonderful novel, in the good, old tradition, with intrigue, love, mystery and tender, audacious and well-drawn characters.”

Who could want more?

And speaking of all things Spanish, I’m including my recipe for my go-to date night dish—Gambas al Ajillo.

Many years ago when we needed such a thing, Dave and I realized the futility of trying to get a babysitter in Berkeley on a Saturday night, so we just lit candles, put on music, made a fancy but easy dinner and pretended we were dining out. The perfect dish for such an occasion? My friend Lynda’s Gambas al Ajillo. Plus, the dish goes well with Champagne, or Spanish Cava, as the case may be. A nice Albarino is good, too, but hey—it’s date night. Splurge!

Gambas al Ajillo

5 TBS. Olive oil ( I use a spicy, Spanish olive oil for this, not an Italian)
1 tsp. hot pepper flakes
1 pound medium shrimp, peeled
4 cloves of garlic, very thinly sliced. (Sometimes I just put the garlic through a press, which results in a stronger garlic flavor.)
2 TBS. Italian parsley, chopped
Sea salt or kosher salt optional. ( Taste and see.)

1. Swirl olive oil in a pan until hot but not smoking.
2. Add hot pepper flakes and shrimp and cook a matter of seconds, just until shrimp are pink.
3. Add garlic and cook for a few seconds to a minute until garlic is golden. Do not burn.
5. Toss in the parsley

Pour shrimp into a warm cazuela, taste for salt, and add if you want ( Be careful. Not too salty) Serve with plenty of good bread to sop up the sauce.

The whole menu is something like this. Champagne, olives and Marcona almonds to start. Cook the shrimp while you sip champagne. Serve the gambas and bread, and for desert have seasonal fruit and a young manchego cheese.

A perfect meal for when they make The Time In Between into a movie! Then again, We’ll always have . . . Casablanca, as another great date night option.

. . . Here’s a great recipe for a Thanksgiving hors d’oeuvres from two wonderful southern cooks. These Cheese Straws taste just like my mother’s.

Recipe: Cheese Straws

1 2/3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoons dry mustard
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 pound extra-sharp Cheddar cheese, coarsely grated (2 1/2 cups)
1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 tablespoons water

Sift the flour, mustard, salt and cayenne into a medium bowl. Using an electric mixer, beat the cheese and butter on low speed until well blended. Gradually beat in the flour until completely incorporated. Add the water and beat for 1 minute.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead 5 times. On a large sheet of wax paper, roll the dough into a 12-by-9-inch rectangle. Slide the dough onto a cookie sheet and refrigerate until chilled, about 15 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 425°. Cut the dough in half crosswise, then cut it into 6-by-1/4-inch strips. Transfer the strips to 2 cookie sheets. Bake 1 sheet at a time for about 14 minutes, or until the cheese straws are golden brown and crisp. Let cool slightly, then transfer to a rack to cool completely.
MAKE AHEAD The Cheese Straws can be stored in an airtight container for up to 1 week.

I’m making mine this afternoon. They’re perfect with my traditional Thanksgiving cocktail — Maker’s Mark Old-Fashioneds.

I’ve just gotten back from a trip to Mexico City for a week, and in my absence, the autumn clouds have moved in. Seems like just yesterday I was standing in big pools of sunlight, hardly remembering winter at all. Now, the light is grey, and every now and then, the clouds settle close to the hill, covering my window.

I’m feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. I thought that we’d have a big freeze while I was gone and that would be the end of the vegetables from the garden. But no. Yesterday, Dave came it with a grocery bag full of eggplants, which I had to cook and freeze instead of unpacking my suitcase.

Okay, I could have thrown them out, but what’s the point of a garden then?

To add to my learning curve up here, Big Mac has a cyst on his face—dryland distemper— it’s called. My neighbor came over to diagnose it, said she had a horse that had it last month, that it’s common in these parts this time of year, and that no large animal vet will come up here to take care of cattle. And adios.

So along with learning that you can tell a heifer newborn calf from a bull calf by the direction it pees (down on the ground if it’s male and straight out the back if it’s female . . .in case you wanted to know), I’m now consulting a book called Raising Beef Cattle to figure out what to do here.

Basically, I’m supposed to lance the cyst, drain it, and swab the wound out with iodine. After that, I give Big Mac an antibiotic injection with a cattle syringe.

Right.

Do you know what Big Mac weighs? Over a thousand pounds! Not counting the horns, friends. You think he’ll cooperate?

Poor Big Mac.

So there isn’t much I can do but follow him around in the clouds and make sure he is still eating, that he hasn’t gone down.

So far so good. I’m told this will resolve on its own and that it won’t be pretty. I can take “not pretty”, but if he gets really, really sick, I don’t know what I’ll do.

Anyway, last night after checking on Big Mac, after putting the last of the eggplant slices in the freezer, I poured a glass of wine, flopped on the sofa and picked up the New Yorker I’d tossed there with the rest of the mail.

In it I found a beautiful poem by Jennifer Barber that carried me off to another place in my consciousness, made me think about language and life at their most basic, and this was both calming and transcendent and just what I needed.

Here it is.

IN THE HEBREW PRIMER

A man. A woman, A road.
Jerusalem.

Nouns like mountain and gate,
water and famine,
wind and wilderness
arrange themselves in two
columns on the page.

The verbs are
remember and guard;
the verbs are
give birth to and glean.

The eye picks its way
through letters like
torches and doors, like scythes.

The harvest, the dust.
The day calls, the night sings
from the threshing floor.

A woman, a man:
I was, you were, we were.

Here in the Sierras, the heat of the summer is gone, and the autumn light has that Indian Summer tinge to it, clear and lovely. But still, the days are getting shorter and the work lists longer.

Dave and I have all the produce in the garden to finish harvesting and fallen leaves to rake. Plus, I have to add a a few more edited chapters of Palace of the Blue Butterfly to my blog.

In anticipation of winter meals, I just ordered The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Cookbook— full of recipes from The Fabulous Beekman Boys farm. This broccoli soup looks like the perfect thing for a cool, fall evening after the chores are finished. Maybe we’ll just bring the bowls into the living area and sit around the fire.

Autumn on the ranch has arrived!

Broccoli Cheddar Soup

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 medium onion, chopped
2 tablespoons long-grain white rice
2 cups vegetable or chicken broth
1 head broccoli (1 pound), end trimmed
2 cups milk
2 cups (8 ounces) shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Directions:
In a large saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring frequently, until the onion is tender, about 5 minutes. Stir in the rice, add the broth, and simmer until the rice is tender, 12 to 15 minutes.

Separate the broccoli florets from the stalk. Peel the stalk and thinly slice. Coarsely chop the florets.

Add the milk to the onion and rice mixture along with the sliced broccoli stalk and cook 4 minutes. Add the florets and cook until still bright green but tender, about 4 minutes longer. Remove the pan from the heat.

If you have an immersion blender, use it to puree the soup right in the pot until smooth. If not, working in batches, transfer the mixture to a food processor or blender and puree until smooth (use caution when blending hot liquids). Return to the pot and reheat.

Remove the pan from the heat, add the cheese, salt, and cayenne, and stir until the cheese has melted.

Serves 4

A note from the Fabulous Beekman Boys from whence this recipe came:

“We like to use as many parts of the vegetable as possible, and sometimes we find the true essense in the parts of the plant that are less often used. Both the broccoli stalk and the florets are used in this creamy soup rich with cheese. The stalks are very sweet; all they need is a little peeling to make them edible. A small amount of cayenne gives the soup a little heat. If you like, garnish with homemade croutons.”