Still Life, With Cats

There was a horrific wind storm in Sacramento last Tuesday night. These pop up every couple years and every time, there’s a ton of trees or branches down – it’s a hazard when you live in a city of trees, especially when some of the trees are as old and as huge as the ones in our neighborhood. We’ve had ginormous branches come down in our area before – one landed on our neighbor’s boat a few years back, but it usually isn’t too bad. However, Wednesday morning we woke up to see this.

Later in the day I went out to get a better sense of the scope of the damage. This is how big the branch actually was.

It blocked the entire street.

Thankfully the tree it came from did not also fall – that could have taken out a house or two. Thankfully no one was hurt (unlike a lot of other places in the city – there were trees on houses and power lines ripped out all over the place). Thankfully we have awesome insurance. But it’s been a hassle, dealing with inspections and paperwork so on. They finally towed away the blue car yesterday – due to its age and the extent of damage, the insurance company declared it a total loss. That’s okay, we figured – with both of us working from home right now, there’s no rush to replace my car. We can easily adjust to being a one-car family. The red car was towed to the body shop, and we’ve had a rental car, so we would be just fine until it was repaired.

But this afternoon I got a call from the insurance adjustor – there was enough structural damage to the red car that it, too, is being considered a total loss. That was followed by a notification that, now that we’re not waiting for one of our cars to be repaired, we only get the rental until the end of next week.

So…I guess this weekend we’ll be car shopping. During a pandemic. This should be *fun*.

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I didn’t get around to making yesterday’s orange thing yesterday, because it was a long day and the last thing I wanted to do at the end of it was bake. So today I made two things – both of which had the unfortunate attribute of using up oranges but not tasting like oranges at all. The first was Orange Cornbread. As cornbread recipes go, this was pretty tasty, but the orange juice addition was a wasted effort, but it made a delicious side to the pork stir fry I whipped up for lunch.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.

This morning I was in the mood for muffins so I looked online and found this recipe, and the premise was so intriguing I decided to give it a go. Because for these muffins, instead of just stirring in juice and/or zest (the usual way of using up an orange in a baked good), you actually cut them into pieces and then blend the entire orange (yes, peels and all) into the dough. Wacky!

Since we have a giant mound of Mandarins in the fridge, I decided that three were probably the rough equivalent of one regular orange, so I quartered them and added those to all the ingredients (minus the flour) and then pulled out my stick blender and blended (messily) until the oranges were no longer recognizable. Then I stirred in the flour and poured the batter into my skull cake pan, because one should use a skull cake pan as often as one can, after all, and popped them into the oven and hoped for the best.

Note to self: while the skull cake pan works great for some recipes, do not bother doing that with these muffins again. If you squint really hard you can sort of make out the skull, but otherwise they look more like misshapen lumps.

Unconventional appearance aside, however, they tasted absolutely delicious. If you were to guess what the ‘special’ ingredient is, you wouldn’t assume whole ground-up oranges, you’d instead guess cornmeal, since that’s what the interior color and texture reminds me of.

The orange flavor definitely comes through. I was worried that the inclusion of the peel would make them bitter, but that was thankfully not the case. And bonus: it used up another three mandarins from the pile. This is another recipe that we’ll definitely be making again.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.

Hooray, it’s February, and that means it’s time for Thingadailies, where I make a thing a day. This year I’m going to be focusing on citrus, but unlike in years past, this year it’s all about the orange – or at least the orange citrus, since the fridge is overflowing with tangelos and mandarins from our trees.

To kick the month off, I decided to make these Orange Sticky Buns. They have several appealing features – the first being that they’re not yeasted, so they are something I could easily whip up on weekday morning before my long trek to the office (aka, walking downstairs still in my pajamas with some coffee and a cat), and the second being that with half a cup of juice required, they would use up at least several of the citrus mountain that has taken over our kitchen.

The dough itself is more like a biscuit dough – you just mix it together and then pat it out into a rough rectangle, spread on the filling, roll them, cut them, and bake. The filling is similar to the typical sticky roll filling – brown sugar, butter, and cinnamon, but with the addition of some zest. But what makes them officially sticky rolls is the orange glaze, which starts with what is basically an orange infused brown sugar caramel that’s poured into the pan before the rolled buns are added.

The house smelled absolutely delightful while they were baking, and once out of the oven, they did not disappoint.

They took a bit longer to bake than anticipated, and I probably could have left them in just a bit longer, since the middle ones were just on the edge of under baked. But overall, they were extremely delicious, and a fantastic way to use up a couple mandarins.

Yum! I would definitely make these again.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.

We might not have done much decorating yet (except for the tree, the rest remains in the attic), but when it comes to holiday food, I’m all in this week.

Tuesday morning I peeled and sliced two pounds of fresh ginger (I am here to tell you that when people tell you you can just remove the peel with the edge of a spoon, they are lying, because that has never once worked for me, and also ginger has a lot of awkward corners, also what’s one more cut on my finger from the vegetable peeler, fa la la) and then after it boiled for a bit I mixed it with its own weight in sugar and cooked that until nearly all the liquid was gone, until poof, only candied ginger remained. I do this every year now because candied ginger is a delightful ingredient to keep in the freezer, ready to grab at a moment’s notice when one wants to make some scones, for example.

Thursday night I turned 16 lemons from our extremely prolific Meyer lemon tree into candied lemon peel. Pro tip – do not start this at 8pm on a weeknight, because not only does it take 3 separate boilings to prep the rinds, but then the actual candying process takes up to three *hours* and also if one happens to doze off waiting for the stupid lemon peel to finish candying, then one ends up having scrub a LOT of lemon-scented caramel off the stovetop the next morning when the pot inevitably boils over. Ahem.

And then today I made Ginger Spice cookies, because it just so happens I have this giant bag of candied ginger in my freezer and why not.

And also I made some Peanut Butter Fudge, because ’tis the season and all that.

Most of it’s going to go to other people (because even if we can’t all be together, I can still share the baked good joy), but there’s still enough left for nibbles here and there, and the house smells wonderful, and that will have to be enough.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.