I have a thousand poems suffering to get out
If only I could find the voice to cut and slice and shout
To the heavens look at me
I have visions you should see
Of how I lived and loved and flew
Through blissful clouds and storm clouds too
And shook the earth with such a roar
That woke the heavens as I soared
Now the mighty thoughts have fled
But sometime as I lie in bed
I dream again of blue stretched skies
And once again my spirits rise.
As my three faithful readers know, The Careless Cook is a proponent of regarding a recipe as a mere starting point, a rough guide, a batting of beautiful eyes from across the room, not a date, not a marriage, nor the last word on what goes in the oven. No change in attitude when I first looked at this scone recipe.
The original recipe called for an egg. I didn’t have an egg. Of course the Kitchen Warrior did not let that stop him, and neither should you.
Then, there was another item that was not on hand. Heavy Cream. Can you really make scones that taste like scones without something so essential as Heavy Cream? Yes. Will it taste OK? Yes again. Better than OK! Rave reviews!
So, hopeful readers, what are the secrets to guide you to success? Only a few: ingenuity, creativity, and no fear of failure. Don’t worry about the last one, I got you ready! And ditto, you can skip the first two as well. And if you don’t care for The Careless Cook’s standby ingredients and prefer to go back to the traditional way, he’s got you covered for that too.
Time to stop the chatter and get cookin’, but first heat the oven to 400ºF!
Ingredients
2 cups all purpose flour
½ cup sugar
½ teaspoon table salt
2 ½ teaspoons of baking powder
½ stick butter, chilled (straight from the refrig)
1 cup of oat milk (or ½ cup heavy cream and one egg)
(more oat milk or heavy cream for painting the scones before baking)
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
About 70 whole, salted Macadamia nuts (this bit of salt joins wonderfully with the sweetness of the scones)
Puttin’ It Together
Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Use a box grater to grate the butter and add the butter and work it into the flour mixture. I used a dough cutter, but a couple of forks will work.
Mix the wet ingredients in another bowl.
With me so far?
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir with a spatula or your fingers or anything else you have handy. Keep mixing until you have the dough completely blended.
Using a tablespoon, drop the dough, spoonsful by spoonful onto a baking sheet. This made 23 small scones for me. But don’t worry about the small size, they SPREAD while baking.
Paint the scones with oat milk or heavy cream.
Lightly mash in three macadamia nuts on each scone.
Place the scones in the oven and set your timer for ten minutes. Check to see if the edges of the scones are browning, as well as the macadamia nuts. EVERY OVEN IS A LITTLE DIFFERENT, TEMPERATURE WISE. I needed another 3-5 minutes.
The scones will flatten while baking and may stick to the baking sheet a bit. I used a metal spatula to loosen them and gently lift them onto the counter to cool.
Time for a second cup of coffee. Don’t be ashamed to sip in a slosh of your favorite gift from Scotland.
I made these for a ladies group. Older ladies. Very grateful ladies, insuring that I will bake for them again and again.
Just got back from a month long cruise. Fantastic! So you probably think I’ll be writing about experiences and cathedrals and museums that YOU MUST VISIT! Nope. Lots of that around. But, as your cruise director I will offer some photos, just to get you in the mood.
If something is outside my experience, I won’t mention it except in passing. And if you’re a cruising veteran, skip this post, settle in, and slosh down another martini. You don’t need me!
First things first: Can you cruise if you get seasick? I don’t know and I’m not a medic, so I won’t suggest pills or discuss whether you’re drinking too much. Never been seasick, so I can only tell you that any ship will wobble a little bit from time to time, but today’s cruise ships have great stabilization systems. Calmest time to cruise depends on where you’re cruising. Just got back (Sept to Oct) from a cruise across the Atlantic and the Western Mediterranean. Smooth as glass. Could waterski!
Lots of information on weather and seas on the Internet. But, if you can’t keep your balance walking through your living room, skip cruising and think twice about ballroom dancing, and riding a bike.
Second things second: Which cruise line? I’m not going to name names, but here are things to consider. Kids or no kids? More formal, or flip flops and rude messages on your t-shirts? Enjoy dining, or stuffing food down using both hands? Where do you want to go? Yes, some cruise lines tend to cover specific areas, while others cover the globe.
And what about entertainment? Some cruises, especially those with many sea days, offer lots of entertainment, with comedians, fabulous lectures by well known authorities, floor shows and a lot more.
Here’s something else about cruise lines to consider: All inclusive, or not. It’s not as easy a choice as you’d think. On our last cruise we paid about $5500 per person….don’t forget it was a month long cruise. Then we had to pay for drinks and excursions. That added another $2000. Some all-inclusive cruises would have covered everything for about the same price that we paid.
Along with which cruise line is big ship or small ship. I've been on both. Purely personal preference, but beware. Can't know unless you've done both, but even then it can depend on the cruise line. Big or small can be great or lacking.
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| Small group in the foreground, large group in the background |
Third things third: Excursions. Most excursions offered by cruise lines are fifty passenger bus tours. Too cumbersome for my taste. I much prefer small group excursions. But doesn’t the cruise line give you a price break? Sometimes, but it pays to check out both cruise line and private excursions.
Things I like about small excursion: I can hear the guide much better than a big excursion guide who took lessons from a bus station announcer. And, when you’re off the bus, you may be at the back of the crowd of fifty, or are separated from the group.
I suggest you find out the specifics of the tour. Too often it’s, step off the busy, take a snapshot, and get back on the bus.
If this is your first time cruising, of course you want to see everything and don’t want to miss anything. Understandable. But, that can lead to an overdose. One guide taking me to a relatively unknown cathedral gave me a whole list of dates and unknown historical figures, from which I took away. “This is a old cathedral.” When is the wine tasting?”
Of course some places are not to be missed, Pompeii, the Coliseum in Rome, or the Vatican, or Gaudi’s Basilica Sagrada Familia in Barcelona for example, but again a small group is the answer, especially when you need/want to ask questions, or even have a discussion. Large or small, often it is better to go via a tour group than on your own. Tour groups usually have tickets that turn hours of waiting to minutes.
A secret: At the most historic places (Coliseum), you can find folks who will sell you reasonably priced tickets to help you cut the line, however you’ll be on your own, without a guide.
Fourth thing fourth: As a long time cruiser, I skip many of the excursions in favor of ambling the streets, finding nice coffee shops and mingling with the natives. I love melding into the everyday culture and too often an excursion uses up limited time.
Just one example of strolling the streets and a lessor known, small group historical tour: Four of us found a small tour. The guide was excellent. Herculaneuam is almost in downtown Naples and was rediscovered before Pompeii. The tour was not offered on the list of cruise excursions. I liked seeing Pompeii, but liked Herculaneum even better. Ash had buried the town and saved a lot of tiles and much of the structures. The guide knew his stuff and was never more than five feet away from us.
Even so, don’t take a tour if you don’t want to. One of our new friends we met on our last cruise was a middle-aged woman who never took excursions, just hopped on the bus to town and walked the streets.
Speaking of which, after Herculaneum, my wife and I wandered the streets and while walking up a narrow street, a guy wearing an ‘Eat at My Restaurant’ sign, told us it was close by. It was. Tiny place, with four tables set on a narrow patio, on a narrow street. The server was an Italian guy who’d lived in Miami. Freshly fried sardines from the fish shop about twenty feet away and a Neapolitan pizza I’ll remember to the end of my days. Local wine so good I wanted to bring home a barrel. Felt like I was carrying one back to the ship!
While we ate, a motor bike came racing by, three feet away from us and as he got to the cross street, he almost hit a police car. The cops didn’t get out, but gave a few angry shouts that I think was something to do with his mother, and hand signals that even I could understand. The guy on the motorbike gave the puppy that just peed on the carpet look of mia culpa. He was riding the wrong direction on a one-way street. The cops pulled away and the guy blasted off still going the wrong way. Welcome to Italy!
You can’t buy memories like this on a fifty person bus tour!!!
Dang that wine was good! So was the pizza! I might even buy a motor scooter.
She knelt with ease on golden sand
Blue striped towel, sweet, soft hands
A dream I saw, glimpsed in repose
The stretching limbs, the pointing toes
That aimed her beauty toward the sea
The queen of all desires
And all that love inspires
Those pining thoughts of used to be
Her silken hair grown silver now
And wrinkles crease the once smooth brow
Vision she was, a tortured thrill
In floating clouds of memories still
That flit like fishes in the sea
Oh, memories how you comfort me
Rusting thoughts when life was grand
Treasured visions, sun blessed sand.
When world was young and so were we
While summer’s sun warmed the sea
We lay on towels baked by sand
Tepid roots of love and then
Grew by power of rushing waves
That crushed the shore and made us crave
The touch of hands, the touch of skin
Oh love was but a whisper then.
The salty breath, each sigh anew
Through passing hours of just we two.
Oh, lord those languid glory days
And good lord how I wish they’d stayed
But love like flow of tides may pass
The wilting time of summer’s grass
Sun a shadow in winter’s frost
A low sad whisper that love is lost.
An Officer and a Spy is the novelized story of the infamous Dreyfus Affair, one of the black marks on the modern history of France and the French Army.
I often hear friends say: I only read non-fiction because fiction is just a made up story that has little to no significance other than entertainment. I beg to differ. I’m a history fan and read a fair amount of it, but I’ve found that often history books trap you in heavy details, dismissing the personal aspects of the story. Novelized histories, on the other hand, wrap the reader in personalities that explore the inner workings of the historical tableau. Yes, that is true even in the historical romance genre, with a glance into how people lived and died and loved and lost. Historical romance novelists collect a trove of reference material. As an example of historical novels that make you “live in the time,” is A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. I often say, unless you have read that book, you will never understand how the French revolution affected French society and the people who lived through it.
A Soldier and a Spy is another novel that takes you inside and makes you live through the intrigues and government of the Third French Republic of the 1890s. Yes, it is very much a history lesson, but one with a human face.
Perhaps you are familiar with the injustice done to Captain Alfred Dreyfus. For those who don’t yet know the story, in the 1890s, Dreyfus was charged and convicted with being a spy. He was stripped of his rank in the most public of places. His disgrace complete, he was sent to the far away Devil’s Island, a tiny and isolated place where he was kept under horrible conditions for years.
This is where the novel unfolds. The French Army Lieutenant Colonel George Picquart. discovers that there be another spy in the army. In his quest to identify the second spy, he uncovers mountains of evidence and deceit that rises to the pinnacle of both the army and the government.
The novel turns and twists as the truth is found and washed away and found again, always doubtful, always less than the full truth.
In this novel, author Robert Harris leads the reader through dust clouds of discovery to the startling ending.
If you enjoy spy stories, you’ll be thrilled and astonished at the reality of the complications of proof and truth and the consequences of both.
An Officer and a Spy is a great read that will keep you up at night and linger in your dreams. Besides the quest for truth, the novel is a valuable, personalized history lesson that echoes in today’s headlines.
If it isn’t in your city library, you can easily find very reasonably priced used copies online.
Trivial, yes, in truth it’s waste of days and time and so,
We babble on, I wonder why, I blink my eye and although
Baby powder’s so much cheaper at the grocer on the corner
Yes, of course, but don’t mind me, I am just a natural yawner.
Tell me won’t you, once again, why the Johnsons got divorced.
Yes, I’ve heard, but carry on, and fill in all details, of course.
Is it true that he’s a pig, a dreadful swine in every way?
I head it all from Charlene Chase, I meet for coffee everyday.
The doctor calls it canker sore, and claims it goes away quite soon
Read directions line by line, and still it’s sore and almost noon.
Margaret had terrific moles, such unsightly little beasts
They’re black and sprouting hairs; she should cover them at least.
Yes, it’s how it comes and goes and clutters up my day
Listening to this and that and everything thing they say.
Such rude and selfish folks they are, hogging all the time,
With their ailments, and complaints, they leave no time for mine.
