The Nutcracker

Clara with her new Nutcracker in the San Francisco Ballet Company

I wonder if The Nutcracker is to ballet dancers what “Pomp and Circumstance” and Pachelbel’s Canon in D are to musicians: something trite to be endured because that’s what people pay you to perform. I am sure dancers must sneer at The Nutcracker. The unwashed millions don’t bother with ballet the rest of the year, but come December, everyone is pouring through the doors. And it’s been revived and conceived in every possible manner by every single ballet company. It’s not exactly the strongest of stories: the main conflict is pretty much resolved halfway through the first act, and then the rest of the night is spent watching Clara watch other people dance for her.

The other night I went with Marianne to see her little sister dance in a ballet recital. Any guesses what she danced to? Come on, it’s December.

So perhaps I should be a little ashamed to admit that I adore The Nutcracker. Almost obsessively. I used to put on my favorite nightgown, turn off all the overhead lights and dance with my nutcracker around the flickering lights of the Christmas tree. Sometimes I put on my slippers so I could slide over the carpet, pretending I was doing some actual kind of dancing.

My imagination was caught up in the magic of the music–and even the most jaded of people must admit that The Nutcracker has a great deal of inherent magic, even if you have heard those tunes hundreds of thousands of times. As I listened and danced, I pictured the Christmas tree growing hopelessly large around me, and my Nutcracker fighting the Rat King. One of the first cassette tapes I wore out was of  The Nutcracker Suite. (I was given a replacement CD of the entire ballet, so don’t worry!)

Now, I must admit that my love of The Nutcracker extends more toward Tchaikovsky’s music than to necessarily sitting through the whole ballet. Right now, I am watching a version of it from the Royal Opera House in London. It seems to be set in the 18-teens/early 1820s. (Thanks, Marianne, for helping me diagnose!) And frankly, it’s nice in the background as I type, but wouldn’t hold me otherwise.

Now, when it comes to choosing Nutcrackers to like, there are a lot of criteria to satisfy. I am of the camp that prefers traditional, classic beauty to stark and modern. I also think this ballet needs a great deal of magic: mystery, longing, and impeccable, joyous dancing. A good production of The Nutcracker should leave you breathless. After all, there are lots of moments in which to do so: the growing of the Christmas tree, the Dance of the Snowflakes, the heart-wrenching Pas de Deux. The music often expresses emotions so large that unless the staging and the choreography match it, the moment is a let-down. Not to mention that unless a production keeps topping itself with magical moments, it’s easy to get bored. (Light on plot, remember?)

Clara and Drosselmeyer. (Again, the SF Ballet Company.)

Watching any production of The Nutcracker lately makes me long to re-watch last year’s Nutcracker–the one from the San Francisco Ballet. (Review here: http://www.saturdaymatineeblog.com/2008/12/) I have never seen a production that held my attention so raptly from beginning to end. In full disclosure, I was let down once or twice–the Waltz of the Flowers left me strangely unmoved, for example. But by and large, this is the version I love best of all the versions I’ve seen.

The action in this version is moved to the 1915 World’s Fair.  And what a great year for magic: gauzy, ethereal dresses, and the aching beauty which hovers over anything set in the Edwardian Era. In just a few short years, everything will have turned “modern.” Gone will be the beautiful, graceful, slow old world. And in a way, gone will be a world in which magic can happen, where anything is possible.

The Grand Pas de Deux, San Francisco Ballet Company

In point of fact, Tchaikovsky composed the music in the 1890s, in that same fast-fading world. And even though he didn’t know that the world around him was about to change forever, the feeling is in the music. Listen to it.

Maybe you won’t like it as much as I do. (After all, few people do love The Nutcracker like I do.) But isn’t there something in all of us that wants a world where Christmas trees grow to yearning, pulsing music, and the Queen of the Snowflakes dances before us with her King?

I know I do. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

(To see if the San Francisco Ballet Company’s Nutcracker will be repeated in your area on PBS, click here and poke around.)

The Savior must have been a docile gentleman

In honor of Emily Dickinson’s birthday today:

The Savior must have been
A docile Gentleman —
To come so far so cold a Day
For little Fellowmen —

The Road to Bethlehem
Since He and I were Boys
Was leveled, but for that ‘twould be
A rugged billion Miles —

And since John Milton’s birthday was yesterday, here is a link to his Nativity Ode, which is too long to post here:

http://shakespeareauthorship.com/xmas/jm.html

It’s not the glow you feel when snow appears…

I tried twice today to explain how I feel about Christmas this year, and failed both times.  The first time was at church this morning, and had the unintended effect of exciting several people’s sympathies, which resulted in dinner invitations at the homes of virtual strangers (I think I shall have a post forthcoming on what I’m going to call “The Introvert’s Dilemma”), and the second time was when I tried to tell Elinor over the telephone about the first time, and got all tangled up and ended up in a tiff.  I’m very sorry, Elinor.

So at the risk of incurring a natural disaster or an extra library fine or some other unlooked-for calamity, I will try once more, right now.

All my life I have loved Christmas, in any way it’s manifested.  Even in the overwhelming advertising, I have seen the whole world joining in what someone has called “a conspiracy of love,” hunting gifts, however misguidedly, to show one another how deeply we care.  I relish the stories, the carols, the traditions, the lights–almost all the stuff that’s hackneyed, sentimental, commercialized–I have thrilled to it because it meant that Christmas was here.

I’m going on my third Christmas since striking out on my own, and loneliness has taught me a few things. (But before you invite me over for dinner, let me state here, gladly and gratefully, that this year when December the Twenty-Fifth arrives, I will finally be with my family!)  As a kid I thought that I loved decorating the tree, and that easing my favorite ornaments out of their fragile tissue was heavenly bliss.  I thought that I loved baking and filling the house with wonderful smells, and I thought that I loved crooning along with Bing Crosby.

As I’ve decorated my first real tree, baked treats to share, and played the Carpenters’ Christmas album so often that I can recite the order of the songs, I have discovered that the truth is what I really loved was hearing the stories about the ornaments as my parents reminisced about their first Christmases together. I loved poring over recipes and begging my mom to choose my favorites, and then fighting off siblings for the privilege of licking clean the chocolate-covered spatula (or, in a display of seasonal goodwill, nobly declining it).  And I loved singing along in an assortment of different keys to our favorite corny Christmas songs and making my little brothers dance with me while trying not to step on the dog in the tiny family room.  As it turns out, cherished traditions fall rather flat when you do them by yourself.

I don’t mean to sound morbid or self-pitying in these reflections, and I haven’t quite given up my traditions as pointless (I write this, in fact, amid a pile of Christmas cards that need stamps and addresses).  What I really want to say is that while I have always kept in mind the birth of Jesus Christ as the reason for this midwinter festival, my focus has suddenly sharpened and I now see–or, rather feel–that this alone is why Christmas will never disappoint me.  The warmth and sparkle that have gone missing from everything else are grown warmer and brighter in this fact: I don’t need to be surrounded by loved ones to feel the love of the Savior, and I don’t need holiday trimmings to rejoice in His birth.  When I hum carols alone or sing out Handel’s Messiah as a guest in a Methodist choir, I feel joy and gratitude to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, that He was born, that He died, that He lives.  I keep wishfully imagining myself in that first angelic chorus, rivening the sky over Bethlehem, and I exult again and again and again that unto us, unto all of us in all ages, a Child was born.  A free gift of light and love, of hope and salvation.  Now there is something to celebrate, and the sweet wonder of it is that I can do it all alone in my own heart.

Sites We Visit: Cookies in Motion

A portion of last year's cookie carnage

It’s holiday season, and a lot of you will probably be baking cookies. If you’re like my family, you might try to bake an insane amount of cookies to give to family and friends in pretty Cookie Packages.

Here’s a site that explains the science of the different ingredients in your cookies, so you can bake a better cookie. It’s a great quick reference if you’re having unexplained cookie problems. (Marianne did tonight, which is how I found this website.)

It’s called Cookies in Motion. Check it out.

Chicken stew with biscuits–MAKE IT!

One of my favorite childhood winter foods (yes, we had “winter” in Southern California) was beef stew, straight from the oven. Cooking it in the oven was my grandma’s recipe and not par for the course, but as a child I was always slightly disappointed with a “stew” that was a bit thin and made on the stove.

Last night, with weather forecasts predicting 5-6″ of snow, we sat around our computers trying to think of appropriate recipes for a good, old-fashioned Snow Day. What I longed for, more than anything, was beef stew like grandma used to make. But my dad can’t have red meat, and a classic beef stew can’t do without the red meat. Soups were discussed–maybe a Senate bean soup or a thick split pea? But nothing felt hearty and comforting and “Snow Day” enough.

On the stove, ready to be put in the pan.

And then, and then. I stumbled on this recipe. Another Ina Garten recipe. We had most of the ingredients on hand. It was a CHICKEN stew. And it was baked! I had to try it.

Not sure why I used a black plate, but...the finished product! By the way, eat this in a BOWL. With a SPOON. Don't be silly like me.

Gentle readers, let me tell you. It was a perfect post-Thanksgiving, use-up-leftover-turkey, comfort-yourself-on-a-cold-day, soup. It may be THE perfect comfort stew/soup. It’s creamy, flavorful, and hearty, and should be the first thing anyone grabs when they come in from the cold.

What’s even better is that this stew is fully adaptable. Use whatever veggies and poultry and seasonings you have on hand. Make the biscuits that go on top according to the recipe, or make your favorite savory biscuits, or buy some Pillsbury and stick ‘em on top.

It’s a pet peeve of mine when I read reviews of recipes that say, “This recipe was great, but I changed this-and-this-and-this,” so I try to follow recipes exactly the first time…but…*sheepish*…I…err…didn’t follow it exactly. I tried to! In my defense, I only CHOSE to change one thing; the other differences came from health issues/pantry issues.

So, without further ado, here is my list of changes to the recipe:

• In the biscuits, I used oat flour instead of white flour, partially because we were out of white, and mostly because my dad can’t have white flour. (I used a combination of white and oat in the roux for the soup, since oat flour doesn’t thicken in the same way.)
• I used Thanksgiving turkey instead of following any of the chicken instructions, because it doesn’t make sense to go out and cook chicken when you have a freezer full of leftover turkey.
• I left out the bouillon cubes altogether. We don’t have them on hand, and my mom asked me to leave them out for health reasons. (I still heated the chicken stock, guessing it had something chemically to do with the roux.)
• And…drumroll…I added garlic! None of you should be surprised. I add it to 90% of any savory recipe I cook. But I recommend keeping this step in. I added about 5 or 6 minced cloves of assorted size in with the onions. Don’t be worried about adding a lot–the longer you cook garlic, the more the taste mellows. The garlic smell was overwhelming at first, but by the time I tasted the finished product, the garlic was merely a subtle layer of flavor

After putting the biscuit dough on the stew. I put the extra biscuits on the cookie sheet. (Do NOT skip the cookie sheet. The stew definitely bubbled over.)

My thoughts on the recipe itself:

• Well, I’m no biscuit-making expert, so I am not sure what went wrong with them. They didn’t rise. They tasted good, though. My dad thought their texture ended up close to shortbread. You’ve got to love a recipe that still tastes wonderful even when the biscuits on top don’t rise. I think maybe I overworked the dough, or…something. I don’t think it’s the recipe. If you choose to make another biscuit recipe, I’d still add in the parsley. The flavor of those biscuits really complimented the stew, and I’m pretty sure it was the parsley that was responsible for it.
• I loved everything about the flavor of this stew. I almost added tarragon (because we had some leftover, too), but I decided I wanted to go with the “original” flavors. I am sure you could put in whatever herb you wanted, and whatever vegetables you wanted, but I’d try the original version just once. Pearl onions, carrots, peas–PERFECT comfort food. The parsley was just right, too.
• The recipe calls for the carrots to be blanched (I cooked them a little longer than 2 minutes, though), and I had to blanch the pearl onions, too, in order to peel them. Don’t skip this step. The recipe really doesn’t have a lot of simmering time to cook those carrots, so if you skip blanching them, you might get crunchy carrots in your stew. (Bleck.) As it stands, the carrots come out just right. Tender, but still with some “shape” to them. I blanched the carrots in the same water I used for the pearl onions.
• My mom suggested covering the whole pan in puff pastry instead of biscuits. How delicious would that be? I had a “pot pie” once at a restaurant that had a layer of puff pastry on top (no other crust involved), and the top of the pastry was covered in kosher salt and pepper. It was absolutely mouthwatering. Speaking of pot pie, the stew would make a great filling for a pot pie. Just make an extra pie crust on Thanksgiving day, and bada-bing, bada-boom, you’ve got pot pie!

The recipe is under the cut!

Learn about our Headers

Since I’ve taken to the habit of frequently changing headers on Barton Cottage, I thought I’d put up a new tab with the information.

Just look above the header to our tabs: Home, About, Our Header.

The “Our Header” tab will give you information about the current header, and the preceding few headers. This saves me having to write an entry every time I change it to give photo credit or explanation.

Christmas Movie Progress

We’re big Christmas-movie watchers in this family. My mom DVRs every Christmas movie on TV, even the incredibly corny ones. (Or should I say especially the corny ones?)

Aside from the TV movies, I so far have watched the following Christmas movies:

• A Christmas Carol (George C. Scott)
• A Muppet Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol (with Kelsey Grammer. It was…err…interesting. This one is not a tradition.)
• A Christmas Carol (new animated one in theaters)
• The Shop Around the Corner
• Little Women (1949) [Not sure if I will watch the 1994 one all the way through, since I watched it in October, but I will definitely watch the beginning]

Still left to watch:

• Scrooge (my personal favorite version of A Christmas Carol, and inextricably bound up in millions of childhood memories. Except for that one scene, which we always skip. We watch this one when we’re decorating the tree, which we have not yet done.)
• Meet Me in St Louis (I read an editorial complaining that this isn’t a Christmas movie, but I still watch it in the Christmas season, so there.)
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• Holiday Inn
• A Christmas Carol (Patrick Stewart)
• Miracle on 34th St (Natalie Wood version–I only watch the other one if I catch it on TV)

There are other Christmas movies, of course, to watch, and I will probably watch most of them. Except A Christmas Story. (I realize this probably makes me a boring person.) Yay for December!

What’s coming up on Barton Cottage?

• More holiday decorations! I could post every day until Christmas about the little decorations in our house, and I probably will. (Sorry.)
• Hanukkah! I can’t wait for next Friday night. We’re lighting the menorah, and I’m making latkes. I’ll share my recipe here. I’m not sure how authentic it is, but I love it.
• Marianne’s Christmas! Hopefully now that I have returned her camera to her, she will post about her decorations.
• SNOW! I hope. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow, and if it really truly does, my camera and I will have some fun.

Christmas Decorations, Part I: Buying the Tree

The June Allyson Little Women is on TV, right at the Christmas scene (where all the girls sell their beloved gifts to buy presents for Marmee), and we are finally starting to put up our Christmas decorations.

Tonight after a spontaneous stop at our charming small-town Christmas parade, my mom and I decided to make another spontaneous detour to pick a tree and put it up as a surprise for my dad, who hates having to deal with the tree in the early stages.

After digging through several so-called 5-6′ trees (which were actually around 4′), we finally settled on a tallish, skinny tree, who looks quite lanky and lovable. A few go-rounds with the young man netting it later (who would not believe he had cut the trunk crookedly), we got it home. We didn’t even impale any other drivers on the road with the top of the tree, which hung out the window.

At home, I pretended I lived 100 years ago and used a small wooden handsaw to take off some lower branches so our beloved tree would fit in its stand. We swept and dashed about and when my dad finally appeared, he gasped with happiness. Mission accomplished!

We’ll finish the lights and ornaments tomorrow. I love Christmas!

Christmas Eggnog…

Made by my mother, just tonight. Recipe forthcoming, if she can ever remember what she did.

Day 7: Mystic Seaport

It’s been much too long since I wrote about one of the days of our trip, and I feel the details fast-fading from my memory. Luckily for me, the last two days of our trip weren’t as detail or picture heavy as the rest of the days, so maybe my memory will forgive me for waiting! I am going to combine the pictures into this post, instead of giving them their own.

Twin Maples

The morning saw us bidding goodbye to our precious Twin Maples: the picturesque room, the mouthwatering breakfasts, and the delightful company. We rose and dressed early, loaded the car, had one last breakfast, settled our account, and headed back to Connecticut. It was raining and cold as we drove–perhaps that should have warned us what was ahead.

Eventually we made it back to New Haven, let ourselves in with a spare key, and found our host dead asleep on his bed.

Let me pause here. Marianne says: “Calling him our host makes us sound like parasites.” I totally agree, especially since he figures more prominently in our tale on Day 7 and Day 8. There is no nickname in Sense and Sensibility that fits. As I pointed out to Marianne, he’s hardly a Margaret Dashwood. So what to call him? I could just call him by his real name (fancy that!).

The only facially-obscured picture I have of me and Mr S, in high school.

I am sitting here in front of the computer screen totally stumped, and feeling bad for such a long aside in the middle of a narrative about something else. Hum dee dum. I think I will just settle on “Mr. S.” It’s derivative of his real name, although it sounds too grown up for an old friend. Why not call him by his real name? I don’t know. It’s a privacy thing. I am ridiculously private, and I try to safeguard others’ privacy, too. At any rate…

Mr S and I have been friends since high school, and he was kind enough to let us stay with him, which I might have mentioned when he first made his appearance. (Or did I?) On Day 7 and Day 8, he was on fall break, and we dragged him along with us on our adventures. He woke himself up, put himself together, and we made room for him in the backseat of Marianne’s car…quite the accomplishment considering the size of our growing libraries.

Marianne teaching Mr. S about harpooning whales, outside the Charles W. Morgan

Cold and rainy.

We arrived at Mystic Seaport in the middle of what seemed like a hurricane. We bundled up in our coats, gloves, and hats, and set out to explore Mystic Seaport, despite the weather. Mystic Seaport Museum is a museum of America and the sea, where you can explore maritime history through buildings, exhibits, and interpreters. We were excited to visit and I am glad we went, but it was sooo cold, blustery, and rainy that we were the only tourists around, and a lot of things that one could normally do were closed. I would like to visit again in good weather!

The sails for the Charles W. Morgan.

We first ventured to the Charles W. Morgan, the oldest surviving wooden whaling ship, which is currently being refitted and restored. We went under-deck and explored the sailors’ and captain’s quarters, and felt quite claustrophic—especially Mr S, who was too tall for most of the ceilings down there.  After the Morgan, we went to the bookstore and Mr S, ever the generous soul, bought us all some hot chocolate and a big muffin to share. We needed to thaw out before venturing on.

Shipsmith.

When we finally built up our courage and warmth, we went back in to the museum. We visited an oyster house, talked to someone about making smaller boats, learned about scrimshaw, went to the building where they make sails and are currently refitting the Morgan’s, and made a dash to the shipsmith shop. (“This shipsmith shop was built at the head of Merrill’s Wharf (now Homer’s Wharf) in New Bedford, Massachusetts, by James D. Driggs in 1885. It is the only manufactory of ironwork for the whaling industry known to have survived from the nineteenth century.”)

The shipsmith shop was my favorite site–while we were in there, the master smith came in and made a hook for a little boy who was visiting him. He was dressed in a suit, but pounded and heated and turned out the pretty hook in only a few minutes.

Harpoons made in the shipsmith.

Our menacing jack o'lantern, complete with "scars."

After we visited the shipsmith, we decided to make a run for the exhibition building where it was warm and dry. We looked around at the exhibits, including some incredible examples of scrimshaw. Then, we watched a video on whaling, and called it quits for Mystic “Hurricane” Seaport. We were frozen to the bone. We stopped at a site we heard had a warm kitchen on the way to the bookstore, where Marianne bought some souvenirs for her family, and Mr S bought us some fudge, which we consumed in the car. We drove back to New Haven, grabbed some Thai food for dinner (courtesy of Mr S, yet again), and then went back to Mr S’s apartment.

Marianne and I had been longing to watch Little Women ever since visiting Orchard House, so we popped the movie in the DVD player, and had a quaint evening devouring leftover birthday cheesecake, watching the movie, and carving a pumpkin we picked at Red Apple Farm. (Although Marianne fell asleep at the beginning of the movie.)