Talked to my mother a couple days ago. She's manic. She asked if I wanted any christmas cookies, I told her I hated them all deeply. She laughed, because she's manic. I mentioned that I had gone to the trouble of ordering Lebkuchen clear from Nuremberg just to see what the fuss was about; she said "oh I threw that recipe away last year they were so horrible." They were. They were horrible. They are always horrible. Lebkuchen is a failcookie that has to be baked on a communion wafer(we didn't) or it will stick and burn (ours always did). Then anybody reasonable dips them in chocolate (my mother hates chocolate). They're still underwhelming when done by dedicated bakers, and fucking terrible when done by a bipolar alcoholic who ruins every Christmas of everyone she can because her big brother sucked a tailpipe Dec 26 and shattered her family for generations. So the recipe should be thrown away. I'm glad it's gone. But considering the grief I went through baking those fucking cookies every goddamn year, and the strife they caused, and the preposterous pressure to put the fucking blanched almonds on just so, and the hours spent cutting candied cherries in half only to slap them on a three-day cookie that tastes for all the world like nyquil-flavored gingerbread? Why couldn't we have thrown the goddamn recipe away in 1979? My daughter adores Christmas. Today is her birthday. She derives a warmly fulfilling amount of pleasure from gift-giving, decorating, singing, and tradition. There are two wolves and one of them gets hungry at Thanksgiving.
Lebkuchen are amazing. But I never thought of or know somebody that makes them at home. Maybe that's the reason 🤣🤣 My favourite Christmas cookie is and will always stay the Spekulatius. They sell them here from August on. And I also buy them in August because dann they are good. They are the only cookie I know that get BETTER after the after the package has been opened and left to accumulate moisture. There are also other nice Christmas thingies. In no particular order. Lebkuchen Hearts, Domino Stones, Aachener Printen (these are amazing)
I just looked up Aachener Printen. That? ...yeah, that's him. You and I will have to agree to disagree. I have trauma from that damn cookie. weeks of effort in order to make a cookie you can't even trade with your friends. And yes, we ground our own spice, by hand, with one of these: But no, we didn't "candy our own orange peel" because that might render something actually good. We used candied citron, which is terrible. Pfeffernusse? Yeah, had to make that crap too. Because yeah - once you've ground spices by hand for four hours you're going to put that shit in everything It's funny. My wife's family is fond of their German heritage yet the only christmas cookie they make is a white-trash sugar cookie frosted to infinity using Crisco icing. I on the other hand grew up forced to make Lebkuchen, Pfeffernusse, these horrible things and these wretched things in a house where my mother expressed her hatred of the Germans at every available opportunity. I will freely admit none of this is the cookies' fault. But you will not convince me that Aachener Printen can ever be baked in an edible fashion. ...unless you underbake the shit out of it. Then they just get rock-hard in New Mexico's 6% winter humidity over the course of a week or so. We made one cookie worth eating. No, that's not true. I made one cookie worth eating, having desperately started rooting through the card box at the age of 8 to find anything that wasn't terrible. My mother threw the recipe away, of course, so I basically came up with my own. Nobody here eats them either because the inlaws are not fond of bourbon. There was another recipe given to us by a friend of a friend. I had them once, they were spectacular. Then I made them a couple times, they were spectacular. Then I asked for the recipe and was told that since it contained chocolate, it was "burned" while I was at college (christmas was a particularly traumatic time growing up). I poked around every now and then trying to find it, and then last year my wife stumbled across them. I teared up when I had them. They are now "lost cookies" in the recipe book.
Lebkuchengewurz an essential ingredient for a variety of German baked goods during the Christmas season, most notably Lebkuchen and Pfeffernüsse.
The standing joke is that Aachener printen are so hard that the bakers have a standing contract with the city’s dentists! Printen are characteristically hard because they’re a very low-moisture cookie: They contain no eggs, fat, milk, virtually no water, and contain three types of sugar which caramelize during baking.
Just to clarify. None of the things I mentioned should be home made. I am not aware of anyone that makes them at home. They are all store bought and from your comment, I understand why. I shall never attempt making any 🤣🤣 But, there are some other cookies that are home made and easier to make. You know, those type of cookies your grandma makes once fot Christmas in a big batch and sends them to her grandchildren. The typical examples are Vanille Kipferl, Kokosmakronen and Zimtstrene. My favourite are the Kokosmakronen, which are basically whipped egg whites with sugar and coconut pieces. If done correctly (and not over baked) they are crispy on the outside and fluffy inside. I find it interesting that the German heritage is so deeply kept or acknowledged in your family. Is that typical in the states that these traditions are kept?
Again, my mother hates the Germans with a blinding passion. It may be vaguely related to her Jewish heritage (which she's always paid lip service to) and the barely-remembered hardships of WWII (she was born a month before Pearl Harbor) but mostly I think she needs someone to hate. A family's christmas cookies are treasured by some, certainly not by everyone. Lots of people have no fucking clue how to bake. Among those who do bake, "secret family recipes" are generally things that are supposedly held close but actually shared far and wide as a point of pride. no one has ever asked anyone else for a bizcochito recipe, and our cookies were universally unpopular among those who tried them. They're f'n terrible. I would say the "typical" christmas cookie in the united states is an undifferentiated sugar cookie with amateurish frosting. That's probably why we were never allowed to make or enjoy them. As a reminder, my mother is mentally ill. Has been my entire life. Having inherited the family photos and documentation (entirely by accident) I can say with no uncertainty that my dead uncle was clearly bipolar, my grandfather was clearly bipolar, my grandfather had at least one bipolar brother and my great great grandmother was bipolar. Asking me about normie shit ain't necessarily gonna end well. ;-)
Still plugging away at this painting. I feel like I need to get a bit adventurous with the lighting. We are headed to Puerto Rico for 4 nights. It will be the first family air travel in the aftertimes. Looking forward to it. Drastically improved some regenerative medicine technology this week for Forever Labs. I need to spend the afternoon making sketches. Did some experiments in the lab on Monday, and it felt good. It had been a while since I had my hands in a bio hood. In other news, I have been obsessed for some time with the idea that we need a new mobile OS that took full advantage of Ethereum applications. Anyway, I started tweeting about it enough until about three weeks ago a guy in Austria reached out and was like let's do it. So we made a discord, and now we have about 130 people and a number of them are building and designing, and we have a v0 Android fork that has an Ethereum client and apps on it can interact with it, and we have a v0 DappStore and a test Dapp. Here's the site that went live today: https://ethereumphone.org It's crazy that with github, discord, figma, notion, etc., people can quickly coordinate and build with very little knowledge of each other. When you couple that with tokens and DAOs, you basically have inverted the capitalist process. It now goes: people gather, sort by talent, build product, issue shares, elect executive leadership. Organization of production used to be the value-capture, but now that aggregates with little more than an idea.
Buddy of mine died of covid the other day. Not a close friend, but an old friend, and a guy I liked and respected. Early fifties, no known underlying health conditions, but of course unvaccinated. He wasn't particularly republican or anything, just a macho dude who I guess thought it wasn't a big deal or something...really don't know. Besides sadness you sort of feel anger, because it's just so avoidable. My wife was a lot closer with him than I was, so she's going to the funeral tomorrow. The invite asked that everyone please wear a mask at all times independent of vaccination status. Really tough way to learn a lesson.
It's 50 degrees in Colorado today... it was 70 last week. This is not normal. On the one hand... feeling climate change anxiety but on the other hand enjoying not wearing my winter jacket to go outside and I will drive to lunch with a friend with the top down.... in December... in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. ok... the anxiety is coming back. edit: I really don't mean to downplay the serious climate crisis I think we're in. I guess I'm just noticing the comfy chair I have on the titanic.
We're below freezing here in Wisconsin which is good, but the forecast has a day in the 50s next week. That's bad. Overnight lows above freezing move the frost the wrong way.
Two more weeks. Then my dog can slowly start going back to dog parks and running again. She's in heat right now, and last time, it was exactly 4 weeks. She's going stir crazy. I do what I can to keep her mentally stimulated and take her for walks where there are no other dogs, but off-leash time is a no-no, and she's really feeling ALL THE FEELINGS right now. Poor girl! Next time - around May of next year - we will find a nice boy Labrador to breed her with and have a litter of puppies. Then we will get the surgery so she doesn't have to go through this again. But for now ... poor girl. She's really having ALL the feelings...
Massive Covid outbreak in my circle right now. Had a gathering on Sunday and 3 people have since tested positive. We all got tested and are awaiting results. Everyone is double vaxxed, one person with COVID has no symptoms at all, others have either a mild sore throat or a headache with fever. I’m feeling totally fine, but still expect my result to come back positive. Which will suck because I’ve seen my parents on Tuesday and I’m scared I might have spread it to them as well. I guess we all got too comfortable as of late, or that this new variant is extra agressive. But at least I’m glad no one seems to feel very sick. My biggest concern really is about infecting vulnerable people. Edit: We're negative! Yay :) But it does put the covid fear back into sharper focus for the upcoming holiday season. And it looks like i'm back to being in the office alone for a bit while my colleague and boss recover.
Sobering reminder, for sure. A good friend of mine works at a dog salon, and the entire staff tested positive. Had to close the shop. It's her second time getting it, and she was a long-hauler the first time who has had a variety of underlying conditions she's had to deal with for years. She is smart and careful and vaccinated... but she's one of those people who is constantly scrambling to keep above the poverty line, with multiple jobs, and odd jobs, and just does everything she can to keep her head above water. It's so hard to see friends struggling because idiots keep acting as COVID petri dishes...
So close to being done my first semester of grad school! One exam tomorrow, one Monday and that's it. Looking at the 15th for the hubski meetup. Will probably post something in the next day or two.