Author Archives: Samantha

Fight With a Foxtail Fern

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When I decided to move the foxtail fern out of the house, on the grounds that it is apparently toxic to cats and sheds a lot of needles even if kept out of reach, I did not realize what a fight I would have to reclaim the pretty pot I had planted it in.

First I tried to wiggle it out of the pot dry. It resisted–strongly. So I thought perhaps watering it would help ease it out. That may have been a huge mistake. The plant continued to remain firmly fixed in the pot, despite my sticking wooden skewers along the edges and wiggling them in an attempt to loosen the roots. I pulled. Not the slightest movement.

I got my husband involved. He stuck a sharp trowel in, moving it around as I had done the skewers, trying not to scrape the glazed interior of the nice pot that I wanted to save. But the trowel wouldn’t go in very far, so finally he pulled out the weapon of last resort–a butcher knife with a slightly curved end–and proceeded to cut the plant out. (By this time I was mainly concerned with saving the pot, not the plant.)

Success! We reached in to find out how the plant had stuck itself so thoroughly to the pot, and found that the remaining roots came out easily. They weren’t attached at all–they were just well and truly packed in there. Watering the plant had, if anything, caused the water-storing tubers to expand and wedge the plant in even more tightly.

To understand, see the loosened mass of roots and tubers that I pulled out of the pot after the drastically root-trimmed plant had been put in a different (and slope-sided) pot.

Foxtail fern and its roots

It’s hard to imagine it fitting in there.

As a side note, I do generally prefer a bit of slope to the sides of a pot. I dislike pots where the rim comes inward at the top and makes it more difficult to tip out a pot-bound plant. But the terra-cotta pot in question had perfectly straight sides, so I wasn’t expecting a battle.

I shall now put the plant out on the porch, where the cats are not allowed. We’ll see whether it survives its drastic pruning, and if so, how it manages the rest of the winter. It’s February–there’s supposed to be some winter still to go, whatever the blooming daffodils think.

Till next post.

Gingerbread–the cake, not the cookie

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Gingerbread with whipped cream

I was recently reminded how tasty gingerbread can be. While looking at other people’s posts on cookie houses, I ran into a post by Come July about gingerbread–the cake, not the cookie–which showed a photo of one of MY COOKBOOKS. Well, not the very cookbook on my shelf, obviously, but the page looked just like mine, only with some water damage.

Better Homes and Gardens, c. 1981, printed 1987

That got me thinking about gingerbread. And whipped cream, because whipped cream is what really makes gingerbread good, in my opinion. My husband really liked a gingerbread with lemon sauce that he had at a restaurant, so adding some warmed lemon curd sounded like a good idea too.

The recipe I’ve used is actually from a different cookbook, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. It may or may not be the same recipe my mom used. I made a gingerbread last weekend (the version with extra spices), and it was good, but now I’m thinking about trying a different recipe, just to see how it compares.

The All-New Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook, c. 1959, printed ?
Fannie Farmer, continued.

The other thing I realized is that while lemon curd is good with gingerbread, I actually like it better with just whipped cream. Some combinations are like that. Some people like apple pie with vanilla ice cream. I like both pie and ice cream, but I prefer to eat them separately. Same for apple pie and cheddar cheese, which some people like together. I don’t think the combination is as good as either of its components.

The serving suggestions in Fannie Farmer (seen above) just go to show the variety of ways in which people apparently enjoy their gingerbread. Applesauce sounds possibly familiar, but grated cheese folded into whipped cream??

I have no particular point to make in this post. I’m just enjoying the world of traditional desserts.

Till next post.

Gingerbread with whipped cream and lemon curd

Cookie Houses–smaller is better

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There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are more interested in the appearance of food, and those who are more interested in the taste. (Joke–there are two kinds of people in the world–those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and…)

Okay, it’s really more of a spectrum, but by way of illustration, every year I see magazines in the checkout showing clever ways to create cupcakes that look like spiders for Halloween, cookies that look like nests of eggs for Easter, and so forth. These are ingenious and very attractive comestibles, and I appreciate them as such, but I also can’t help thinking–do licorice whips really taste good with chocolate cake? Will the marshmallows work with pretzel sticks?

Partly for that reason, I’ve never been all that excited about making gingerbread houses, even though I love baking. I’ve always seen them as purely decorative–after all, surely pretzel logs and Necco wafers don’t taste as good combined with gingerbread. My husband, on the other hand, sees gingerbread houses as edible as well as decorative. His position is that one should enjoy it for a few days, then start picking candies off, then eat the cookie before it gets stale.

Still, I do like to decorate sweets, and I do like constructing things. This year, I had an urge to make a cookie house, possibly as a result of watching too many episodes of The Great British Baking Show. But did it have to be made of construction gingerbread? What other flavors might there be?

In looking up recipes, I found some blogs with pictures of miniature cookie houses: Pretty Petunias and For the love of butter, among others.

Brilliant! Not only were the little houses cute, but they had the following advantages over full-size cookie houses.

–I could make cookie houses and still enjoy fresh cookies from the rest of the dough.

–Each person could decorate their own house.

–It would be easier to cover the finished houses (to protect them from our cat who has been known to lick at them.)

–The cookies would not need to be quite so sturdy as the pieces would be smaller and subject to less tension and compression. (Thank you, Stephen Ressler of The Great Courses for the engineering vocabulary!)

–And finally, we could eat one while still enjoying the appearance of the remaining ones.

I tried two different doughs, and I tried cutting out my own small pattern (which was a bit of a pain) and then bought some ready-made cookie cutters for mini cookie houses. Photos below.

Cookie houses made from my own pattern.
Cookie houses made using purchased cookie cutters.

I’m not going to provide links to recipes, as the recipes I tried were okay but not thrilling. Better that you should scout around for recipes you find exciting and try those. (And then let me know, please, if you find a recipe you think is especially good.)

I will provide links to some of the cookie cutters, however, because they make it much easier. I didn’t recut my pieces after they were baked, which probably would have improved the results, but they stuck together all right anyway.

These are the cookie cutters I bought:

Fox Run Christmas Village

and this mini set which seems to come from several different sources. There is also one that cuts out all the pieces at once, which I didn’t try.

Till next post.