Happy New Year

The Weimaraners are Ready to Charge into 2011

Maddie, Gracie and Asher received beautiful new red jackets from Hallie, Karen and Mary. They will be warm and dry and ready for action this winter. They even glow in the dark at night.

Ghostly Glowing Dogs

Pete and I are making our new year's resolutions later, but the dogs go to sleep early so I thought we should work on their resolutions this afternoon.  I don't think they understood the concept at first.  I explained that they needed to make a few goals to improve things and work on them during the year.  Here's what they came up with:

The Weimaraners' 2011 Resolutions - Take One

Asher - I will catch more ducks.

Maddie Jo - I will take more car trips.

Gracie - I will not wear any more costumes.

Gracie
No More Costumes in 2011.

 

Asher
More Ducks in 2011

Maddie
 More Trips in 2011

Those were okay for the first attempt, but I thought they should make resolutions that would benefit others, as well as themselves. For help I turned to the experts at Highlights magazine and read a little Goofus and Gallant to inspire the dogs.

The dogs all agreed it would be fine to share our oranges, and grapefruit would be okay too (The Weimaraner's 2011 Resolutions - Take Two). Very generous, but try again.  Here's what we finally came up with:

The Weimaraners' 2011 Resolutions - Final Take

Asher will try to come when he is called the first time.

Maddie Jo will be kinder to Gracie.

Gracie will stop counter-surfing.

Goofus Asher
runs away when called.

Gallant Asher
happily runs home.

Goofus Maddie gives Gracie
the evil eye and growls.

Gracious Maddie accepts
Gracie for who she is.

Goofus Gracie takes
food off the counter.

Gracious Gracie
quietly waits for her dinner.

As expected the dogs pooped out early.  They each had a little dish of black-eyed peas for luck, went for a quick romp outside and then retired for the evening.

Lucky Dog

Maddie Jo finished up a bowl
of black-eyed peas.

Wake me up next year.

Karen and Beth Make Kransekake

Karen building the Kransekake

“Kransekake, or ring (tree) cake, is a festival tradition in Norway.  It is served at Christmas because of its tree shape, at weddings because of its impressive height and for anniversaries and birthdays because of its many layers.” –Louise Roalson, Notably Norwegian.

The McGaffeys are always up for a festival, so the building of a Kransekake has been a  Christmas tradition since I Karen and I were kids. Our mother wanted to instill the importance of our Norewegian heritage; a lifelong campaign, which included many other baked goods, Norwegian Power bumper stickers, trips to Norewegian-American cultural centers and the sacred homeland itself and a lot of politically incorrect statements about Swedes.

Ten thousand Swedes
Ran through the weeds,
Chased by one Norwegian.

    

The Norwegian cake is more like a 3-D cookie. An almond cookie dough is pressed into special tin rings and then baked.  The finished rings are popped out, or in some cases pried out, of the tin molds and stacked in a cone shape using almond icing as glue.

Kransekake tins

Tins filled with cookie dough

Uff da!

It is very unusual for Norwegians to do something wrong, but sometimes half-breed Norwegians forget the traditional ways and things don't work smoothly. If you (Beth) don't grease the tins you end up with broken pieces of cookie. In this case it is better to eat the broken bits while you make and bake new rings; trying to "glue" them back together rarely works - remember you're only 1/2 Norwegian.

A few ungreased tins resulted in
delicious, but unsightly crumbled bits

The cake is traditionally decorated with small paper Norwegian flags and icing swags using a pastry bag. Some cakes have a lot of layers and are very tall.

  

Since we only had one paper flag and no pastry bag, we opted for a holiday theme and decorated with small Christmas ornaments.

 

There are a number of recipes for Kransekake and the icing. I think there are three key elements that make the cake great:

1. It has the texture of a cookie, not a cake.
2. The cake and the icing have an almond taste as a result of using almond extract.
3. The icing is stiff and hardens within the hour, not soft and creamy.

We found the right cake and icing recipe this year to meet the criteria above and then some.

Recipes

Another UFF DA! 

Recipes coming soon, I think they are still packed up in one of the boxes I brought back from Milwaukee.

Celebrate the Winter Solstice

Sunrise

Sunrise December 21, 2010 is 7:40 a.m. in Mercer, WI

Even though the sun is rising late these days the sleepy dogs don't want to get out of bed.

Asher

Maddie Jo

Gracie

According to a solstice website, http://www.candlegrove.com/solstice.html, "Many, many cultures the world over perform solstice ceremonies. At their root: an ancient fear that the failing light would never return unless humans intervened with anxious vigil or antic celebration." I'm not sure what an anxious vigil or an antic celebration entails, but I'm going to be anxiously driving through a winter storm to Milwaukee to celebrate the holidays with my dad.

Curious about my heritage, I was looking up Scandinavian solstice traditions.  It seems ancient Vikings would leave fires or candles burning all day to symbolize the heat, light and life-giving properties of the  sun. A Yule log was brought in and burned through the day in honor of Thor. This sounds like a great practice and one I know the Weimaraners would enjoy.

Okay, where's the Yule log?

We'll have to do that next year because I'll be on the road most of the day.  Here's something doable.

In Scandinavia, some families place all their shoes together, as this will help them to live in harmony throughout the year. Okay, Dad, Karen get your shoes ready.

The Tea Party (the band, not the political party) has a nice instrumental piece called Winter Solstice. You can listen to it on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdf4Qcy1MEI.

Sunset

Sunset December 21, 2010 is 4:17 p.m. in Mercer, WI

You can find out the time of the sunrise and sunset by zipcode for any date on the Calendar Updates website http://www.calendar-updates.com/sun.asp

What Would Martha Do?

photo courtesy of Martha Stewart Living

amazon.com

I was looking through my old copies of Martha Stewart's Christmas and Handmade Christmas: The Best of Martha Stewart Living for inspiration and ideas on a particularly vexing decorating challenge.


The first book tells how she decorates her house, wraps gifts, and cooks elaborate dishes for her family and friends throughout the holidays using a thirty day timeline. Nothing to help me. Handmade Christmas looked promising. I paged though pictures of boxes made from acorns, a wreath created from twenty kinds of succulents and starfish studded with silver. Close, but no banana. What I would like to ask Martha is,

amazon.com

How do you Decorate a Mounted Musky for Christmas?

Thanks to the generosity of the world renowned musky fisherman, Deane Ferm, we have a beautiful 44", 22 lb musky hanging on our fireplace.  Musky has been hanging around since 1991. How can I make this magnificent fish blend in with the Christmas stockings, evergreen boughs, candles and holiday cards? Neither your books, nor your magazines could help, although I did find a rather interesting article on setting up a fish tank on your website http://www.marthastewart.com/article/set-up-a-fish-tanks

Well, I decided to keep in simple, no one likes a gaudy, overdone fish. So, Musky's head is tied with a green satin bow, two ornaments hang from his fins and a beautiful blue ornament rests in his mouth.

Nothing Says Christmas Like a Decorated Musky

Musky hanging above the fireplace

A close up of Musky

Now that my Christmas decorating dilemma has been resolved. I can share a few more traditional decorating schemes with you.  I made two wreaths using wreath forms from The Warehouse. The forms sell for a dollar.

jingle bell wreath

pine wreath with lights

wreath form

  

The rest of the photos are of our outdoor decorations.

front of the house

you can see our tree through the window

The lakefront view

The dogs' pen is decorated too

The next two decorations are tributes to my childhood Christmas' in Mequon and my Dad.

A little blue tree for Dad

A decorated front pole
completed before the New Year

Well, despite not getting any practical Northwoods holiday decorating advice from Martha Stewart, I'm still a big fan.  It looks like we're ready for Christmas.

With all these lights Santa Paws will surely find our house. Won't he?

  

Sunday Football

The dogs are BIG Packer Fans

We love watching football on Sundays. Unfortunately, our satellite service comes out of Duluth; Viking games are sometimes aired instead of Packer games. Tonight we were lucky as the Packers play the Patriots at 7:00.

I didn't always enjoy watching Packer games. When I was a kid I remember Mom, Dad and Karen gathering in the TV room for the Sunday Packer game. Dad was in his leather easy chair workstation, which consisted of a TV tray stacked
with bills and an adding machine. My mom made a huge bowl of popcorn on the stovetop (microwave popcorn did not exist. I don't think home microwave ovens did either) and settled into the sofa with a pile of sewing projects including my Girl Scout sash and badges. To this day I don't know why she didn't make me sew on my own badges. Perhaps. I hadn't earned my sewing badge yet. By the way, today neither Girl Scouts, nor their mothers need sew on badges - they're all iron-on! When did this happen? Since I didn't have to sew badges and I didn't like football, I took my own bowl of popcorn and retired to the kitchen for and afternoon with Charlie Chan.

photo courtesy of filmsinreview.com

Now, in Mercer Pete usually has brats and sauerkraut, but today he made a delicious beef stew to enjoy during the game. I should say, a delicious savory beef stew.  The stovetop of our Jenn Air range is called the Savory Centre - really, it is, it came that way.

The Savory Centre Logo

A Pot of Savory Stew

The dogs donned their Packer scarves and were ready for the game to begin.

Packer Zombie Dogs

Before the game I was talking to a wise man (Jere McGaffey) who reminded me of the often quoted saying, ". . . on any given Sunday, any given team can beat any other team." He didn't seem very optimistic, but as the game went on it seemed as though the Packers might be that "given team".
The game was really exciting, the lead went back and forth and I was forced to stay up for the whole thing.

Sometimes the dogs didn't want to look

or listen.

It was up and down - good news was followed by bad news, good luck was followed by bad luck and good plays were followed by bad plays.  In the end it seemed a Vince Lombardi quote came true,

"We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time."

Pete with statute of Vince Lombardi

What an UGLY ending. 

Without a timeout left on fourth-and-1, clock ran all the way down to four seconds before Flynn snapped it. Then, he is sacked and fumbles as time runs out. The game ended at 10:26.  Packers lose 31-27.

Can we go to bed now?

We went to bed and tried to obey the second Girl Scout Law,

A Girl Scout is Loyal.

photo courtesy of museumoflondon.org.uk

The Pack will be Back!