“Max”
So… what did y’all decide to do?
ORIGINALLY POSTED Published on: Nov 19, 2016 @ 04:02 Date and time
Month
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Tomorrow, 20 November, is the Last Sunday of the Church’s Liturgical Year. It is therefore…
STIR UP SUNDAY!
The “stir up” comes from the first words of the traditional Collect at Mass of the Last Sunday of the Year.
Excita, quaesumus. Dómine, tuórum fidélium voluntátes: ut, divíni óperis fructum propénsius exsequéntes; pietátis tuæ remédia maióra percípiant.
Also, because you stir up the ingredients for your Christmas pudding on Stir Up Sunday, and steam it, so that it has adequate time to set before the big day.
In the meantime, some have asked about the image at the top. Here is the whole chain, from a book I recall from my distant childhood, depicting “Max” preparing what I now at long last understand to be The Christmas Pudding! As a kid I had always wondered what he was making.
Any resemblance to hamsters once on sidebars is entirely intentional.
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Stir it up, isn’t that the name of a Bob Marley song?
I am doing the baking here in West Cork… my Grandmother Ronan’s apple-sauce raisin cake with toasted walnuts, cinnamon, and cloves.
It will be a grand stir-up Sunday, but she who must be obeyed instructs me it cannot be a ¡Vaya lío! moment in the kitchen.
I’m gonna dig dig!
I’m not a pudding person. However, I gave a homemade sourdough bread to a priest today. Many people I know have already been making natural leaven (sourdough) panettone for a couple of weeks & that’s on the agenda soon.
The younger generation of Hillary supporting liberals is coming to stay at my house for 10 days. It’s going to be dreadful.
Gracie, I was at a symposium yesterday where most speakers referenced the election and the horror of the results. Some were in tears as they presented. Many had rewritten their papers in the time since the election. It was tedious and boring. More tedious and boring than expected, due to the election commentary. One used the word trump, commenting that she wouldn’t let him take away her vocabulary. I couldn’t believe that so-called professionals were acting like that.
Hagan Lío Sunday ?
That would describe my kitchen !
[I like it.]
4th annual fruitcake baking party at our house and hopefully zero political conversation as most of our visitors are “c”atholics. I figure we can kill them with kindness.
My only plan for this weekend is to attend Mass, having missed the last two due to influenza. This is what you get for passing the peace with a handshake. I’m done with that once and for all.
Bumpkin that I am, I only know pudding of milk and chocolate, butterscotch, or other bumpkin flavors. Spending solitary Thanksgiving and Christmas so I am deciding what to have. I should have chocolate pudding at least!
Elizabeth, yes, be so sweet they will feel like they just ate maple syrup.
gracie, exude treacle!
Nan, I too am surrounded by such professionals. I shrug a lot. My shoulder muscles are getting strong.
Some of you need to review what “pudding” means in this context.
No Christmas pudding this year; it will be tofurkey pie instead.
I know full well what a Christmas pudding is. Bumpkins are only allowed to have the other kind.
My wife baked a batch of pumpkin bread to take to church in the morning. That’s about as close to a Christmas pudding we’ll be getting.
Nan,
The ones coming to me are in the entertainment industry. In L.A.
I felt like this waiting for Hurricane Sandy.
Gracie, they’re from LA so they don’t live in the real world.
un-ionized, shrugging is safe. I had to keep my mouth shut yesterday.
I have never successfully steamed a pudding, but I do make a wicked mincemeat, the ingredients for which will begin luxuriating in their rum-and-brandy bath today.
My mother, R.I.P., unfailingly started her puddings, and cake, on 8th December. It being a holy day of obligation, we kids always had a day off school if on a weekday, so we were able to “help”. Lord, she was a patient woman ?
So I’ve always kept more or less to that tradition and will start pud-preps around that date, probably Sunday 10th. I don’t bother with cake, the family don’t really go for it but pudding… yes, big time, so I make 2.
I am stirring things up by turning in my CCHD envelope empty and with “Matthew 15:14” written on the “amount donated” line. Hat tip: Robert Spencer
I am celebrating Chicago’s new cardinal ~ Chi is the hometown of Alinsky and some of the clergy who supported him.
Dear Fr Z,
Your Readership might well be interested in this Comment, left on my Blog (Zephyrinus) by GENTY.
Some useful tips for Christmas Pudding Punters.
in Domino
Genty 20 November 2016 at 08:07
Snap! I’m finishing off a pud made three years ago. This should be the best Christmas pudding you have ever had, as long as it’s laced generously with alcohol. My Ma used to make batches and the longer they were stored in a cool, dark place, the better they tasted and came up a wonderful rich black colour. Enjoy.
PS Don’t microwave. If there are any leftovers they will turn into teeth-breaking rocks overnight.
Dear Un-ionized, other singles, those without a stand mixer, and the baking challenged:
The recipe below is quick, easy, and like a dark fruit cake; goes well with hard sauce; and is quick and easy !
Substituions/Additions (especially if one doubles the recipe) could be other fruits and nuts, butter as shortening, and dark brown sugar, Demerara, or Turbinado sugar.
We’ve always eaten it the same day ( it was made as birthday cake for an allergic-to-everything-dairy brother), so it doesn’t need to be made weeks in advance. Never tried it with an alcohol rub, as we were all underage . But hard sauce would take care of that !
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/7490/eggless-milkless-butterless-cake/
Emf, thank you! I used to bake a lot before my health went south (it went so far south it’s started to turn north again) and have a stand mixer even. This recipe should get me back into the swing of things!
Just finished adding dry and wet ingredients, after some hagan lio!, and the mixture is resting until tomorrow when it will be steamed in my pressure cooker. This is my first try. I went here:
http://pudding.denyer.net/
for the recipe and followed it to a “t”. (You’ll need a kitchen scale)
It happens to end up with leftover beer….!
Dear un-ionized: you’ve hinted before about health problems. God bless you and give you strength. As regards stirring, my mother had bad arthritis from about 1970 on, so one of her presents one year was a stand-mixer (Moulinex), still working lo all these years hence! It was a blessing for her. It’s still in its original 1971 box. We don’t use it all that much now but if push comes to shove! And I still use my great-grandmother’s basin for the mix, originally part of a wash-stand kit before piped water in bathrooms etc. Well… we Catholics value tradition, eh? ;)
Jaykay, my main “issue” is arthritis too and disc damage. I love thinking that I can get people out of purgatory this way. They fly up saying thank you.
I have a kenmore mixer which has metal gears and is astonishingly noisy and weighs about 80 pounds, feels like, so there it sits, never moving, the box is long gone. I can only make bread with the dough hook now, I am beyond kneading, but the hook does much better and I get a better product with it.
Old equipment is wonderful. I have some tin molds from my great grandmother. I value tradition though I am only a convert. When I converted I got tradition built in! Like an advertisement, tradition built in, not added on.
This year’s Christmas pudding yield is seven quart sealers worth.
[Wow!]