Friday Find: Holiday Music: It's full of food

This is kind of a cop-out on a Friday Find, but I am just SO EXCITED that this season is officially upon us! This is a post I wrote and originally posted on FoodLush a few years ago. I've edited and modified it.

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Thanksgiving is over! It's time to be unapologetically full of THE OTHER HOLIDAYS. 

I have an obsession with Christmas, and Christmas music, and Christmas food, and also regular food. And maybe you've noticed, but they overlap. In the obvious ways, sure, but have you noticed how often food is sung about in holiday songs? Because I have and I want to talk about it.

Let's examine some favorites shall we?

1. Sleigh Ride. 

Obviously the only good version is sung by Johnny Mathis. Give it a listen and just try not to feel jaunty and festive. Personally, it makes me want to dance like Kristen Wiig, which is high praise in my book.

If you've never heard Johnny Mathis's Christmas albums, get thee to iTunes and get thee some of that retro crooning. It's perfect.

My favorite part of the song is where they talk about passing around the coffee and the pumpkin pie.

a) Pumpkin pie is delicious (so is coffee) and b) It seems kind of rebellious as pumpkin pie is clearly a fall food, not a Christmas food. When I hear that lyric, I always wonder if people do eat pumpkin pie at their winter celebrations post-Thanksgiving. Do you? It certainly would seem that Johnny is in good company, given that pumpkin pie is also mentioned in Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.

2. My Favorite Things.

I am partial to the Barbra Streisand version on her Christmas album, which is aptly titled "A Christmas Album". I didn't know this was a Christmas song, but it must be if it's on that album. Here we have crisp apple struedel, and schnitzel with noodle. 

Again I am confused. Apple struedel? Really? Admittedly I do not know how the Von Trapps and Fruelein Maria did things in Austria, but aren't apples more of a fall food? How DID this become a holiday song anyway? The lyrics also mention rain. As we all know, the only festive precipitation is snow, so I continute to be confused all around by this song. 

3. The Christmas Song.

Bold and daring, this song puts it all out there right in the title. This is THE Christmas song. Therefore I'm willing to accept at face-value anything it claims. The chesnuts are roasting on an open fire. "Everybody knows, a turkey and some mistletoe..." Bam. Suddenly turkey isn't just for Thanksgiving. 

4. The 12 Days of Christmas.

Pear trees, partridges, maids-a-milking, geese-a-laying. So many foodstuffs I can hardly count....count. Eh? Ehh?

5. We Wish You a Merry Christmas

Figgy Pudding! A fictitious Christmas food only available in classic Charles Dickens stories.

6. Baby It's Cold Outside. 

A problematic song featuring drinks, and a woman wondering what a man has put in her drink as he doesn't accept no for an answer. I hate this song. Every time I hear it I think, oh, it can't be THAT bad, then, nope, it just keeps getting worse. 

7. Let It Snow.

He or she brought some corn for popping! Festive!

8. Frosty the Snowman. 

He has a corncob pipe, so.

9. The Hannukah Song. 

There aren't many Hannukah songs, but this one is really in it to win it, with it's love for gin and tonics. There's also mention of the Carnegie Deli, and I think we can agree a pound of pastrami with a piece of bread perched precariously on top makes a damn good sandwich. 

10. Marshmallow World. 

The entire song revolves around corny food jokes. It's a marshmallow world, a whipped cream day. I get excited every time the Target commercial featuring this song is played.

11. Here We Come A-wassailing. 

According to Wikipedia, which quotes Readers Digest: "the Christmas spirit often made the rich a little more generous than usual, and bands of beggars and orphans used to dance their way through the snowy streets of England, offering to sing good cheer and to tell good fortune if the householder would give them a drink from his wassail bowl or a penny or a pork pie or, let them stand for a few minutes beside the warmth of his hearth. The wassail bowl itself was a hearty combination of hot ale or beer, apples, spices and mead, just alcoholic enough to warm tingling toes and fingers of the singers"

It doesn't get more festive than pork pies, warm spiced alcohol, and begging British street urchins. 

God bless us, every one. 

Things I'm enjoying lately

1. I love a breakfast smoothie, but also I love toasted things. These cranberry orange morning rounds, toasted with delicious Kerrygold butter, are delightful. The muesli ones are also delicious. I don't really like apple cinnamon flavored things, unless it's actual apples and cinnamon, or pie, or applesauce, so I can't speak to those.

Image from trndreport.com

2. Kids & babies in Halloween costumes. I can't get enough. Parents, please keep the photos coming.

3. Thanksgiving planning. At least thinking about Thanksgiving and talking about recipes and exchanging tips. I could do it year-round, honestly. This will be the first year since 2009 that we haven't hosted or been in our own home. Back in DC we hosted every year, except for one, since we bought our house. In 2012, I was a week off sinus surgery and it was one of the busiest times of Zach's career and we just couldn't do it. We stayed home, alone, and ordered dinner from a restaurant and man, it was just awful. It was so sad. I vividly remember lying in bed that Wednesday night and thinking how it was the first night before Thanksgiving that we'd ever not had a bunch of people sleeping under our roof, with a kitchen full of food waiting to be prepped and consumed. I probably cried. Anyway! Last year we made up for it by hosting 15 or 20 people with All The Food. I made five pies! It was glorious. You know what? I'm going to do a whole 'nother post with a bunch of recipes.

4. So: Halloween (check), Thanksgiving (check), CHRISTMAS.

Photo from hlntv.com.

I unabashedly love seeing Christmas stuff in stores already. I know, it's OCTOBER! JUDGE ME! It makes me happy. Autumn into the holidays is my favorite time of year. It's cozy and happy and encompasses basically all of my favorite things: food, family, nostalgia, coming up with the Perfect Gift, specifically scented candles, traditions, hauling out beloved ornaments and old things (nostalgia, again), etc. I love it. Zach is just happy that I haven't subjected him to Christmas music yet. (If my father is reading this right now, he probably wants to punch his computer. Hi Dad! Jingle bells!)

5. Searching for an Aztec print cardigan/sweatercoat type thing. I know they're a bit trendy right now but I prefer to think I'm just really letting my inner hippie flourish, what with living by the beach in San Diego and all.  

I like this, but the collar is weird and it didn't feel nice in the store. 

Image from Nordstrom.com. I really want to take a brush to this model's hair. 

I reeeallly like this and it felt well-made in person, but it's not very Aztec-y.

Image from Nordstrom.com.

This one is pretty and very Caitlin. Though not totally Aztec-y, I still want it. Santa, are you listening?

Image from ModCloth.com.

6. Sharing my all-time favorite fall recipe: Pumpkin Lasagna. I wrote about it over at FoodLush a few years ago, and my feelings on it have not changed. It's not healthy, and it's never going to photograph well, but it's by far the recipe people ask me for the most. I used to make it every year for a fall potluck, and it was always the first to go. The last time I made it I tripled the batch and it was still gone in about 15 minutes. My friend Kate made it recently, and added arugula. Smart move.

It would be lovely served with a salad on a Friday night, at a potluck, or on your Thanksgiving table, for vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike. It's so perfect. Oh darling pumpkin lasagna, is there anything you can't do?

Photo from realsimple.com.

I like new finds. Tell me what you're liking lately? 

Gram's Blueberry Buckle

This post first appeared over at FoodLush, a site I loved writing for and probably would still be writing for if it weren't defunct. 

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Some of my fondest and earliest childhood memories are of being in the kitchen. Dad's homemade mac-and-cheese in the fall, or maybe Pot roast on a cold, dark Sunday in the winter, the whole family assigned to their tasks with music playing in the background. To this day I can't hear Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, Paul Simon, or the Moody Blues without thinking of my parents' kitchen.  

I remember being 8, and Mom letting me make bacon and eggs on my own. (It's how I learned that eggs will stick to the pan unless you use something to keep them from doing so.) I remember my first cookbook: Put out by the library, it was a collection of recipes from people in the town, and many of them used the microwave. I was in love.  

My parents were pretty liberal when it came to use of their kitchen and ingredients, and for that I will be forever grateful. My brother and I loved making "potions" out of whatever we could find in the cabinets. It was a total waste of ingredients, but priceless fertile ground for our imaginations. Oh, how the concoctions would fizz when you dumped in baking soda.

My grandmother has always been a good cook, with a particular penchant for baking. I loved going over to her little yellow house, coming in through the breezeway, and making a direct right into the tiny galley kitchen. There was an orange ceramic cookie jar on her counter, and I can probably count on one hand the number of times that I lifted that little round lid -- oh delicious anticipation! -- to find it empty. Chinese chews, lemon squares, chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles, the beloved molasses crinkles. 

Oh those molasses crinkles. 

When I was first living on my own after college Gram and I used to exchange letters. I would ask her for certain recipes (blueberry buckle, her famous apple pie, lemon lush, cereal mix), and she'd write back about her recent activities, painstakingly handwritten recipe cards enclosed, just as I'd requested. I've saved them all, in a tin box she once gave me that she used to use for recipes. What a fantastic rainy day activity that is, pawing through cards and letters with Gram's handwriting on them. The truth is I've only used the recipes a handful of times, but I can't bear the thought of her someday not being here and no one knowing the recipe for her apple pie. 

She used to always tell me, back when she still lived in a place with a kitchen, that she was saving her cookbooks for me. That she'd even written my name in them, because when the time came, they were mine. Gram's a strong, feisty, independent lady and I guess I never imagined she'd ever not have a kitchen, ever not cook. But today she lives in an assisted living home, no longer has a kitchen, and somewhere along the way she passed on several of her cookbooks to me.  

(Fret not, she's doing pretty okay: She even has a boyfriend. He lives across the hall and they have their nightly cocktail together before heading down to the dining hall. She's robbing the cradle though. He's only in his 80s!) 

Flipping through those cookbooks, seeing the splashes and dabs on the pages, her notes in the margins, the well-worn spines: It's a piece of living history, a time-machine to my childhood and part of her life. I picture her in that little kitchen, bent over the cookbook, making notes as a cobbler sits cooling on the stove, the counter covered in mixing bowls. My favorite has to be the book put together by people in her hometown church. She told me it was her favorite cookbook, and she wrote my name right on the front. Taped inside the front cover is a piece of yellow paper that says "Anything made by Anita Buddington is good."  

Well-noted, Gram. 

Thanks, Anita. 

Image from FoodNetwork.com

Anita Buddington's Blueberry Buckle

(Gram made this often when I was growing up, usually in the summer during prime blueberry season. We often ate it as dessert, but it's great for breakfast too.) 

Cake

1/4 cup butter

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg

1 cup flour

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/3 cup milk

1 pt. blueberries

Topping
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup flour
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 cup butter    

Cream butter, add sugar and mix well, add egg. In a separate bowl sift flour, baking powder, and salt and alternately with milk to first mixture. Fold in blueberries and pour into an 8 inch greased square pan. Mix first three ingredients of topping, then rub in butter. Sprinkle over blueberry mixture and bake at 375 for 45 minutes. Also good with chopped nuts added to topping.