2022

We are celebrating New Year’s with the UK branch of the family. For New Year’s Eve dinner, daughter E and spouse L prepared Korean food. I admit that I didn’t stay up for the midnight festivities which follow the Filipino tradition of L’s parents, with whom E and L and their daughters ABC and JG live.

At midnight, they bang on pots and pans to make noise to drive away evil spirits. There were not organized fireworks due to COVID, but there were lots of fireworks in the streets – all evening and until about 3 this morning. Actually, there have been fireworks in the neighborhood for the past several nights, as though people needed to practice for the big event.

E and L went shopping for fruits as they prepared bowls with 12 different round fruits, which symbolizes prosperity for the household for each month of the year. They even prepared a bowl for us to have in our Airbnb. It’s important not to eat any of the fruits until the new year has begun. L’s family will also hang grapes above the front door, where they remain for the year. First they will have to take down the 2021 grapes which are now a bunch of raisins!

For New Year’s dinner, E is planning to make lasagna and homemade bread. This is our family’s traditional Christmas dinner which got transferred to New Year’s Day this year. It will be a nice way to remember my parents as we move into our first year with them both gone.

Wishing all of us peace, contentment, and good health in 2022!
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Linda is once again hosting Just Jot It January to encourage daily posting to get the new year off to a good start! Prompts are provided, but not required. Learn more here: https://lindaghill.com/2021/12/31/the-friday-reminder-for-socs-jusjojan-2022-daily-prompt-jan-1/

Drought, farms, and climate change

On the morning news, I heard the staggering statistics that California, which is in extreme drought, uses 80% of its water for agriculture, growing a third of the US supply of fruits and vegetables. It has already taken some farmland out of production or substituted crops that use less water. Meanwhile, it is in its fourth year of drought with snowpack under 5% of normal. As in over 95% of normally expected runoff water will not be there this year.

This should be setting off all kinds of alarm bells across the country. We need to shift our food production to more local areas and sustainable practices. Now, not in some distant future. We need to change our expectation of what foods we eat in which season of the year. When I was growing up, we ate fresh sweet corn in mid- to late-summer, when nearby farms were harvesting. We would prepare extra corn, cut it off the cob, and freeze it to eat at other times of year. We need to get back to this sense of eating fresh foods locally and preserving the extra produce to eat later rather than expecting California to send us strawberries in February. Certainly some crops, like citrus fruits, will not grow throughout the country, but others, like salad greens, can be grown close to where they are consumed, even in northern urban centers in winter where they can be grown indoors.

During the long slog fighting against shale gas development in New York State, I used many arguments against various aspects of this industrialization of our state. One of them was that, in this time of shifting climate, we needed to preserve our New York farms and forests for food production. Much of the farmland in the US is projected to have major droughts and heat waves as atmospheric carbon increases, including California and the Great Plains/Midwest farm belt. The Northeast, while expected to warm, is not expected to have severe issues with water supply. New York must assiduously protect its soils, water, and air from pollution in order to feed itself and other states as climate stressors increase.

Fruitcake

Jokes about fruitcake at Christmas are standard, but fruitcakes are not universally worthy of derision.

Most years, we make several loaves of a wonderful fruitcake. The base recipe came from a co-worker of B’s in his first post-college job and we have modified it over the years to suit our tastes. The main thing that sets it apart from other fruitcakes is that it uses no candied fruits and peels. No unnaturally bright red and green cherries. No citron. All the fruits we use are dried – prunes, apricots, dates, raisins, pineapple, and cherries. (There is also mashed banana in the batter.)

We just finished chopping the dried fruits and have set them to soak until tomorrow in a bit of cider. The recipe calls for brandy, but we prefer non-alcoholic fruitcake, so we use juice.

Ordinarily, the fruitcake would have been made prior to Christmas Day, but this is not an ordinary year. We will keep a couple of mini loaves for ourselves and bring one to B’s mom, but most of the loaves will go to my parents. My father is especially fond of our fruitcake and will slice, wrap, and freeze it to enjoy over the coming months. He likes to bring a slice to enjoy with coffee at Wegman’s while Mom is picking up a few items in the store. He especially loves apricots, so we put extra in for him.

Our fruitcake is definitely too tasty to re-gift!

Update:  A friend asked if I’d share the recipe.  Enjoy!