Mid-Morning Snack

My Beloved works part of the time out of a home office; the rest of the time, he's an on-the-road sales guy. When he's home, we sometimes enjoy a mid-morning snack, usually a cookie or a muffin we have picked up on our morning walk with Cora and brought home. It makes a nice break for him while he's working and I only get hungry for breakfast around 10am, so it works well for us.

This time, we had Beckmann's Lemon Current Scones. Beckmann's sends a rep up from Santa Cruz each Wednesday to attend our local farmer's market so we stopped by their booth for a treat. I must learn how to make these for myself once the farmer's market closes at the end of October - these are just too good to have only in the summer. Lovely and local, they are made with fresh ingredients and no preservatives. They freeze well, too, as I learned this morning when I busted out a couple to heat up for our mid-morning snack.

Buckle? Chuckle

I like to read the Wednesday Chef blog - I like the way Luisa writes. She's funny and witty, and you can almost hear her talking. And, every now and then, she posts a recipe that transports me to heaven - what's not to like about that?

And so it is with Luisa's post about Cory Schreiber and Julie Richardson's Lemon Blueberry Buckle. I made only a very few changes to Luisa's recipe, subbing in some kefir that I had in the fridge for the buttermilk that I didn't have, and it was truly, truly killer.

Luisa advocated letting it get cold after baking and I'm an obedient student, so I did. The crumb is as light as air and perfumed with lemon throughout. The berries made dark little hollows of sweet-tart flavor. But, I forgot to tell that to My Beloved, so the next morning he gently heated it for our breakfast and, Big Wow!, it was great that way, too!

I carved up the remainder to offer to my neighbors as a peacemaking gesture for their forbearance with all the nail pounding and drilling they are enduring as we add a small deck onto the house. I doubt if they even noticed the noise while they were transported on a cloud of Lemon Blueberry Buckle.

Old Faithful

We are not good farmers. We forget to water. We neglect to fertilize. We leave our fruit trees to struggle against wind, weather and insects down on the lower forty, all by themselves. Still they reward us, year after year, with unexpected produce. A case in point, the lemon tree.

The poor little thing is sickly, with yellowed leaves and straggly branches, competing for light with an overgrown but gorgeous flowering crab that delights us each spring with rose-colored buds and lavish white flowers. I may have hammered one of those food spikes into the ground on the steep hillside above the lemon tree 12 years ago when we moved into this house and I was seized pride of homeownership, but that's the last help I ever gave it. Yet it continues to produce lemons, not very many but really good, tart ones, every year. They always look like this, sort of scarred and weary, when I remember to scramble down the steep incline to pick them, which isn't often. Sometimes, they ripen and fling themselves down the hill into the street below in a desperate bid for attention from passing joggers.

We are not good stewards of our tiny plot of land - we don't deserve the faithful service the lemon tree gives us, but we are grateful.