The Clotted Cream Chronicles

Sunday, November 8

It just keeps getting better.  I tracked down another supplier of cream - not fat Jersey cows (and more on my trials with their clotted cream another time), but local Puget Sound cows at least.  The farmer's wife and I met downtown where she handed me a half gallon from the back of her truck.  Laura is one of the few Americans I've met who knows what CC is -  her family has Devonshire roots.

I may be on CC overload by this point, but it seemed to me that the batch I made with this cream was not quite as heavenly as the the first two, meaning I didn't feel the urge to dab a little behind my ears, but it was still quite good.  When I removed the CC the liquid underneath still looked very creamy so I decided to try another batch. No it's not secondhand cream - I prefer to call it the second flush.  It resembles double thick cream - a more liquid, but still spoonable version of pure CC.  I test drove it on my scone which I had with Pauline's Plum Jam from the Farmer's Market yesterday and it was excellent.  Clotted cream AND Double cream - what abundance!

I have one more attempt with my Jersey cows and then I'm calling it quits.

And in case you're wondering, yes, my clothes do feel a teeny bit tighter lately, but it's all in the interests of science.  At least I don't have to directly inject the clotted cream into my body - I get to enjoy it first.

Wish I could say I was as far along with my sausage rolls and Cornish pasties.  The pastry is making me crazy.  I am sending out an SOS for my Aussie and English friends to please check their old cookbooks and send me suggestions.  Neil is already on it (please, please find your Mum's recipe for Pastie Slices!) but I need all the help I can get.  I've made two batches today and had to throw out the first one as it cracked all over the place  - version 2 is in the oven with 2 different kinds of sausage that I made today with the fat happy pork I got at Nash's yesterday.

Psst! The good stuff''s in a cooler around back.

This counts for fast food in the Pacific Northwest.

Look at the size of those oysters.

 





























So, yesterday was a pretty full day.  First the Market for my pork, veggies and Pauline's jams - she grows all the fruit herself and has more orders than she can handle but won't take on an employee as she's nervous about her recipes.  Hmmm.

Had lunch at Dos Okies Barbeque and caught up with Larry the owner (one of the partners from Oklahoma, hence the name.)

He runs the best barbeque place in town (okay, the only barbeque place in town) and it's, shall we say, modest in terms of curbside appeal, but the food is great.

When we were out in July we stopped by for lunch with cousin Susan.  Larry joined us at our al fresco table we yakked for a couple of hours.  He introduced us to everyone who stopped by as if we were old friends of his and by the time we left we felt we were.  Those were two of the happiest hours I've ever spent in a parking lot.







I love his sign:

Then we headed to the Woodworker's Show where Dan did the secret handshake with his fellow woodies and was happy, happy in his natural environment.

He even bought me a belated anniversary present from Seth, a talented chap whose designs appealed to Dan, probably because they share a similar aesthetic.

Dan gave me the one in the middle.

This is the first piece by another woodworker (besides me) in this house.  Did you know I took a couple of woodworking classes and made a footstool for my Stickley chair?   Okay, full disclosure - I designed it and cut all the pieces (and did the mortice and tenon joints!) and Dan finished it and put it all together for me as a surprise one Christmas.










Then it was home to prepare for the ball.  Time was marching on and still no costume.  My clever husband waved his magic hot glue gun and voila!  A costume appeared.

Okay, so you've all seen a movie where someone is told that it's a costume party and he or she turns up in some outrageous outfit only to find it's not a costume party at all, right?  R-i-g-h-t.

Black Tie and Carhartts (a kind of overall favored by the manually inclined) was perhaps a teeny inside joke that we didn't quite twig to.  Of course, it didn't help that Tim, the chap behind it all, and an Englishman to boot (which should have alerted me - bloody Poms) did stress that creative attire was expected.  Dan managed to find the tails from his Groucho Marx costume and a black tie and was, indeed, quite creative I thought, despite not having a pair of Carharrts.

And my American Ash Veneer headdress and matching belt, not to mention the fabulous wood necklace and earrings I bought at the Woodworker's show while Dan was distracted, were rather understated and clever I thought.  Turns out, no one else wore wood.

The brooch is the 'Woman of a Certain Age' gift from cousin Susan for my 50th birthday.

But guess what?  It didn't matter!  Okay, there was one woman who had a small carpenter's thingy in her hair-do and some clamps attached to her skirt, and one chap who did indeed wear Carhartts and a black bow tie - but that was it.  But no matter, this is Port Townsend, where the weird are welcome and there's no such thing as wearing the wrong thing.  In fact, I got more compliments about my hat than anything I've ever worn - ever.  Someone suggested adding it to the Silent Auction but this is a priceless original DM Design and I won't part with it (the belt popped off halfway through the evening proving that a glue gun is no match for Clotted Cream.)

Last night it blew like stink and this morning was still wild. Remember the Coast Guard Sea Rescue Demo on Friday?  I didn't expect to see it again so soon but this morning the helicopter was buzzing up and down in front of the house for an hour and a half.  Not a good sign.  Nothing on the local news wire yet.  Turns out the waters of the Straits of San Juan de Fuca are quite notorious.  Extreme rowers (yes, there really are such madmen) train here for the Cross Atlantic rowing race (don't these people have mothers?) because the conditions are similar.
 

By midday the wind had dropped to nothing and the boats were back out on the water, including our new ferry, the Chetzemoka, which has started trial runs prior to its official debut next week.  That day the whole town is turning out for the annual town photo which this year will be on the dock in front of it.  Then we get to go on board and have a party.

Taken from the deck.

Oh, and for those of you losing sleep over the tidal dilemma, No. 2 Brilliant Daughter (Hilary) has taken pity and supplied the following info (this is why we're paying the big bucks for college) and pay attention: there's a quiz at the end.

Tides are affected largely by the gravitational pull of the moon but also to a lesser extent by the sun.  Assuming you know what gravitational pull means (I lied, I really don't) you should be able to reason out why the tides don't occur like clockwork (er ...)  Here in California we have mixed semi-diurnal tides, meaning two high and low tides of unequal strengths each day.  I assume it's essentially the same up in Washington.  Anyway, the strongest high tide will occur when the sun and the moon are in the same position (how is that even possible?) because their masses (and their gravitational pulls) will be exerting attraction on the oceans in the same direction.  So back to why they aren't regular.  Everything is constantly rotating - us around the sun and the moon around us (see, that part always confused me in school, I can't get the whole 3D thing to work for me) - so throughout the day the moon and the sun might be in opposing positions. If it were solely the moon that influenced the tides, it probably would operate like clockwork.  But since there's that secondary force - the sun - it messes with the balance of the attraction so that it isn't exact.

Oh, another thought.  The earth is constantly in rotation as well (think of a spinning top when it starts to wobble; we're on that kind of axis) so that also probably has some affect on the strengths of the tides. (Now my head is spinning and I'm starting to feel sick.)


Thank you Hilary.  It was sweet of you to try to enlighten me.  I think I'll just have to go on being surprised  by the tide each morning  and give up trying to understand the reasons why.

 Another biblical sky over Port Townsend.  That's the paper mill smoke stack in the lower right corner.  Ah, yes, the paper mill .....