It’s the yaupons. Well, that and the beautifully executed Tod und Verklarung we heard Saturday night at the Mobile Symphony concert. Let alone the magnificent music, something about watching a man sit for twenty minutes waiting to hit a gong will make you contemplate the relentless passing of time. Anyway, we have six yaupon trees planted on the north side of the house, so big now that you can look out of the upstairs windows into their branches. They got blown sideways some during a 90s hurricane, I forget which one, so they are kind of slanted, but still lovely. Every winter they are covered with those glassy little red berries yaupons have, and then in the spring the cedar waxwings pass through on their way north and strip them bare. Sometimes there are disasters, like the year an especially territorial mockingbird chased away the early scouts and we never saw the rest. Or the year a different hurricane came through at just the right angle to blow off all the green berries before they could ripen. Or the year we had a bad summer drought combined with a huge squirrel population and they ate all the green berries long before fall came. It was so sad, to hear the waxwings arrive kee-kee-keeing to one another almost as high as a dog whistle, all that way from South America or wherever they stay all winter, to get a empty-handed welcome like that. I was kind of glad when a hawk moved in to the neighborhood, to right-size the squirrels.
But nothing went wrong this year. There were plenty of berries for all, and the waxwings showed up a week or so ago, and now the berries are all gone. This isn’t my video (thank you cedarshores1) but this is about how it goes:
Today, the tiny white flowers that will be next year’s berries popped open, and instead of bustling, seed-pooping birds, the trees were alive with bees. Well, and flies too, but they’re not so nice to talk about. I don’t know what’s in those flowers, but there were about a million bees working them when the rain stopped this morning, big bees and little bees and also those flies.
That’s the kind of thing I would think about if, like Richard Strauss’s tone poem guy, I were lying on my deathbed waiting for the gong to sound. Damn, I would say, or maybe will say. I didn’t get to see the waxwings come through one more time.
I can’t spend too much time on Tod though, cause there’s all the Verklarung to think about. The sugar snap peas are blooming, and the cucumber seeds are up, and the eggplant and peppers seedlings are all potted up and waiting their turn to go out and be ignored and forgotten in the sweltering heat of July. Not this year, though. This year is going to be different. Can’t you hear the French horns coming in?
Recipe: this morning we said goodbye to fall with muffins made from the last half-bag of cranberries that had been in the back of the fruit drawer since Thanksgiving. (I can ignore and forget things in the winter, too.) Half of them were still firm, just enough for the recipe, and the other half were not, and were gobbled up by the chickens. So you see there was no waste.
When I make muffins I usually use the recipe in Mark Bittman’s wonderful How to Cook Everything. (There’s a revised 10th anniversary edition, but that’s not the one I have.) You can throw anything in these muffins, and Mr. Bittman suggests several variations.
CRANBERRY NUT MUFFINS
Preheat oven to 400° and spray some Pam on a 12-cup muffin tin. Put 2 cups all-purpose flour, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 3 teaspoons baking powder into a mixing bowl and stir to combine. Here is how they become cranberry: grate the peel off an orange, toast 3/4 cup or so of chopped nuts (we had walnuts), measure out a cup of cranberries, and throw all that in too. The traditional time to fold these things in is at the end, but this way works too.
Then melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a medium-sized container, so you have enough room for the egg and milk. Naturally I used the microwave; Mr. Bittman says you can also use vegetable oil here. Add a cup of milk and an egg. Beat that all up together then—you know the drill— add it to the flour mixture in your mixing bowl and “combine with a few swift strokes.” (Actually he goes into more detail, about folding rather than beating, and stopping as soon as the dry ingredients are moistened. It’s a really good book for new cooks.) I always seem to need way too many swift strokes, but the muffins rose and were tender anyway. Divide into your muffin cups and bake 20-30 minutes (check at 20). Mr. Bittman says to let them rest 5 minutes in the pan, but who can wait.
His blueberry variation, since I am betting nobody else has cranberries still sitting around from Thanksgiving, is increase the sugar to 1/2 cup and add a cup of blueberries, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and 1/2 teaspoon lemon zest. I don’t like the cinnamon addition, but to each his own.
A Rich Interior Life 