Dept. of Existential Seasonal Angst

[kaffy_r]

Just Call Me a Yule-ish Capitalist

I have done all my Christmas and holiday shopping. Two days of research, an hour of checking with my Best Beloved for agreement on choices, one text, one frenzied 20-minute stretch online. 

Oh, and weeks of guilt over abandoning brick and mortar stores and the living they grant their employees. 

Go, me. 

How do the rest of you handle it?

Comments

[kaffy_r]

Oh crap, kidney stones; that sucks so hard. I hope it passes, and does so as painlessly and quickly as possible.

Now you need to tell me what vinatarta is!

[maruad]

It is a traditional Icelandic layer cake... it is so traditional that they no longer make it in Iceland. It is only found in North America. It is basically 7-12 layers of a giant shortbread like cookie with ground, stewed prunes in between the layers. It contains a lot of butter, sugar and cardamon seed. Just google it. There are a tonne of recipes online.

I am one of the last people in my family (though there are 20+ cousins on my mom's side) who still makes it. It is a lot of work.

[kaffy_r]

It sounds like it would taste incredibly rich; do you put some sort of tart glaze on it, like, say, lemon or orange?

The entire thing would go down well at our dinner table, as long as you called the the ground stewed prunes something else, like ... hmmm ... plum paste. If you call Bob's attention to the fact that something has prunes in it, he won't eat it.

[maruad]

Some people put a type of icing on theirs even if we don't.


We call it prunes but if plum paste works for him, go for it. If he won't eat prunes, would he eat apricots? A lot of people have begun to use substitute fillings.

The difficult part is that you need to cook so many separate layers (7 to 12 depending on how you roll out your dough) and each layer is the size of a pie plate. I know some people who have switched to using the bottoms of cake pans, which, depending on the shape of the pan, can lead to square or rectangular vinatarta. These squared off pieces make sense as the cake is cut into rectangles, with the edge being either discarded or eaten by immediate family while guests and others would get the properly sliced bits.

I just found a website that will ship "vinarterta" to folks. It is expensive. They also sell "Plum Jam" which is vinatarta filling (I often have way too much "jam" leftover so I am not surprised they do as well). The site will let you see what it should look like (though they use a lot of icing).

Vinatarta is awesome with coffee or tea (or even milk).

[maruad]

Also, with regards to the kidney stone(s)*... it hasn't been very painful. Just very tedious. I underwent the sonic treatment to break it up but as far as I can tell, it just made me need to go to the washroom every 45 mins. It may be as much as another week before it passes.


* I am fairly certain the discovery of the current stone was caused by passing of another stone from the other side. I won't go into details. It was rather uncomfortable but not incredibly painful, as it is for some people.

[kaffy_r]

I am grateful that your experience with kidney stones seems to be at least slightly on the mild side. I hope it remains that way.