Tea and Travels

This spring, Wayne and I embarked on an autumn encounter with three countries located in the southern hemisphere: Zambia, Botswana and South Africa. Our intention was three-fold, to interact with the people and learn something of their culture and values, to enjoy the animals in their natural habitats and to sample the local food. In all three countries, we ate well, saw hundreds of healthy animals living free and had the pleasure of meeting some of the most courteous and dignified human beings on earth. And we missed no opportunity to enjoy Afternoon Tea.
 

​Our journey began in Zambia in the town of Livingstone, a colonial looking place with lots of 1920-1930s buildings and women in traditional clothing carrying their parcels on their heads. We boarded a water taxi on the Zambezi River to take us to our lodging, The Royal Livingstone Hotel. On the way, a large male elephant with impressive tusks stepped out of the dense foliage along the river bank to get a drink of water. Our little boat almost ran into him, affording us a very close look at this handsome creature, the first of many elephants we were privileged to encounter in our three-country travels.
 

​The Royal Livingstone Hotel has an elegant ambience with colonial style architecture and wide, beautifully maintained lawns sloping down to the Zambezi River. Zebras and even giraffes quietly graze on the grassy grounds and among the shady trees that grace the setting. The hotel is located in the Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park and provides not only views of the resident animals and the mighty Zambezi, but also of Victoria Falls, a short distance away. Our first view of the falls was truly breathtaking, as we witnessed huge plumes of water spewing into the sky above the falls just at twilight. The Zambian name for the falls, Mosi-oa-Tunya, translates as “The Smoke that Thunders,” and indeed the copious amounts of skyward-moving water above the falls did resemble smoke.
 

​That evening, we had the old-fashioned fun of riding the Royal Livingstone Express, a restored 1920s steam train with a charming retro dining car. We chugged along on our sixteen-mile scenic journey to the Victoria Falls Bridge on the Zimbabwe border. Here we disembarked from the train and wandered along the railway bridge, viewing the truly thunderous falls below from a viscerally close angle. The spray was so massive that the rainbows it generated arched downward into the gorge below as well as up into the sky. On the trip back, we enjoyed a five-course dinner in the romantic dining car featuring some local fare. Wayne was served kudu, an African game meat, in two forms, a carpaccio with goat cheese and in a Zambian style pot pie. Wayne said the kudu, an antelope-like animal, tasted like very lean venison. I enjoyed barramundi, a river fish, and I was also served a vegetable curry with rice, an example of the wide spread Indian influence in the cuisines of southern Africa. Our dessert was coconut cake served with custard sauce in the British style along with minced fresh pineapple. Very good chocolate truffles and coffee concluded our meal.

​After our walk with the rhinos, we boarded an open sided safari vehicle which took us to another area of the park for animal viewing. But first we stopped by the Zambezi River for our morning snacks—fresh lemonade, very good homemade ginger cookies and pound cake served from the hood of the vehicle. As we enjoyed our refreshments, we spotted a monitor lizard and a crocodile near the riverbank. Other animals we were fortunate to see on our afternoon game drive included a group of giraffes including a mature female and three juveniles, a golden, fluffy vervet monkey, several herds of beautiful and graceful impalas, and a male puku, an impressive antelope-like animal with large curving horns graced with horizontal stripes.

​Bird watching was also exciting in the park. We saw majestic African fish eagles, Egyptian geese, hornbills, kingfishers and the ever-present melodious doves. Newton used an amusing phrase to describe the dove’s call, and I turned it into this haiku:
 

​At lunch time, we visited another hotel on the Zambezi River named after the famous Scottish explorer—The David Livingstone Hotel. We boarded a boat at the hotel’s dock and cruised along the river, eating fresh tilapia with nicely cooked vegetables and a very fresh Greek salad. I was not surprised by the prevalence of Afternoon Tea and custard laden desserts considering Britain’s influence throughout Africa from the Victorian era to the Twentieth Century. But I was startled to be served so much Greek, Italian and Indian food in all three of the countries we visited. Perhaps the African tourism industry is convinced that American tourists prefer European food, and Indian immigrants have added to the diversity of Zambian cuisine.
 

​During our luncheon cruise, we saw hippos, some making very loud noises, as we floated along. We saw more Egyptian geese and beautiful sacred Ibis with their curving beaks, feeding in the shallows of the river bank. While we were on the boat, one of our local guides, whose name happened to be David, enlightened us with the Zambian version of the life and achievements of David Livingstone, for whom almost everything in this part of the country is named. I remember learning about this famous Victorian explorer and medical missionary when I was in the fourth grade, a very long time ago. My take away from this elementary school history lesson was that David Livingstone “discovered” Victoria Falls and was later “discovered” himself, (after disappearing for several years in the heart of Africa) by the Welsh-American journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, who upon finding Livingstone, uttered the famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
 

​Clearly Livingstone did not discover the Mosi-oa-Tunya. He was simply the first European to see it and took it upon himself to re-name the falls after Queen Victoria. Everyone living in Zambia at the time of Livingstone’s arrival was obviously aware of the falls’ existence, as the sprays of water shooting into the sky are impossible to miss. But David, our local storyteller, was very kind to Dr. Livingstone, who is a hero in Africa, not because of the falls, but because he learned about the Arab slave trade, and carefully documented this odious activity in his journals. Though Livingstone died in Africa in 1873, Stanley protected his journals, and published an expose on the southern African slave trade, leading to its abolition. Livingstone was also apparently far kinder and more considerate in his treatment of Africans than can be said of most other Europeans of that era, including Henry Morton Stanley.
 

​Our final adventure in Zambia was a walking tour of Victoria Falls which took us directly into the torrent, soaking us to the very bone, and leaving a lasting impression of the falls’ power and grandeur. Our trek into the falls took place on a Sunday afternoon, and I was pleased to see many Zambian families enjoying an outing to their own world famous natural wonder. As we approached the falls on foot, we came to a stopping point where we donned waterproof shoes and two layers of plastic ponchos. Even with this protection, the rest of the journey resembled a walk through a cyclone. We were inundated, surrounded by rainbows and rocked by the relentless and reverberating sound of endless amounts of falling water. The volume of the downpour was so intense that we were walking, not just through puddles, but through rivers of moving water, over our feet and up our legs. Our trek took us over a bridge across the gorge where we witnessed more rainbows and glimpsed the enormity of the waterfall, twice the height of Niagara Falls, and gazed in awe down at the swirling gorges below.
 

​Our last Zambian dinner was at the restaurant of the Royal Livingston Hotel, where the menu featured a Eurocentric selection that included roast duck, roast lamb, and a rather nice pureed vegetable soup. I was embarrassed to order penne arrabiata in Africa but could find no other vegetarian entrée options. My dessert of chocolate lava cake with ice cream could have been on any American restaurant menu, but it was delicious.
 

​Zambians who prepare their own food, particularly those living in traditional villages, rely on river fish, chicken, beef and staples that they can grow in their own kitchen gardens. Corn, called “maize” in Zambia, (from “maiz,” the Spanish word for corn,) is the starch of choice, especially in the form of cornmeal mush (called nshima,) which can be served at any meal of the day. Popular garden vegetables include pumpkins, squash, spinach, onions, tomatoes, beans, cabbage, okra and sweet potatoes. Peanuts also grow in Zambia. Does this sound familiar? Those of you who live in the American South or have a southern heritage might recognize these foods as the ingredients in your grandmother’s everyday cooking. The African and Southern American culinary connection is a strong one, not surprising when one considers the powerful historic confluence between the two continents and the continuing creativity and vitality of African American culture. Contemporary African culture is also diverse and ever changing. And as I have already pointed out, Zambians are open to culinary influences from all over the world.

​As we prepare to ferry across the Zambezi river from Zambia to Botswana, I will leave you with the recipe for a very traditional Zambian meal which you can easily cook in your own kitchen—good old vegetable stew with corn meal mush. I made this delicious meal in my own kitchen shortly after returning home from Africa. Wayne and I both loved it, and I had no difficulty finding all of the ingredients in our local grocery store and farmers’ market.
 

 
Ifisashi with Nshima
(Zambian Peanut and Vegetable Stew with Corn Meal Mush)
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​Ifisashi, or peanut and vegetable stew, is the go-to Zambian family meal. It is perfect for home gardeners, which many Zambians are, as the cook can simply go out in the back yard and harvest any of the vegetables that are ready to be picked. The inclusion of roasted peanuts makes this dish a nutritional powerhouse, and it is loaded with the green and yellow vegetables that we have all been taught to include in our daily diet. Ifisashi is traditionally served with nshima, the ubiquitous Zambian corn meal mush (or polenta, if you prefer.) Keep in mind that Zambia’s national dish is not fast food. It will take you some time to wash and cut up the vegetables. I expedited the process by oven roasting the squash and sweet potato the night before so they could be ready to be peeled, chopped and added to the stew the next day.
 
Ifisashi is a vegetarian dish, which is my preference, but I served Wayne’s ifisashi with sausages. You could turn your ifisashi into a family dinner, or even a special meal with friends, by adding another protein to the menu. Pan fried river fish, such as catfish or trout would be good with corn meal and vegetable stew, as would grilled chicken, pork chops or even broiled hamburger patties. These recipes will produce about eight servings, and we discovered that ifisashi is just as good, if not even better the next day. For a large group, both recipes can be doubled.
 

For the Nshima:

•  2 cups corn meal (fine grind)
• 4 cups water
• ½ teaspoon salt

 
Special equipment: measuring cups and spoon, large cooking pot with lid, whisk or immersion blender
 
Makes: approximately 8 servings 

1. Bring 4 cups of water and ½ teaspoon of salt to a boil over high heat in a large cooking pot. Make sure the pot is large, not medium sized, as the cornmeal can boil over and splatter on your stove and your hands.
2. Reduce the heat to medium and gradually add the cornmeal, whisking to avoid lumps. I use an immersion blender. The mixture will thicken.
3. Turn the heat down to low and continue to cook and whisk for an additional 3-4 minutes until the mixture is thick and smooth. Cover the pot with the lid and place it on the back burner of the stove without heat until the ifisashi is cooked and ready to serve.
4. Nshima is traditionally served in two or three torpedo shaped portions per person, not cut into squares. To create nshima “croquettes,” use a large serving spoon and twist it in a circular fashion through the cooked corn meal, releasing each nshima portion onto an individual plate.

 
For the Ifisashi: 

• 3-4 tablespoons peanut oil, divided
• 1 cup lightly salted roasted peanuts
• 1 large sweet onion, chopped
• 2 medium or 3 small tomatoes, chopped
• 1 small butternut squash
• 1 sweet potato
• 1 large bunch of spinach, carefully washed, stemmed and chopped
• 1 small head of cabbage, finely shredded
• 1 cup water or chicken broth
• salt and pepper to taste

 
Special equipment: large roasting pan, large skillet, wooden spoon, large cooking pot with lid, sharp knife
 
Makes: approximately 8 servings
 
Preheat oven to 350°F
 

1. Early in the day or the night before, cut the squash into 4 pieces with a sharp knife, cut the sweet potato in half and place the pieces, skin sides down, into a large roasting pan. Drizzle lightly with peanut oil, sprinkle with salt, and turn the pieces over, skin side up. Roast for approximately 1 hour, until the chunks have softened. Cool for about 1 hour, peel, seed the squash and cut all of the chunks into small pieces. Cover and refrigerate overnight, or reserve to add to the ifisashi in step #4 if making it immediately.
2. Place 2 tablespoons of peanut oil in a large skillet, add the chopped onion and cook on medium heat until the onion softens and turns a light golden color. Add the chopped tomatoes and peanuts and continue to cook, stirring with a wooden spoon until the tomatoes have softened. Transfer the vegetable mixture to a large cooking pot and continue to cook, stirring, on low heat.
3. As the onion mixture continues to cook, add 2 more tablespoons of peanut oil to the skillet and add the shredded cabbage. Stir fry over medium high heat until the cabbage turns a light golden, and transfer it to the large cooking pot. Add 1 cup of water or chicken broth to the large pot and stir the vegetables.
4. Add the cubed squash and sweet potato pieces and stir carefully. Cover and simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the chopped spinach, stir and cook for another 10 minutes or more until all the vegetables are cooked and the stew is well blended. Sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.
5. To serve, place 3 rounded portions of nshima on each plate and place a generous serving of ifisashi next to the nshima. Add a small serving of cooked meat or fish to the plate, or eat as a vegetarian meal. I served my nshima and ifisashi with stir-fried fresh mushrooms.

 

Several months ago, Wayne and I decided that it might be fun to rent out the downstairs studio apartment in the home where we live as an Air B&B. The place has its own lanai, looking directly at the Pacific Ocean, and out the back window, guests can gaze at the stunning Koolau mountain chain immediately behind the house. We are situated on the eastern shore of Oahu, half way up the Kamehameha Highway between the bustling touristy beaches at Waikiki and the equally busy North Shore, surfing capital of the World.
 

​Kaaawa, where we live, is not only the only town in America whose name contains three consecutive letters. It is also an ancient Hawaiian village and an oasis of calm between the frenetic south and north shores of Oahu. Our little B&B, as we have discovered, attracts a variety of people for diverse and interesting reasons, and all of our guests, we are pleased to say, have been good company.
 

​Among our first visitors was a Hawaiian couple from Maui who came with their little daughter to attend the traditional memorial service for his uncle at Kaaawa beach. A military couple who had not seen each other for many months because of his deployment overseas, came for a romantic reunion in our quiet and very private hideaway. We have also welcomed several Mormon couples from Utah and Idaho who like our location because of its proximity to the Mormon Temple and the surrounding L.D.S. community in the town of Laie, just north of us.
 

​Then there have been the Canadians and the Minnesotans who have come to escape the sub-zero temperatures in their homelands. One of these refugees from the land-locked cold actually broke out in tears of joy when she arrived at our studio in soft afternoon sunlight, the balmy trade winds wafting in from the sea, just steps away, and the coconut palms swaying gently above the pink hibiscus blossoms in our front yard.
 

​It is our goal to offer our guests the kind of hospitality that Kathleen and I describe in our website: myteaplanner.com. And we want our Air B&B to be a living example of the Philosophy of Tea: a refuge of peace, tranquility and mutual respect between guests and hosts. Wayne and I have tried to think of everything our visitors might need to help them feel welcome, relaxed and at peace. On arrival, all of our guests will discover a loaf of Hawaiian Banana Bread which I have baked for them from the Hawaiian Tea Menu on myteaplanner.com. We also offer almond croissants from the local farmers’ market, chocolate covered macadamia nuts made on the island and a refrigerator stocked with bottles of water, juice and milk for the Hawaiian granola we provide for them.
 

​Our studio also contains a cappuccino machine and a massage chair, very popular with guests who arrive exhausted from months of over-work and hours on a cramped airplane. Before our guests leave, Wayne always asks them if there were anything further we could have done to make them even more comfortable. Their answers have been very interesting, and we have implemented all of their suggestions: a night light, more hangers in the closet, hair conditioner as well as shampoo and body wash, an extra set of fluffy pillows, a luggage rack for a guest who wanted to live out of his suitcase rather than unpacking, and a bulletin board on the wall outside the entrance where guests can leave behind pamphlets and brochures for the activities they have especially enjoyed as suggestions for future visitors.
 

​We also ask our guests what made them choose our B&B over the many others available on Oahu. Several of them said they liked Wayne’s photos on our website, and to our surprise, two guests mentioned the photo of our very cute little dog, Declan, standing on the lanai.
 

​When our guests arrive in their rental cars, Declan always comes downstairs with us to greet them, and we have discovered that many of our visitors are already missing their pets back home when they get to our B&B. On two occasions, our guests have asked if they could baby-sit Declan, and he was happy to come down and keep them company in the studio. Ultimately, we have learned that hospitality is really a form of healing, and it is our vocation as hosts, to discern what kind of healing our guests need and offer it to them.
 

A recent experience with Jenn and Anna, two delightful women from Minnesota, provides an example of how we celebrated with them the joy of hospitality and the Philosophy of Tea. Like many of our guests, Anna and Jenn came to Hawaii to escape the cold and to relax and refresh their spirits in nature after years of hard work. They own The Coffee Hag, a coffee house and community hub in Mankato, Minnesota. We discovered that both Jenn and Anna are creative artists as well as business women. Anna had just finished several commissions before leaving on vacation, and Jenn is a musician who does vocals and guitar in her own band. When I mentioned that baking and hosting tea parties is my creative outlet, Anna exclaimed, “Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to have a tea party while we’re here in Hawaii?”

Of course I said, “Yes,” and eagerly offered to host the event. This was on a Saturday afternoon, and we set the date for our tea party for Tuesday at 2:00 PM, the final day of their Hawaiian vacation. While Jenn and Anna spent the next three days relaxing on the beach and experiencing a shark adventure (the humans are in an underwater cage while the sharks swim freely in the ocean), I set about planning a Hawaiian Afternoon Tea that I hoped would express the spirit of Aloha for our guests to take home with them.

My first task was to check my cupboards to see what I already had on hand and develop the menu based on these staples plus fresh ingredients I could pick up at the Sunday farmers’ market. A search of my kitchen revealed the following treasures: two gifts from Kathleen, a tin of Twining’s Black Tea Blend in honor of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II’s ninetieth birthday and a jar of Lady Wolf Marmalade Supreme, an orange, grapefruit and lemon marmalade made by Kathleen and her friend Ellen from fruit growing on Ellen’s property in Fresno. In the freezer I found a piece of salmon we bought from a fisherman at the farmers’ market and a large round of home-made Czech-style jalapeño sausage which we bought, also at the farmers’ market from the man who makes the sausage himself. Digging around in the refrigerator, I discovered, sour cream, cream cheese, a cucumber, some cheese slices, a very ripe papaya (a gift from a friend,) and a large jar of assorted Greek olives, both black and green, combined with strips of brined red peppers, tiny onions and cornichons.

A further exploration of my cupboards unearthed a package of Haupia (Hawaiian coconut pudding) mix, some candied ginger and a tiny jar of rare Ohelo Berry Jam, which we had bought from the woman who sells her home-made jams at the farmers’ market. And fortunately, I had some very ripe bananas in my fruit bowl, ready to be baked into a fresh batch of Hawaiian Banana Bread. We also had some chocolate covered macadamia nuts and a pretty fresh baguette laying around that we had been eating with olive oil to accompany a recent pot of Borscht.

Based on these available ingredients, I devised the following menu for:
 
​                                                    A Hawaiian Spring Tea

Now all I had to do was create my list for the Sunday farmers’ market in nearby Kaneohe to obtain the missing local ingredients, including smoked marlin from the guys who go out on their boat and catch the fish themselves, fresh chives and watercress from Waimanalo and the lovely taro rolls, guava bread and sprouted multi-grain bread sold at the French-Vietnamese bakery’s booth.

As I was visualizing the menu while sorting through the larder, I began to conceptualize the setting for our tea. It would be on our upstairs lanai, facing the Pacific Ocean; thus, Anna and Jenn would be guests in our home. And since I knew that they were dog lovers, Declan would also be invited. Our color scheme would be a casual mix of pink and green with a bouquet of pink ginger flowers augmented with greenery from our garden as a visual focal point. These colors would harmonize with my inherited collection of pink Depression Glass and my “good” china, the Lennox Charleston pattern, a soft blend of cream, pink and celadon green. I polished my silver tea pot and tray to serve the tea and used our Hawaiian koa wood tray for the sweets.

I rolled my three-tiered tea cart onto the lanai to serve the scones. The scones were on the top tier, the Devonshire cream, marmalade and butter on the second, and a photograph of Queen Liliuokalani rested on the third tier. We invited Hawaii’s last monarch to join us as we enjoyed our Queen Elizabeth II commemorative tea. I was also grateful for the opportunity to dig around in the linen closet for vintage napkins and tablecloths, waiting to be used.

Our guests had revealed themselves to be generous hearted, grateful and non-judgmental people, and their attitude made it easy for me to create the food and the setting with a relaxed and happy heart, knowing that my efforts would be appreciated. The guests’ participation at the tea party is crucial to the success of the event. If you are not quite familiar with tea party etiquette, I encourage you to read “Guidelines for the Host or Hostess” and “Guidelines for the Guest” in myteaplanner.com. I can honestly say that Jenn and Anna were perfect guests.

I hope there is a lesson here, as the celebration of Afternoon Tea is really a mini celebration of life itself. To be happy in life, one must be trusting and fearless, grateful for both friends and strangers, willing to be spontaneous and creative and also respectful of one’s own culture and surroundings. Can you see how the Hawaiian Spring Tea menu emerged from the ordinary staples and food items that are part of everyday life in rural Hawaii? Nothing on the menu was especially fancy or unusual, but I trusted my guests to enjoy these simple preparations that were unique to Hawaii.

I urge you to look around at your own environment with grateful eyes. What is unique about the foods you eat or the plants and flowers that surround you in Mankato, Minnesota, in Houston, in Utah, in Calgary? Idaho is known for its huckleberries, California for garlic and artichokes, Vermont for maple syrup and Kansas for its glorious corn. In its own environment, each of these items is ordinary, but it is the elevation of the ordinary into art that makes a tea party a memorable occasion. I hope you will support the farmers’ markets in your own community and take the time to welcome the produce that becomes available with each season as it arrives. Most of all, I wish for you a healthy enjoyment of the world in which you happen to live.

And finally, since May is the month in which we celebrate Mother’s Day, why not skip the over-crowded restaurant brunch this Mother’s Day and invite your mother or another older woman friend to tea in your own home? You can look at the Mother’s Day Tea menu in the Year of Tea Parties calendar section of myteaplanner.com for ideas. Kathleen’s Pink Champagne Cake is spectacular. Or, you can look in your own cupboards and refrigerator for inspiration and fill in the blanks with fresh May produce from the farmers’ market in your own neighborhood. Just to get you started, I leave you with the simple and very ordinary recipe for Hawaiian Banana Bread which the guests at our Air B&B seem to enjoy.

Hawaiian Banana Bread is often sold from trucks or roadside stands by women who have whipped up a batch using the bananas growing in their back yards. Hawaiian Banana Bread is not fancied up with the addition of nuts, chocolate chips, raisins or coconut. However, you can make a special tea party treat by slicing the loaf lengthwise and then into thin matching slices which you can sandwich together with cream cheese or peanut butter to create little banana bread tea sandwiches. The secret to perfect banana bread is to make sure that the bananas are very, very ripe, black and drippy preferred. 

• 1 ¾ cups flour
• 1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
• ¾ teaspoon salt
• 3 large eggs
• 1 ½ cups sugar
• 1 cup mashed very ripe bananas (2-3 bananas)
• ¾ cup vegetable oil
• cooking spray for the pans

 
Preheat oven to 350° F
 
Special equipment: electric mixer, large mixing bowl, sieve or flour sifter, two 8” x 4” aluminum baking pans (or three 5 ¾” x 3 ½”,) sharp knife or wooden skewer
 
Makes: two 8” x 4” loaves (or three 5 ¾” x 3 ½” loaves)

1. Bring the eggs to room temperature. Spray 2 loaf pans with cooking spray. Beat the eggs, sugar, oil and bananas well in a large bowl with an electric mixer. Make sure that the bananas are thoroughly mashed. Place the flour, soda and salt in a sifter or sieve and sift the flour mixture into the banana mixture. Beat just until incorporated.
2. Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake for 50 minutes for two loaves or 45 minutes for three loaves. Test for doneness by inserting a sharp knife or a wooden skewer into the center of one of the loaves. The bread is done when the knife comes out with no crumbs attached.
3. Serve warm or cool in the pans, remove, wrap tightly in plastic wrap or foil and store at room temperature for up to three days. Banana bread can also be frozen.

​Easter is a moveable feast, like Hanukkah and Passover. This means that these important religious holidays do not occur on the same date every year like Christmas. Instead, a complex system of calculations is used to determine that Easter will fall on the first Sunday after the paschal full moon that occurs on or after the vernal equinox. I’m sure this explanation is crystal clear. There is plenty of information on line for those who want to explore the astronomical occurrences that determine the date of Easter every year. In any case, Easter always falls between March 22 and April 25. This year, Easter will fall on April 16. Some of you will be thinking about your income taxes at that time. A comforting thought is that if you were a poet or other artist in Ireland, you would have to pay no income tax at all because of your invaluable contribution to Irish culture. If only artists in other countries were treasured as they are in the Emerald Isle!
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​Here in Hawaii where I live, the local culture and Polynesian artists, musicians and dancers are very much appreciated, although I do believe that they have to pay taxes like all the rest of us. Almost everyone in Hawaii celebrates Easter, and Easter in the islands is a time to celebrate both traditional culture and European Easter customs imported by the various immigrants who have come to live in this beautiful place. Indeed, Hawaiians have been very generous in adopting cultural celebrations from all over the world. Although the climate here does not include the dramatic shifts from cold to warm that are emphasized in European and mainland American Christmas and Easter customs, the Easter Egg, an ancient symbol of fertility and new life after the bitterly cold winter, is nevertheless the central Easter symbol in Hawaii. Easter egg hunts will take place all over the island, outdoors of course, as will traditional Easter sunrise services.​

​On Oahu, it will not be cold and miserable at dawn on Easter Sunday, and anyone who can get even close to the eastern shore of the island will be able to experience the glorious joy of watching the bright pink sun emerge from the sea, spreading light across the waves and into the soft, balmy sky. Holy Saturday, the night before Easter, is also a lovely time to appreciate Oahu’s natural beauty. Evenings in the islands do not turn chilly as they do in California and many other places on the mainland. Usually the warm, gentle trade winds blow in from the sea at this time of year, and it is breathtaking to watch the full moon emerge from the shifting waves.
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​The weeks before and after Easter are also a time to enjoy traditional Hawaiian cultural activities, including the Prince Kuhio Festival and the Merrie Monarch Festival, spring time events that celebrate ancient Hawaiian chants, music and hula. The Prince Kuhio Festival in late March celebrates the birthday of Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana’ole, Prince of the House of Kalakaua, and March 26 is designated as a state holiday honoring his birth. Fondly referred to as the Citizen Prince, Prince Kuhio, who lived from 1871 to 1922, is revered for making the best of a bad situation following Queen Liliuokalani’s illegal ouster from the throne by a group of American businessmen.  After Hawaii was annexed as a territory by the United States, Prince Kuhio was elected as Delegate from Hawaii to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1902 through 1922 and was instrumental in the passage of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1921, which provides homesteads for Native Hawaiians.
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​The free festival named after Prince Kuhio reflects his devotion to native Hawaiian arts and culture. The events include a parade, Native Hawaiian arts, music, hula and other cultural specialties and of course plenty of aloha and tasty food. It will conclude with a free Hawaiian a cappella singing concert in the historic Kawaiaha’o Church in Hoholulu, featuring many local choruses and choirs, including the University of Hawaii at Manoa Hawaiian Chorus. If you ever happen to be on Oahu during the last week of March, do not miss this authentic celebration of Hawaiian history and culture.​

​The Merrie Monarch Festival, a week-long celebration which begins on Easter Sunday, honors another member of the Hawaiian Royal Family, King David Kalakaua, the last king of the Kingdom of Hawaii, who reigned from 1874 to 1891. King David is appreciated as a patron of the arts, especially Native Hawaiian music and dance, and is remembered for sustaining many endangered Hawaiian traditions, including chant, mythology and medicine. The Merrie Monarch Festival, which takes place in Hilo on the island of Hawaii, includes the most prestigious hula competition in the world and is credited with helping to bring about the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s, which continues to thrive today. ​

​Merrie Monarch events include exhibitions by halau (hula schools) from Hawaii, other Pacific islands, Japan and California, hula competitions for men (kane) and women (wahine,) and performances of modern and traditional hula and chant. Even if you can’t get to the Big Island of Hawaii for this event of worldwide historic and cultural significance, you can watch it on television throughout the Hawaiian Islands. Wayne and I glue ourselves to the television set, mesmerized by the beauty of the chanting and drumming, the elegance of the exquisite hand-made costumes, and most of all the grace and skill of the dancing.

​Since moving to Oahu, Wayne and I have had the honor of spending Easter with the Waiwaiole family, who have been kind enough to “adopt” us since our arrival. This large, multi-cultural family unit of Hawaiian, Portuguese, Japanese, Filipino and “Other” locals, gathers at the home of their octogenarian matriarch, Sylvia, for every holiday, and all of them bring food. The menu is always an eclectic microcosm of Hawaii’s population and the foods enjoyed all over the island. Sylvia herself prepares vinha d’alous (pronounced veenya dosh,) the mandatory main dish for every holiday. This preparation is the popular Portuguese style vinegar-marinated pork that one can order with rice and fried eggs at many coffee shops and pancake houses throughout the islands. Sylvia serves her vinha d’alous with steamed white rice and a huge pot of home-made chicken noodle soup, loaded with boiled eggs, chopped into big chunks. Scrambled eggs are also on the menu, keeping the Easter egg theme alive. Sylvia’s husband Tom makes them in a big electric wok, soft and golden, sprinkled with green spring onions.​

​A daughter-in-law brings home-made potato salad, as there is no such thing as winter food and summer food in Hawaii. Potato salad is always part of the Christmas menu also. Baked yams, fresh pineapple, and even a caprese salad with fresh ripe tomatoes and basil also find their way to the table, along with baked beans and a moist, juicy ham. I have found my niche in the family as the dessert lady, as in general Hawaiians seem to prefer purchasing their desserts at local bakeries or grocery stores. The number one favorite store-bought dessert all over Oahu is Ted’s Chocolate-Haupia Pie. Haupia is the Hawaiian word for coconut, and what could be more luscious than chocolate and coconut in a single cream pie, topped with chilled whipped cream?
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Ted Nakamura, a third generation Japanese Hawaiian, sells these and many other fabulous desserts, like Macadamia Nut Cheesecake, from his family-owned store on the North Shore at Sunset Beach, surfing capital of the world. All sorts of other local foods and snacks are also available at Ted’s to keep the surfers energized, and Ted’s pies are sold in local grocery stores. ​

​Since I know that three or four family members will undoubtedly show up with a Ted’s Pie, I will bring a cake that may not be quite so familiar to the Waiwaiole clan. So far, I have introduced the family to Tres Leches Cake, Danish Pastry Wreath, Spanish Almond Cake, Ellen’s Fabulous Coconut Cake, Lemon Bundt Cake, Texas Sheet Cake, Rum Cake with Caramel Icing, and a variety of other desserts from the mainland and beyond. Most of these can be found on our website, myteaplanner.com. I have been grateful for the enthusiastic responses and encouragement I have received from my adoptive family. Hawaiians are generous with compliments and not shy about eating. This year I plan to bring an Orange Poppy Seed Cake that I have been making for decades from a very old recipe that I adapted from Family Circle Magazine back in 1976. Poppy Seeds do not grow in Hawaii and are not part of the local cuisine, so I may need to make a special trip to Whole Foods in Kailua to find them, but I enjoy introducing desserts that are new to Hawaiians.

​As you plan your family’s Easter meal, I hope you will look at our Easter Tea in the April calendar section of myteaplanner.com. It is filled with spring time delights, including Kathleen’s charming recipes for Hot Cross Buns and Lemon Ring Cookies. I also encourage you to review our Hawaiian Tea in the World of Tea Parties section of our website. We have included a Hawaiian Easter Brunch menu along with the tea party recipes, and you can learn more about Hawaii’s famous coconut pudding, Haupia. You might even find the courage to make your own Chocolate-Haupia cream pie. Meanwhile, I am happy to share Sylvia’s Vinha d’ Alous recipe and my tried and true Orange Poppy Seed Cake.
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​Vinha d’ Alous is a Portuguese pork dish introduced to the Hawaiian Islands by the many Portuguese immigrants who came to Hawaii in the previous century to work in the pineapple and sugar cane fields or to labor as paniolos (Hawaiian cowboys) on the cattle ranches. Hawaiians love pork, and the popularity of this recipe has never diminished. The key ingredients, chunks of boneless pork, vinegar and garlic, become uniquely Hawaiian with the addition of Hawaiian sea salt and Hawaiian red peppers. If you cannot find these small red peppers, try substituting two medium sized jalapenos. You can remove some of the seeds while wearing disposable gloves if you want to control the heat in the marinade. Vinha d’ Alous is easy to make, but you will need plenty of time. The meat needs to marinate for at least twenty-four hours, and cooking the pork requires a two-step process of braising on the stove in a Dutch oven followed by browning, either in a skillet or in the oven. The recipe I offer here, from Hawaii Electric, includes potatoes, cooked in the marinade and browned along with the pork.
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• 6-8 pounds boneless pork butt, cut into 2” chunks
• 2 cups vinegar
• 2 cups sherry or white wine
• 2 cups water
• 2 tablespoons Hawaiian sea salt
• ½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 4 Hawaiian red chili peppers, chopped (Seed the peppers if you are nervous about the heat.)
• 2 bay leaves
• 12 whole cloves
• ½ teaspoon thyme
• ¼ teaspoon sage
• 6 russet potatoes
•  steamed white rice for serving

 
Preheat oven to 350° F (after step #1)
 
Special equipment: sharp knife, potato peeler, disposable gloves, glass measuring cup, large Dutch oven with lid, large roasting pan, large slotted spoon, large bowl or platter for serving
 
Makes: 6-8 servings
 
Cut the pork into 2” square pieces if the butcher has not already done so. Place the pork chunks and all of the marinade ingredients (except the potatoes) in a large Dutch oven and marinate in the refrigerator overnight or up to 24 hours. About 2 hours before serving time, remove the Dutch oven from the refrigerator and braise the pork in the marinade on medium heat for about 1 hour, turning the chunks occasionally.

1. Preheat the oven to 350° F. Using a large pierced spoon, lift the pork chunks out of the marinade and place them in a large roasting pan. Bake for about 30 minutes, until the chunks are brown. Reserve the marinade in the Dutch oven.
2. Peel the potatoes and chop them into medium sized chunks. Place the potato chunks into the marinade in the Dutch oven and cook them for about 30 minutes while the pork is roasting. Remove the potatoes with a slotted spoon and add them to the pork in the roasting pan. Continue cook the pork and the potatoes for another 30 minutes or until very tender.
3. Place the pork and potatoes in a large decorative bowl or platter and serve with steamed white rice.

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This cake has been a favorite Birthday Cake and all-purpose holiday cake in my family for many years, as poppy seeds and oranges span all the seasons. If you wish, you can make it a day in advance, add the orange syrup and store the cake at room temperature under a cake dome or wrapped in plastic wrap to allow the flavors to meld. Add the powdered sugar glaze the day you plan to serve it. You will need about three large, brightly colored navel oranges, as you will require orange zest for the cake and the glaze and orange juice for the glaze and the syrup. This recipe calls for quite a lot of orange zest, but it is entirely up to you how much orange zest you want to add. To serve this cake for Easter, place it on a cake pedestal or decorative plate and surround it with little chocolate Easter egg candies. Chocolate and orange are always happy together.

 
For the cake:

• 1/3 cup poppy seeds
• 1 cup buttermilk, at room temperature
• 2 ½ cups flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• grated zest of 1 orange
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
• 1 ½ cups sugar
• 4 eggs at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 tablespoons sugar, mixed with
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• cooking spray and extra flour for dusting the pan
• pastel colored chocolate covered almond Easter eggs for decoration

 
For the orange syrup:

• ¾ cup fresh orange juice from 2-3 oranges (include the zested orange used for the cake)
• ½ cup sugar

 
For the orange glaze:

• grated zest of 1 orange
• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 1-2 tablespoons fresh orange juice

 
Preheat oven to 350° F
 
Special equipment: 10” angel food cake pan or Bundt pan, 2-cup glass measure, waxed paper, large mixing bowl, medium sized mixing bowl, small bowl or cup, sieve or flour sifter, hand held electric mixer, rubber spatula, measuring spoons, thin knife or wooden skewer, wire rack, oven mitts, citrus zester, citrus juicer, 1-cup measuring cup, fork, decorative serving plate or cake pedestal
 
Makes: One 10”-11” cake, 10-12 servings

1. Spray the angel food cake pan or Bundt pan with cooking spray and dust with flour. Bring the buttermilk, butter and eggs to room temperature. Place the buttermilk in a 2-cup glass measure and stir in the poppy seeds. Set aside. Zest one of the oranges over a large sheet of waxed paper, and set aside. Mix the 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon together in a small bowl or cup and set aside.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt together into a medium sized mixing bowl and set aside. Place the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl and beat with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating for about 1 minute after adding each egg. Beat in the vanilla.
3. Sprinkle the orange zest evenly over the batter and gently stir it in with a rubber spatula. Add the flour mixture alternatively with the buttermilk and poppy seed mixture, in about four batches, beginning and ending with the flour, and mixing on low speed just until each addition is incorporated into the batter.
4. Pour half of the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top with a rubber spatula. Sprinkle the sugar and cinnamon mixture evenly over the batter. Add the remaining batter and smooth the top with the spatula until the batter is evenly distributed. Bake in the pre-heated 350° F oven for about 50 minutes, or until a thin knife or wooden skewer inserted into the center comes out clean.
5. Cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10-15 minutes. Using oven mitts, remove the cake from the angel food pan and place it on a decorative plate or cake pedestal. (If using a Bundt pan, invert the pan over the plate until the cake releases.)
6. While the cake bakes, make the orange syrup: Zest a second orange onto a large piece of waxed paper, and set aside to us the zest in the orange glaze. Wash the 2-cup glass measure and squeeze the oranges. Pour the juice into the measure until you have almost 1 cup of juice. Reserve 2-3 tablespoons of the juice in a small cup. Add ½ cup sugar to the remaining juice; you will have about ¾ cup. Stir and microwave for 30 seconds to 1 minute until the mixture is very hot.
7. After the cake has been removed from the pan, but while it is still warm, poke holes in the top of the cake with a wooden skewer and slowly pour the hot syrup all over the cake. Let the cake cool completely. Wrap or cover with a cake dome until shortly before ready to serve. (The cake can be wrapped and frozen at this point.)
8. Make the glaze: Place 2 cups of packed powdered sugar in a small bowl. Add the reserved orange zest and mix it into the powdered sugar with a fork. Add the reserved orange juice, 1 teaspoon at a time, and stir with the fork until the mixture reaches a thick but pourable consistency. Pour the glaze over the top of the cake, covering the entire top and allowing some of the glaze to drip over the sides. The cake is ready to serve as soon as the glaze has set. Sprinkle small chocolate Easter egg candies (I like the ones with almonds inside) around the cake just before serving.

​Our adventures in Russia concluded in Moscow, the nation’s capital and a city of more than twelve million people. In very chilly weather, we disembarked from our river boat and drove for about two hours past thriving businesses and sturdy brick Stalin-era apartment buildings constructed to withstand the brutal weather. Our destination was the Moscow Metro, a bustling place with walls and interior ceilings decorated with Soviet era art and sculpture. After surviving the Metro’s long and nearly vertical escalators, we continued with a walking tour of about six miles around Moscow’s Red Square and the Kremlin.

​Red Square, a stunning and enormous public area surrounding the Kremlin, was hosting a harvest fair when we arrived. Booths decorated with pumpkins were selling all sorts of snacks, including sausages, meat kabobs, fish in many forms and the ever-popular piroshkies. We also had an awe inspiring up close view of St. Basil’s Cathedral, perhaps Russia’s most famous landmark, occupying one end of Red Square. Built between 1555 and 1560, this magnificent church consists of nine individual chapels constructed on a single foundation and topped by a set of intensely colored domes of varying heights. Commissioned by Russia’s first Tsar, Ivan the Terrible, this unique architectural masterpiece has loosely Byzantine origins but also may be influenced by the style of the domed wooden churches of northern Russia, such as the lovely wooden churches on Kizhi Island. St. Basil’s however, is built of red brick on a white stone foundation. Architectural historians can find no analog in the designs of other Russian churches, and some scholars conjecture that the gilded tin high rising domes, in red white and golden colors, are intended to depict flames rising toward heaven. Others surmise that the green and blue ceramic inserts on the domes suggest the Biblical rainbow.

​Whatever the architects’ intentions, St. Basil’s has captured the imaginations of artists, folklorists, and ordinary people for centuries, even influencing the “castles” at Disneyland. We returned at night for another view of St. Basil’s, and it was even more beautiful in darkness with its flaming domes lighting up the night sky. In ironic contrast, another famous occupant of Red Square is GUM department store, an elegant, over-the-top shopping center that rivals Harrods of London, Mitsukoshi of Tokyo and New York’s Fifth Avenue. We focused on the Food Hall, a massive and decorative array of meats of every kind, including whole cooked pigs, fish and caviar, cheeses, breads, wines and liquor, including Vodka of course, pastries and candies. 

We bought a large bag of assorted Red October chocolates, Russia’s favorite candies. They come in thirty different kinds of flavors and fillings, each individual piece in a bright, artistic wrapping. The most popular Red October candy is Alenka, a milk chocolate whose wrapping depicts an adorable little girl wearing a colorful headscarf. We found Red October candies quite delicious and indeed addictive. The huge six-story red brick factory where these historic candies were made for more than a hundred years is now a museum and trendy visitors’ hot spot. But not to worry; Red October chocolates are still being produced in a modern factory in one of Moscow’s suburbs, and one can even order Red October treats on line at Amazon.

Our walking tour took us from Red Square to the nearby Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a beautiful white church with gleaming golden domes. This massive structure, the tallest Orthodox Christian church in the world, has been completely rebuilt in the Russian Revival style after the original was blown up by the communists. Completed in 1999, the new church is decorated with elegant interior frescos and icons and is a functioning cathedral. On our tour of the interior, lured by the sound of glorious a cappella singing, we tiptoed downstairs to a chapel where mass was just starting. The priest in his gold-embroidered green vestments carried a golden thurible on a chain, spreading incense throughout the chapel as the congregation chanted in unison. We were privileged to witness this numinous, sacred moment.

That evening, we witnessed another example of the Russian love for beauty, reverence and artistic excellence on the highest level. We were treated to a Russian folk music recital by a very talented group of young people who played traditional instruments, many of which I did not recognize. We saw and heard balalaikas, dulcimer-like stringed instruments, an auto-harp or koto-like stringed instrument, accordions, drums and flutes. The performance was delightful, the music beautiful and the musicians obviously accomplished. I only wish I were less ignorant about the history of Russian folk music and traditional instruments.

The next morning, we drove once more past the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, gleaming in the very cold morning sun light, on our way to the Tretyakov Art Gallery to view an impressive collection of Russian art. We saw mostly Eighteenth to Twentieth Century portraits, landscapes, historical and allegorical paintings, but also some very fine icons. Once again I was reminded how tragic it is that Americans, perhaps because of the many years of the Cold War, are taught nothing about Russian art in our public education, and I was again embarrassed by my own ignorance yet determined to learn more. Let me share a brief listing of some of the paintings that seemed to me especially skillful and significant: Alexander Ivanoff’s The Appearance of Christ to the People, a huge canvas which 

The Tretyakov also has a comprehensive and well-presented collection of Russian icons from a variety of time periods and artistic styles. Among my favorites were painted icons of St. John in Patmos, St George and the Dragon, and a mosaic icon of Dmitry of Thessalonica. Subsequent to my visit to the Tretyakov Gallery, I researched all of the paintings mentioned above and other works by Russian artists on line. I encourage everyone to explore Russia’s monumental contribution to Art History. To begin, try googling the Tretyakov Gallery, as not surprisingly, this state owned museum houses the finest collection of Russian art in the world.

We returned to the modern age in the afternoon with a visit to the Cosmonaut Museum. This interesting and accessible museum is located in a pleasant park setting dominated by a large slender titanium obelisk entitled Monument to the Conquerors of Space. This sculptural giant depicting a rocket rising on its exhaust plume was erected in 1964 to celebrate the dawn of the space age, and indeed it was the Russians who first entered outer space. The two-story museum is well designed with a gentle ramp, allowing the disabled as well as the exhausted to view the exhibits on both levels without exertion. The collection included actual space crafts, space suits, part of a rocket that landed on the moon, meteors and even the packaged foods including the dehydrated sour cream that was deemed essential for the Russian cosmonauts to take with them into outer space.

We were startled by the two cute little taxidermy dogs who, while they were alive, were sent into orbit early in the Russian space program and returned safely. The notes on their exhibit assured visitors that both little females subsequently lived long and happy lives prior to becoming museum exhibits. As expected, there was also plenty of information about Yuri Gargarin, the Russian pilot and cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first man in outer space, orbiting the earth aboard the Vostok 1. We were charmed to see that the museum also displayed a collegial attitude toward the American space program with a large photograph of the three American astronauts who were the first to land on the moon, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, who took Apollo 11 to the moon in 1969. And a display in the Cosmonaut Museum admits that Russia has made four attempts to send a manned rocket to the moon, and all four efforts have failed. 

​After an evening of viewing the lights of Moscow from Sparrow Hill, the highest point in the city, enjoying the magnificent architecture of the University of Moscow, and taking in the lights of Red Square and the Kremlin at night by boat in the freezing cold, we had just enough energy for a daytime walking tour of the Kremlin, bitterly cold even in the morning sun. As we know, the word “kremlin” refers to the fortified governmental center of any Russian city, but “The Kremlin” always brings to mind Moscow’s Kremlin, the center of the Russian government. This massive walled area, protected by tall brick guard towers, overlooks the Moskva River to the south, St. Basil’s Cathedral and Red Square to the east and the Alexander Garden to the west. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Center. Occupied by ancient people since the Second Century B.C., the Kremlin now houses four cathedrals, five palaces, museums, government buildings and the official residence of the President of the Russian Federation.

Our tour of the Kremlin took us to two magnificent gold-domed cathedrals, St. Michael Archangel Cathedral and the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also called the Assumption Cathedral. This latter cathedral was founded in 1406 and is filled with gloriously gilded icons covering all of the walls. The crown jewel of the Assumption Cathedral is an especially beautiful Dormition icon, painted in 1479, depicting Jesus and his Apostles calling the Virgin Mary to heaven. The equally beautiful Archangel Michael Cathedral contains a large number of tombs, including the tomb of Ivan the Terrible, Russia’s first Tsar. A little research leads us to conclude that the word “terrible” originally meant “inspiring fear or terror,” so a better title to describe Ivan might be Ivan the Formidable or perhaps even Ivan the Awesome. In any case, these two lovely Cathedrals in the Kremlin were significant in Ivan’s life, as he was crowned first Tsar of All Russia in the Dormition Cathedral in 1547 and buried in St. Michael Archangel in 1584. A fascinating figure in Russian history whose behavior was on occasion terrible, Ivan transformed Russia from a medieval collection of towns and cities to a major empire, symbolized even today by the Kremlin.

In the afternoon of our final day in Russia we visited one of the four buildings of the Pushkin Museum, the one containing a world class collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. Wayne and I both love the Impressionists and have seen excellent exhibits in the Louvre, in Holland, in Japan where the Impressionists are deeply appreciated, and in many other museums elsewhere in Europe and Asia and throughout the United States, but we felt that the Pushkin had an excellent selection by all of the best painters in this genre. Every name in the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist panoply was well represented, including works by Monet depicting a Japanese bridge with waterlilies and Rouen Cathedral, familiar motifs by this most beloved painter. I was also drawn to a deeply colorful and breathtaking painting by van Gough entitled “The Red Vineyard at Arles.” Painted in 1888, legend has it that this beautiful work is the only painting sold by van Gogh during his own lifetime. This painting alone is worth a visit to the Pushkin Museum.

We said a poignant farewell to Russia, a clean and orderly country filled with friendly, hard- working people, good food and a passion for painting, literature, music, dance and folk crafts of the very highest standards. As a concluding thought, I will share with you that while many North Americans have read the works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Chekov, either as college assignments or for personal pleasure, it is the writings of Alexander Pushkin that have captured and remain in the hearts of the Russian people. This poet, novelist, playwright and writer of folk tales of the Romantic era lived only briefly from 1799 to 1837, when he died in a duel defending his wife’s honor. But there are statues of Pushkin all over Russian, and he is loved throughout his native land as the founder of modern Russian literature. I have put Pushkin on my reading list. I think I’ll start with his Fairy Tales, and picture the beautiful Russian countryside as I read them.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with a recipe for Russian Apple Sponge Cake to eat with a cup of Russian Caravan Tea while you are reading Pushkin. This is the cake that we were served in Uglich by Rita the icon artist when we visited her and her husband Vladimir in their home. (See my February 2017 blog, Relishing Russia Part II: Along the Waterways.) It’s also perfectly all right to serve this cake with Irish Breakfast Tea (or even Irish Coffee) at your St. Patrick’s Day party this month, as both the Russians and the Irish live in cold countries where apples are plentiful and everyone loves good literature, good music and good food. Don’t forget that we have a lovely Russian Tea menu as well as a St. Patrick’s Day Tea menu at myteaplanner.com, the Road Back to Civilization. Finally, take a look at Kathleen’s blog this month on Cake Pedestals. This simple yet elegant Apple Cake would look gorgeous served on your best cake pedestal.

​This light, airy cake, filled with chopped apples, is like a little black dress or a navy blazer. It is welcome at any occasion, and its true charm is its simplicity. Called a Sharlotka Cake (Apple Charlotte) in Russia, this pastry is popular throughout the country and can be served at any time of the day, although it is traditional to serve it in the evening with hot tea after dinner. In its simplest form, Apple Sharlotka contains only four ingredients, eggs, sugar, flour and chopped apples, no butter, spices or nuts. Other versions call for the addition of vanilla, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, or even raisins and walnuts. I have chosen the middle road, and include very small amounts of almond extract, nutmeg, lemon juice and salt. A dusting of powdered sugar on top is all an Apple Sharlotka needs, although you could serve this delicious cake with sour cream or vanilla ice cream.
 
Please note that it is difficult to discern when this cake is done, as the batter can remain doughy as it mingles with the chopped apples. Using an oblong glass baking pan will make it easier to see when the cake is fully cooked, but a spring form pan makes a very attractive presentation. You will have to test carefully with a wooden skewer to determine when this cake is done.

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​Preheat oven to 350°F
 
Special equipment: large mixing bowl, 2 medium sized mixing bowls, sifter or sieve, parchment paper, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, electric mixer, citrus juicer, paring knife, wooden spoon, colander, rubber spatula, 10” or 11" spring form pan, (or 13” x 9” glass baking pan) large baking sheet, wooden skewer, wire rack, cake pedestal for presentation

Makes: one 10” cake, 8-12 servings

1. Spray the bottom and sides of a 10” or 11" spring form pan with cooking spray. Line the bottom with a round of parchment paper. Spray the parchment. Place the prepared pan on a foil lined baking sheet and set aside. If using a glass pan or Bundt pan, spray with cooking spray, but do not line with parchment.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and nutmeg into a medium sized bowl and set aside. In another medium sized bowl, mix 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice. Peel and core three apples, one at a time, and cut each apple into very small pieces, adding the apple pieces to the sugar and lemon juice and stirring the mixture with a wooden spoon to coat the apples as you proceed. Cover the bowl of apple pieces with plastic wrap and set aside.
3. Combine the eggs, 1 cup of sugar and almond extract in a large mixing bowl and beat with an electric mixer for about 8 minutes until the mixture is thick, very foamy and light yellow in color. Add the flour, a small amount at a time, to the egg mixture and fold it in with a rubber spatula, using an over and under motion, until no flour is still visible.
4. Place the apple mixture in a colander to drain off the lemon juice. Gently fold the apple pieces into the batter to distribute evenly, and pour the mixture into the prepared pan.  Smooth the top of the cake with a spatula and bake it for approximately 1 hour or more until a wooden skewer comes out clean.
5. Cool on a wire rack for 15 minutes. If using a glass pan, sift powdered sugar over the cake and serve while still warm. If using a spring form pan, remove the cake from the pan, peel off the parchment and place the cake on a cake pedestal or serving plate. Sift powdered sugar over the warm cake.

 
Note: This cake can be served while warm or refrigerated and served chilled or at room temperature.

​We left St. Petersburg with memories of the cold autumn wind blowing through the willows on the Bay of Finland at glorious Peterhof Palace. Under puffy white clouds in pristine but chilly air, we boarded our cruise ship to begin our pilgrimage down Russia’s waterways toward Moscow. During the night we cruised through Lake Ladoga, Europe’s largest lake, apparently with a lot of rocking of the boat. We noticed none of the turbulence and slept like angels (if indeed angels sleep) with images of the luminous gold mosaic icons of St.  Petersburg’s Church of the Spilled Blood floating through our dreams. By morning we were on the gentle Svir River where forests of birch, aspen and pines, all the same height, stood along the banks, the leaves of the aspens and birches turning gold among the deep green and fragrant pines.
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​Our first stopping place was the charmingly reconstructed town of Mandrogy, utterly destroyed during the Second World War and now resurrected as a crafts village with lovely little nineteenth century style wooden buildings where the artists live and work. Visitors can observe the artisans carving or painting the famous Russian nesting dolls, called matryoshka, or “little matrons.” This quintessentially Russian art form was probably introduced from Japan well over a hundred years ago and has found a lasting home. Matryoshkas come in a vast variety of sizes, colors and designs. A set can include as many as ten wooden dolls, carved and hollowed out, with each holding a smaller doll. Each doll is sliced into two pieces horizontally, and the fun in is disassembling each doll to discover another doll within and another and another, each brightly and elaborately decorated and only slightly smaller than the doll in which it nests. Matryoshkas can be appreciated for their aesthetic beauty, but they are also fascinating to children, who love taking them apart and putting them back together again. This process is actually an intriguing learning device, helping children to recognize size contrasts and spatial relationships while enjoying artistic beauty.

Many other local arts and crafts are available in Mandrogy: jewelry made of Baltic amber, lacquered and beautifully decorated papier- mache boxes, elegant linen shawls, scarves and tablecloths, boxes made from birch bark and pottery. One can enjoy the entire town in a single gentle afternoon stroll. Attractions include a Vodka museum, a smithy, horse stables, a mill and a banya, a Russian style steam sauna. There is also a traditional restaurant in Mandrogy, and we discovered that they sell piroshkyies to go at a little counter in the back. A piroshky is a hand pie, similar to an English pasty, and it can be either savory or sweet. We sampled both, as fortunately, the kitchen continued to send out a steady stream of freshly baked piroshkies in a variety of different flavors. Wayne loved his pork piroshky, and I loved my mushroom version. Both were very fresh and delicious. Other available savory flavors included cabbage, cheese or potato. For dessert I had a cherry piroshky, as delicious as the cherry pies of my childhood, and Wayne ordered one called cowberry, which we later learned is another name for lingonberry, a wild fruit which grows in northern climates and is a frequent ingredient in Nordic cooking and baking. It too was fresh, sweet and memorable. One of the Russian guides who worked on our ship told us that she always gets piroshkies when the boat docks in Mandrogy because they are her favorites. We couldn’t disagree.

A cynic might accuse Mandrogy of being a tourist trap, and we would not argue with that assessment, but we found the place utterly charming, a bit like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. The artists were welcoming and gracious, happy to allow the tourists to observe them at their work. And the setting itself, with the authentically constructed wooden buildings surrounded by birch trees, pines, fresh air and the beautiful river, took us back in time to a simpler era when arts and crafts had a dignity and beauty based entirely on the natural world.
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​The larger of the two churches is unheated and is used in summer. The smaller nine-domed church contains a wood stove for winter heating. The churches are made of unpainted horizontal pine logs and share a single plot of land which includes a graveyard filled with Russian style wood crosses. The churches and the cemetery are enclosed by a low stone wall topped by more horizontal pine logs and aspen shingles to keep the cattle and other animals out of the sacred space. 

​The larger summer Church of the Transfiguration was being restored, so we visited the smaller winter Church of the Intercession. Some of the icons, including the large Transfiguration icon from the larger church were on display in the narthex of the smaller winter church. The interior was decorated entirely with rows of icons and horizontal painted wooden panels. Many of the icons contained gold paint which glowed in the cool dim sanctuary. We were struck by the austere beauty of this remote and ancient place. 
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​Only a small human community remains on Kizhi island, caretakers of these exquisite wooden churches, a windmill and the former home of a merchant, his family and his livestock. As our ship sailed away toward Goritzy, near the White Lake, only a few mallards and sea gulls were at the dock to see us off. 
​

On board, we enjoyed a Russian-style Afternoon Tea, presented as a buffet. The menu included hot Russian Breakfast Tea, served from a samovar with lemon and an array of pastries. These sweets included blini with sour cream and jam, an apple tart with custard on the bottom and a cherry tart, both served cold. There was also a spiral poppy seed pastry, doughnut-like treats with jam centers, and rolled, filled coconut and walnut pastries called Piroshnoye. I noted that there were no chocolate desserts of any kind, nor were there any savory items. We learned that although Russians serve bread with every meal, they do not like sandwiches, and do not even consider them food. This may explain the absence of the little sandwiches that are usually served with Afternoon Tea in other cultures.

​On October 4, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, we docked at Goritzy to visit the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, once the largest religious community in Russia. Founded in 1397 by St. Cyril (spelled Kirill in Russian,) by the Seventeenth Century, the complex included two monasteries and eleven churches, protected by thick walls and eight guard towers. This large community became a center of learning and a place of pilgrimage for Tsars, including Ivan the Terrible, a generous donor. The Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery preserved important religious documents and housed an extensive library. In the Eighteenth Century, the monks felt the wrath of Catherine the Great, who confiscated the monastery lands, and in the Twentieth Century, the Bolsheviks closed the monastery and executed many of the monks.

​Today, the monks have returned, the churches are functioning again, and guests are welcome to visit both the churches and the monastery’s museum, all filled with magnificent icons. We arrived in freezing wind and heavy rain, trekking over slippery cobblestones and through chilly puddles, yet the monastery, situated on the bank of the White Lake, was a beautiful beacon, surrounded by marigolds, red salvia and lilac bushes, its glorious green domes calling us through the cold. In the museum we viewed an impressive collection of icons in various styles. We saw a beautiful icon of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, referred to as the Dormition in the Russian tradition, for which the monastery’s Dormition Cathedral is named. We also saw a gorgeous Transfiguration icon and two different icons of the Trinity. The traditional Russian Orthodox iconography for the Trinity depicts the three men (actually the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in disguise) who visited Abraham and Sarah as angelic figures. The other Trinity icon, more like the Roman Catholic version, showed the Father and Son as human-like persons and the Holy Spirit as a dove. We were also invited to visit the church, filled with lighted candles reflecting off the golden icons on the lovely iconostasis. St. Cyril is buried in this church under a beautiful gold sarcophagus.
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​We took a bus ride through the majestic national forest in which the monastery is located. We were told that elk, foxes, bears, eagles and falcons live in this cold, clean northern habitat, but we didn’t see any, just the familiar mallards and sea gulls. The bus took us on to the town of Kuzino, to which our ship had moved in our absence. In the chilly evening back on the boat, we enjoyed a hearty Russian dinner of very good borscht seasoned with a little cumin seed, stuffed cabbage on a beet puree, and a very nice Russian honey cake, sort of like squares of soft graham crackers stacked on top of each other with a honey buttercream filling. Our chef also treated us to a demonstration on how to make Pelmeni, which are little savory dumplings similar to tortellini or perhaps won tons, but served, as is the Russian tradition, with sour cream. If you would like to try making your own Pelmeni, the recipe appears at the end of this blog.
​

​Our next destination was the ancient city of Yaroslavl, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the confluence of the Volga and Kotorosol Rivers. This charming and cultured city was established in 1010 by King Yaroslav to Christianize the “pagans” who lived along the two rivers and worshipped bears. Yaroslavl is home to the oldest theater in Russia, an excellent university and several of the most beautiful churches in the country. The old town center, where these churches are located, is the UNESCO Site. The Church of Saint John the Baptist is justly famous for its fifteen gorgeously glazed onion domes and its seven-story, elegantly designed bell tower. Constructed of carved red brick, this Fifteenth Century masterpiece is considered the pinnacle of the Yaroslavl School of Architecture.
​

​Our final stop before cruising on to Moscow was the interesting town of Uglich on the Volga River. Established in 1148, this lovely city is home to 35,000 people and the magnificent Church of Saint Dmitry on the Blood. This memorial church was built to honor Dmitry, the eight-year-old son of Ivan the Terrible. The church is located on the exact spot where the little boy’s bleeding body was found in 1591, apparently killed by a sword. Numerous versions of the cause of the child’s death still abound, from accidentally falling on his sword during an epileptic seizure to murder by a power hungry member of his own family. The beautiful church named for Dmitry contains frescoes depicting the boy’s murder, gorgeous icons and an ancient bell, the one used to call the locals to arms after the boy’s death was discovered.

​Uglich was once the home of a busy watch factory which employed a large number of skilled jewelers and artisans. Now that the factory has closed, these workers are finding employment in other areas. We had the privilege of visiting one such couple, Vladimir and Rita, in their home, where we were welcomed with generous hospitality. We were greeted by the handsome family dog as we toured the extensive back yard garden where the couple grow their own cabbages and other vegetables for making Borscht. Inside, we were seated around the dining room table with other members of our small group where we were treated to glasses of homemade “moonshine” at nine o’clock in the morning, complemented by dark bread and homemade dill pickles. After three rounds of toasts, Vladimir, who spoke good English, told us about his and his wife’s new occupation as icon artists. With their training as jewelers, they make the silver filigree frames for very elegant icons that are painted by other artists. He showed us an example of one of the finished icons, which would sell for many thousands of dollars. Most of these are being purchased by wealthy Russians who then donate them to the many churches that are being reconstructed after years of religious persecution.
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​Rita served us excellent hot black tea with pieces of lovely apple sponge cake that she had baked that morning. And we learned a little about their domestic life. The couple showed us some charming paintings made by their young daughter. And their cozy home revealed the entire family’s resourcefulness and self-reliance, with stores of homemade jams and pickles in their pantry and jars of dried mushrooms, which they had picked in the nearby forests. Mushrooms are another important staple of Russian cooking. No doubt Vladimir and his family were compensated by Viking, as our visit was a shore excursion sponsored by our cruise ship, but we left with a sense of genuine friendship and cultural exchange. No matter what may be going on in the political worlds of our two giant countries, ordinary people can still share the simple joy of our shared humanity.
​

Our final stop in Uglich before cruising down the Volga to Moscow was a visit to the city’s Kremlin, the Russian word for a major fortified central complex. Situated on the high bank of the river and accessible from an old stone bridge, this ancient gathering area houses Uglich’s Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral. 

​Within the cathedral, we had the opportunity to hear a five-person a cappella choir perform a gloriously beautiful ancient church hymn. The high lyric soprano voice of the young girl, the only female in the group, reflected off the soaring golden walls of the cathedral, an aural complement to the glimmering icons. In another church in the Kremlin complex, now a museum, we heard an a cappella male quartet singing ancient liturgical chants in glorious harmonies.

​We said “goodbye” to the echoing voices and the cold, clear waterways of old Russia as we enjoyed a charming lunch of local foods back on our ship on our way to an even more famous Kremlin and the bustling city of Moscow. Our meal included Marinated Herring with Potatoes, Ucha, a Russian fish soup with potatoes and onions, and the familiar Blini, filled with sweetened cottage cheese and topped with lingonberries. Russian food and the Russian people themselves seemed not at all foreign to us. Russians are people who like to laugh, sing, dance, eat good food and fall in love, just as we do.
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​And speaking of love, Kathleen has reminded us in her February blog that this is the month to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day. While Valentine’s Day is not a traditional Russian holiday, it has come to our attention that many Russians in this post-Bolshevik era enjoy a little romance along with the rest of us, and Russians have been known to celebrate this special day with love letters, poems, flowers, candy and romantic walks in the park. Does this sound familiar? Taking an imaginative leap, I would like to leave you this month with a Russian-inspired Valentine’s Day Lunch menu, including the recipe for the promised Pelmeni. We can find the rest of the items for this menu in myteaplanner.com and in our various blogs. Happy Russian Valentine’s Day!
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​A Russian Valentine’s Day Lunch
Borscht with Pelmeni Garnished with Sour Cream and Dill
(Recipes below)
 
Charlotte’s Marinated Mushrooms
(A Russian Tea, myteaplanner.com)
 
Open-faced Smoked Salmon Sandwiches on Swirled Rye
(A Russian Tea, myteaplanner.com)
 
Charlotte Rousse
(A Russian Tea, myteaplanner.com)
 
Suzi’s Marbled Sugar Cookie Hearts
(Kathleen’s Blog: February 2017, “Valentine’s Day”
 
Russian Caravan Tea and or Vodka
 

Chef Oleg Zagorodnyk of Ha kyxhe restaurant and cooking school in St. Petersburg taught us to make this very delicious and healthy Borscht. We have made it several times since returning home to Hawaii. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.  You can add protein and extra flavor to this already nutrition-packed soup by including freshly cooked Pelmeni, Russian meat dumplings. The recipe for Pelmeni follows.

• 2-3 medium sized beets, greens removed and peeled
• 1 large onion
• 2 medium sized russet potatoes
• 1 small head of cabbage
• 1 large carrot
• 4 tablespoons butter (or use olive oil, but the flavor will not be as good)
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 slice of lemon, peel cut off
• salt and pepper
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 large can (49.5 ounces) chicken broth
• sour cream for garnish
• chopped sprigs of fresh dill for garnish

​Special equipment: large sharp knife, wooden spoon or heat-proof rubber spatula, food grater, large Dutch oven or other cooking pot with lid, ladle
Makes: 6-8 servings

1. Thinly slice the onion, beets and potatoes; then cut them into small julienned pieces. Melt the butter in a large Dutch oven or cooking pot over medium low heat, and add the cut-up vegetables, stirring with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula until the onions start to turn golden.
2. As the vegetables continue to cook, grate the carrot and the cabbage and add them to the pot, stirring to make sure the vegetables do not stick to the bottom and burn. Add a little of the chicken broth if the mixture becomes too dry. Saute the vegetable mixture for about 20 minutes.
3. Season the vegetables in the pot with salt (about 1 teaspoon) and freshly ground pepper to taste and stir. Add the bay leaf. Finely mince 2 cloves of garlic and stir into the vegetable mixture. Cook briefly. Pour the remaining chicken broth into the pot, and bring the soup to a simmer on medium heat.
4. Chop the lemon slice into small pieces and add to the pot. (The purpose of adding lemon is to preserve the bright red color of the beets.) Place the lid on the pot at an angle so steam can escape and simmer on low heat for about half an hour.  Taste the soup and adjust the amount of salt and pepper if you wish.
5. To serve, ladle the Borscht into bowls, top with a dollop of sour cream, and sprinkle each bowl with a little chopped fresh dill. Add Pelmeni to the Borscht if you wish.

​
​Pelmeni
 
These little savory dumplings resemble tortellini or won ton and are delicious boiled and served in soups, like the Italian and Chinese versions. This recipe calls for a meat filling of ground beef, ground pork, onions and garlic. You can also make vegetarian Pelmeni by filling the pasta pockets with a mixture of ricotta cheese, black pepper and chopped chives. These Pelmeni will be boiled and added to a pot of hot Borscht for a hearty Russian lunch.
 
For the Pasta:

• 3 cups flour, plus more for rolling out the pasta
• 2 large eggs
• ¾ cup water
• ¼ teaspoon salt

 
For the Filling:

• ½ pound ground beef
• ½ pound ground pork
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 5 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 2 large egg whites, beaten

 
Garnish:

• Sour cream or
• Melted butter
• Sprigs of dill

 
Special equipment: large mixing bowl, fork, rolling pin, ruler, round 2-inch cookie cutter, medium sized mixing bowl, teaspoon, pastry brush, large cooking pot
 
Makes: 6 servings

1. Make the pasta. In a large bowl, combine 2 cups of the flour, 2 eggs, water and salt. Stir with a fork until the flour is moistened and the eggs have been incorporated into the mixture. Knead, adding the remaining flour, until the dough forms a ball.
2. Transfer the dough to a floured surface and roll it out until it is very thin, about 1/16”. Using a round 2”  cookie cutter, cut the dough into circles. Set aside. Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat.
3. Make the filling as the water comes to a boil. Combine all of the filling ingredients in a medium sized bowl and mix thoroughly with your hands.  Place a teaspoon of the filling in the center of each of the dough circles. Brush the edges with egg white and fold each dumpling in half, pressing the edges to seal.
4. Add the Pelmeni to the boiling water and cook for about 5 minutes until the filling is cooked through. Serve alone topped with sour cream and dill or melted butter, or add to a pot of hot Borscht for a hearty soup.

​Golden Autumn had already settled on St. Petersburg when we arrived in this glorious city at the end of September. The fluttering aspen along the Neva River and the linden trees in the spacious palace grounds were turning yellow; the air was crisp and cool. Our intention was to explore the artistic and culinary riches of St. Petersburg before boarding a river boat and cruising down the Neva, across Lake Ladoga, into the Baltic Waterway and finally down the Volga to Moscow.
 

​Russia’s artistic riches are almost too abundant to fathom. This vast country has produced literature, symphonic music, classical ballet, painting and architecture of the highest order. In addition, Russia’s folk art tradition brings color and depth of meaning to this ancient, diverse and complex culture. Russian folk music, folk dance, fairy tales and hand crafts reveal a dignity and respect for precision, detail and patience that only a culture of scarcity and brutal weather conditions can produce. The creation of icons, which combines, art, craft and ministry, is one of Russia’s greatest contributions to the world, and icons were everywhere to be seen during our time in Russia.
 

​People who have never been to Russia probably know at least one significant fact about St. Petersburg: It is the home of the Hermitage Museum, housing a world class art collection, second only to the Louvre in Paris in size and scope, deposited in five magnificent Classical and Baroque palaces, which are in themselves among the most beautiful buildings in the world. We visited the Hermitage on three separate occasions during our time in St. Petersburg, even touring the warehouse area in a separate location where large items such as entire suites of furniture and elaborately decorated Turkish tents, which are not on display at the museum, are kept. One cannot hope to see even a fraction of the contents of the Hermitage in three visits, but we saw what we could.
 

​And we were grateful that the works of even the world’s greatest artists, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and the other giants, are accessible to every viewer, who can stand right in front of each painting or sculpture and look at it up close, free from plastic shields and security buzzers. In the Gold and Diamond Rooms, of course, the items are displayed in glass cases for obvious reasons. We viewed beautifully worked gold crowns, headdresses, earrings and necklaces, some of very ancient origin, and an overwhelming collection of jewelry, swords and even decorative equipment for horses, encrusted with huge diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, pearls and other precious stones.

​These items belonged to various Tsars and Empresses, most notably Catherine the Great, who owned 15,000 dresses, almost all of which were decorated with jewels and gold embroidery, and many of which are on display in the Hermitage. The Gold and Diamond Rooms, if not the royal palaces, gardens and coaches themselves, are silent testimony to the inevitable necessity of the Russian Revolution. Indeed, the entire city of St.  Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703, is a monument to the excesses of the Baroque Era, beautiful though it was. Peter, whose personality combined equal parts of brilliance and cruelty, was determined to turn the heads of the Russian people away from the ancient Tartar culture and the influence of Turkey and toward France and Holland, whose “modern” ways he admired and envied. In Peter’s view, France was the most advanced and cultured country in the world, and it was through Peter that Russia’s love affair/obsession with all things French began.
 

​We visited Catherine Palace in nearby Pushkin Town, and Peterhof, Peter’s own estate on the Bay of Finland, both designed to outshine Versailles with room after room of gold encrusted carved columns, painted ceilings adorned with more gold, sparkling crystal chandeliers and suites of elaborately carved and gilded furniture. Peter, along with one of his very capable serfs, designed and engineered the complex series of fountains on the grounds of Peterhof, today a magnate for tourists until the winter months when snow and ice prevent the fountains from functioning.
 

​A bit satiated with the Baroque and Rococo glories of Eighteenth Century architecture, we welcomed our afternoon at Ha kyxhe (pronounced na kukchne, meaning “in the kitchen,”) a restaurant and cooking school where chefs Oleg Zagorodnyk and Aly Yakcheev introduced us to the hearty, down to earth charms of Russian cooking. We were greeted by the restaurant cat, a well-fed, fluffy white beauty who keeps the customers entertained while their food is being prepared in the open kitchen. In between cooking seared tuna and grilled vegetables for the lunch crowd, Chef Oleg taught us how to make Borscht, the national soup of Russia.
 

​Borscht is a healthy combination of finely chopped beets, potatoes, cabbage, carrots and onions, sautéed in butter and then simmered for about half an hour in broth, either beef, chicken or vegetable. A little garlic, salt and pepper are added for flavor, along with a slice of chopped lemon (or a little vinegar) to maintain the bright red color of the beets. Borscht is served with a dollop of sour cream and a sprig of fresh dill on top. We ate the Borscht we made with Chef Oleg, and it was beyond delicious. He told us that there are at least thirty different recipes for Borscht in Russia, depending on regional preferences. To make your own Borscht, which makes a perfect lunch along with some dark bread with butter or cheese, check Kathleen’s recipe in “A Russian Tea” in the World of Tea Parties section of myteaplanner.com. Chef Oleg gave Kathleen’s Borscht recipe his seal of approval, although he seemed to think that pureeing the soup after cooking the vegetables turned it into more of a “gourmet” dish. We ate Borscht a few days later on the cruise ship bound for Moscow. The chef on our ship added a little caraway seed to the Borscht, which I thought was quite tasty.
 

​Back at Ha kyxhe, we needed dessert, and Chef Aly taught us to make Blini, which are Russian Crepes. He insisted that a cook should develop a feeling for the correct consistency of the batter rather than measuring the ingredients exactly. Blini batter should resemble heavy cream in texture. The ingredients included flour, a little sugar, a little salt, equal amounts of milk and kefir, a dollop of sour cream, one or two eggs, and a little melted butter. These had to be whisked vigorously in a large mixing bowl with a large wire whisk, not an electric mixer. Chef Aly may be young, but his culinary training is old school. The Blini batter needs to be poured from a ladle into a lightly oiled skillet while one tilts the pan until the entire bottom is covered with a very thin layer of batter. As the Blini cooks briefly over medium heat, the chef watches the edges to see when they start to brown slightly. When this occurs, he picks the Blini up by the edges and flips it over, cooking it for a few more seconds until lightly browned. Somehow, Chef Aly manages this process without burning his fingers; I used disposable gloves to protect my fingertips. Blini should be brushed with melted butter as soon as they are removed from the pan and stacked on a plate until all the batter has been used.
 

​Here is my guess at the ingredient measurements that Chef Aly and I used in preparing our Blini:
 
            2 cups of all-purpose flour
            1 cup milk
            1 cup kefir
            1 rounded tablespoon sour cream
            2 eggs
            1 teaspoon salt
            2-3 tablespoons sugar
            1-2 tablespoons cooking oil or melted butter
            2 tablespoons fresh poppy seeds
 

​Blini can be filled and folded over with savory fillings such as sautéed mushrooms, cheese, chopped cooked meat with fresh herbs, or even caviar and sour cream. Kathleen offers this latter combination in her Blini recipe in our Russian Tea Menu in myteaplanner.com. Kathleen’s Blini, by the way, are made with buckwheat flour, giving them an earthy, rustic quality. At Ha kyxhe, we ate our Blini with sour cream and honey, and Chef Aly added poppy seeds to the batter for some of the Blini to create an extra delicious and quintessentially Russian treat.
 

We learned as our travels continued that sour cream is the essential condiment at every Russian meal, dolloped on top of porridge and fresh fruit for breakfast, into the soup at lunch and on the potatoes, cabbage and meat at dinner time. Later, when touring the Cosmonaut Museum in Moscow, we learned that the Russian Cosmonauts, the first human beings in outer space, were sent on their mission with packages of dehydrated sour cream.

​Before leaving beautiful St. Petersburg, we had two more truly memorable experiences, a visit to the Church of the Spilled Blood, built between 1883 and 1907 to commemorate the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II and an evening performance of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in the Mikhailovsky Theatre. The Mikhailovsky Theatre, built in 1833 on St. Petersburg’s Arts Square, has an elegant Neo-classical exterior. Its interior, however, is a rococo confection with four tiers of box seats along the right and left walls and a charming parterre. The décor imitates a Romanov palace with velvet curtains, swags and chair upholstery, sparkling mirrors and crystal chandeliers and a stunning painted ceiling dome by the Italian artist, Giovanni Busato. Named after the Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich, and built by decree of Tsar Nicholas I, the Mikhailovshy is one of the oldest ballet and opera theaters in Russia.
 

​Our evening with Swan Lake was a delight for the senses and the spirit. The large cast of thirty-six very able dancers, led by Svetlana Bednenko as Odette-Odile and Victor Lebedev as Prince Siegfried, mesmerized us with their virtuosity, artistic sensitivity and warmth while the orchestra, conducted by Pavel Klinichev, brought the magic of Tchaikovsky’s music to life. And the costumes and sets were as gorgeous as the theater itself.
 

​People watching at the Mikhailosky was also a treat. No American style jeans and sweatshirts at the ballet for the Russian gentlemen, and certainly not for the ladies. These ballet attendees were out for a night of glamor in their chic and colorful dresses with just the right sparkling necklace to complete their costumes. They seemed to be channeling Catherine the Great herself! The snacks also fit the occasion and certainly eclipsed the intermission fare we have eaten at American ballet and opera events. Elegant couples snacked and sipped on open-faced caviar sandwiches and champagne, chocolate torte, mini Pavlovas and Napoleons. I noted a charming mother and young daughter, equally stylish in their attire, sitting at a café table where the girl was eating, with perfect table manners, a generous serving of chocolate gelato from a beautifully shaped dessert glass (no Styrofoam cups at the Mikhailovsky!)
 

​It was inspiring to witness the Russian people’s love and appreciation of the ballet for the glorious art form it is. Contemporary Russians also love their churches, and they are meticulously repairing those that were neglected during the soviet era. In some cases, the Russians are completely rebuilding the churches that were simply blown up by soviets in the dark days of religious persecution. Icon artists are also busily at work creating new Icons in both the ancient Byzantine style and in the more Western Realistic style of the French-obsessed Seventeenth century.
 

​The creation of Icons, visual depictions of Biblical events, particularly in the lives of Jesus and Mary, began around 988 when Russia embraced the Orthodox form of Christianity, imported through Greece from the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople. Because Christianity came to Russia from the East rather than from Western Europe, Russian Orthodox churches reflect the Eastern architectural style, which includes a square footprint with one to several onion-shaped domes topped with large gold crosses on the roof. The domes themselves are often covered with gold leaf, and gold leaf is used extensively in the creation of Icons, especially to depict the halos of the saints. Icons typically cover the interior walls of Russian Orthodox churches, especially the iconostasis, a screen with central double doors which separates the nave of the church, where the worshippers stand, from the sanctuary, where the altar is located.
 

​An excellent example of neo-Medieval Russian style church architecture is the Church of the Spilled blood, located on the Griboedov Canal in St. Petersburg. Funded by the Imperial Family and private donors, this magnificent memorial church was built on an old cobblestone road next to the canal on the exact spot where Tsar Alexander II was ambushed and murdered by two terrorists in March of 1881. The church, also referred to as The Church of the Savior on Spilled blood and The Cathedral of the Resurrection, was constructed during the reign of Alexander III. Instead of imitating the Western-style Baroque and Neo-Classical architecture prominent in St. Petersburg at the time, the architect, Alfred Parland, created a church reminiscent of Russia’s Romantic medieval churches such as St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.
 

​The church is constructed of brown bricks, richly decorated with gold exterior mosaics and topped with gold, blue and green onion domes. The interior, however, is the Church of the Spilled Blood’s true glory. All of the walls and the ceiling, including the interior dome, are covered with elaborate and gorgeously created icons depicting significant Biblical events such as the Resurrection of Christ, the namesake of the church. The icon of Christ Pantocrator in the interior dome is breathtaking, but one is nearly overwhelmed by the glorious beauty of all of the shining icons, reflecting the shimmering light from the gold iconostasis illuminated by elaborate chandeliers.
 

​Across the mosaic floor, opposite the sanctuary, is the memorial shrine, built directly over the old cobblestones where Alexander II was mortally wounded. Shaped in the form of a ciborium, a canopy resembling the golden cup used to hold bread for the liturgy, the shrine reminds the visitor not just of bread, but also of blood, both human and divine. The spiritual solemnity of this place echoes everywhere, from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. And the amount of artistic energy, on the very highest level of which human beings are capable, is a gift to the world for all of time. Although The Church of the Spilled Blood was mistreated during the soviet era, it is truly a miracle that it was not destroyed and has survived for anyone who loves beauty to behold.
 

​It is time for us to say goodbye to St. Petersburg, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I plan to share two more blogs with you in the upcoming months as we continue our journey along the waterways. Next month we will Relish Russia in several small and charming cities along the rivers, and the following month we will explore Moscow herself. Until we meet again, enjoy your Borscht and your Blini.
 

​The impulse to offer generous hospitality is one of the most ancient of human motivations. The Greek Classics are filled with stories of kings welcoming strangers from foreign lands with lavish food, wine and companionship. The familiar story of Abraham and his wife Sarah and their three visitors, later revealed to be angels, demonstrates this deeply felt urge to provide food and friendship to those who are away from the comforts of home. Note the tone of urgency as Abraham literally begs his guests to accept his hospitality:
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​The happy ending to this story is that God gives to the elderly and childless Abraham and Sarah, a son, Isaac, as a reward for their generosity and kindness to the three travelers. This priceless gift is also a reward for Abraham’s humility, his willingness to become a servant to the strangers, to put his own ego and status aside to provide food and comfort to those in need.
 

​This spirit of generous hospitality underlies Christmas celebrations throughout the world. Although our culture can certainly be accused of excess and ostentation in our often ridiculous yard and shopping mall displays of lighted Santas, reindeer, snowmen and even cartoon characters as a way of recognizing the season, let us look beneath the glitzy surface to discern a sense of welcome and shared friendship. There is indeed something addictive in the pleasure one derives from providing a little happiness to others, even if that delight is only bright colors and glittering lights. But as we learned from the story of Abraham’s generosity, there is always a deeper meaning embedded in every act of kindness. During this Christmas and Hanukkah Season, we might be wise to keep our judgments and “shoulds” to ourselves and look for the angels in disguise.
 

​I admit that I have succumbed to the heady addiction of getting carried away with holiday hospitality. It started when I was in my twenties, a young wife, mother and college student with no money at all to spend on Christmas gifts. Remembering the powerful childhood magic of Christmas morning when my sister, brother and I woke up to find what seemed to be hundreds of gifts, wrapped in bright colors, spreading out from under the tree in glittering piles, Iwanted to bring the same joy to my family members.
  

​In fact, my parents were not wealthy at all, and our gifts were small and inexpensive, but my parents had generous hearts and were willing to spend their own time and energy to surprise and delight their children. One Christmas, when we were just barely old enough to go to school, my mother stayed up late into the night to sew my brother John a Lone Ranger mask by hand from black velvet. Johnny was thrilled and wore that mask with his red flannel shirt for months as though he really were the Lone Ranger.
 

​I never learned how to sew, but the impulse to make something with my own hands to offer as Christmas gifts almost overpowered me in early adulthood. I couldn’t see any natural talents or artistic skills in myself, and I didn’t even know how to cook, but I turned to the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook that someone gave me when I got married. As it turned out, my love for reading was my hidden talent, and I was able to follow the simple instructions in the cookbook to make cookies and simple candies like fudge. These I wrapped up and gave as gifts to my relatives and friends. Over time, I tried more complex recipes like Banana Bread and Fruitcake, and read with fascination all of the details associated with baking, like greasing and flouring the pans, pre-heating the oven and making sure that all of the ingredients were at room temperature before starting to make the batter.
 

​I made many mistakes and learned from almost all of them. My very kind family members were tolerant and forgiving when my gifts turned out to be overcooked, under baked, or just sort of mediocre. I will always be grateful to them for not criticizing me for my lack of baking expertise, and to this very day, it breaks my heart when I hear people badmouthing a family member’s cooking or belittling any gift which is freely given.
 

​Eventually, I became a pretty good home baker, and I was struck with the idea of hosting a Holiday Dessert Party before Christmas for my family members, friends and even for some of my students. Once this idea took hold, I could not stop myself. I read cooking magazines year-round and saved recipes that seemed to have promise. I started my menu planning in July, writing up lists of possible cakes, pies, puddings, candies and cookies to include. Then I would spend hours picturing how all of the finished desserts would look arranged on the lace table cloth, interspersed with Christmas candles and greenery. I would plan which bowls, platters and dishes to use, making sure to include treasured old plates and bowls I had inherited from my grandmother. I also thought about the various flavors, colors, sizes, shapes, textures and temperatures of the many desserts I wanted to offer and how they would complement each other.

​Then the idea of including international holiday desserts like German Spritz Cookies and Greek Baklava took hold, and I also started researching historic foods like Fruitcake and Plum Pudding. Each year the menu grew larger, and I started creating contrasting pairs such as two pies, two pound cakes, two puddings, two chocolate creations, etc. To manage all of this, I needed to obtain special equipment, such as candy molds, a cookie press and various Bundt and spring form pans, etc. I also had to do long-range planning, figuring out which desserts could be made early and aged, which could be frozen, which could be made the day before the party, and which had to be made just before the guests arrived. I derived hours of pleasure and joy in planning and anticipating my yearly Christmas dessert party, and this process continued for several decades until Wayne and I retired and moved to the small house on the ocean in Hawaii where we now live.
 

​I still bake for every holiday and offer my creations to neighbors and new friends here in Oahu, and I still mail my brother-in-law Rudy Pedulla, a Panforte for his birthday every year. I gave my complete set of Lennox Holiday china to my great-niece Amanda before I moved, and I only miss it a little bit. I still try at least one new recipe every Christmas, and I hope to continue baking as long as I live. I should not have been surprised when my niece, Kathleen Pedulla, suggested that we write a book on Afternoon Tea after I moved here to Hawaii. It has been my joy to share the recipes I have collected over my entire adult life with my readers, especially at Christmas time. I hope you will look at our Christmas Tea in the December calendar section of myteaplanner.com.
 

​As another gift to those of you who love to read, as I do, I recommend a poignant and beautiful Christmas story by the Irish writer, James Joyce, who lived from 1882 to 1941. Although it has the unfortunate title, “The Dead,” it is really a story about the living.  In this complex tale with many hidden meanings, we meet the shy, awkward, and self-conscious protagonist, Gabriel (an angelic person,) who attends a family Christmas party in Dublin with his wife and ultimately discovers the deeper significance of generosity, sacrifice and love. “The Dead” is the final story in Joyce’s famous collection, Dubliners, which should be available in any library.
 

​In this story, Joyce includes a description of the holiday party table prepared by Gabriel’s two elderly aunts. This gorgeous description has always resonated for me as an example of that “impulse to offer generous hospitality” that has motivated Abraham and so many other people of good will over the centuries.
 

​May your holiday table be as festive and hospitable as this fictional feast, written more than a hundred years ago. And finally, I would like to leave you with a composite menu from my many Christmas Dessert Parties over the years and a recipe for a Christmas Cake I plan to bake this year for the first time. In the menu, I have indicated the location in myteaplanner.com where some of the recipes can be found. Merry Christmas to you and your families, and may you always be generous in welcoming the stranger.
 

Aunt Rose’s Holiday Dessert Party
 
Traditional Fruitcakes
Old English Fruitcake with Hard Sauce (An American Southern Tea)
Panforte (An Italian Tea)
 
Pound Cakes
Ellen’s Fabulous Coconut Cake (An American Southern Tea)
Orange Poppy Seed Cake
 
Chocolate Cakes
Queen of California Cake (A California Tea)
Chocolate Biscuit Cake (A Classic British Afternoon Tea)
 
Caramel Cakes
Caramel Toffee Yule Log (A Christmas Tea)
Sticky Date Pudding with Caramel Sauce (A Tea for Our Elders)
 
Yeast Bread and Pastry
German Christmas Stollen
Danish Christmas Wreath (A Christmas Tea)
 
Pies
Lemon Chess Pie (August Family Reunion Tea)
Chocolate Almond Fudge Pie
 
Chilled Molded Desserts
Spiced Apple Gelatin (North American Family Reunion Tea)
Chestnut Bavarian with Chocolate Sauce (A Winter Afternoon Tea)
 
Cheesecakes
Pumpkin Sherry Cheesecake
Chocolate Mocha Cheesecake
 
Chilled Puddings
Christmas Trifle (A Christmas Tea)
Tiramisu
 
Rustic Puddings
Warm Bread Pudding with Lemon Sauce (Afternoon Tea for a Large Group)
Afghan Rice Pudding
 
Steamed Puddings
Steamed Pumpkin Pudding with Candied Cranberries (A Christmas Tea)
Steamed Gingerbread
 
Quick Breads
Lemon Tea Cake (Tea Menu Basics)
Persimmon Bread (Tea Menu Basics)
 
International Pastries
Baklava (A Greek or Middle Eastern Family Reunion Tea)
Madeleines (A French Afternoon Tea)
 
Christmas Cookies
Spritz Cookies (A Christmas Tea)
Orange Ginger Cookies (A Christmas Tea)
Shortbread Cookies (A Classic British Afternoon Tea)
Almond Butter Cookies (A California Tea)
Mexican Wedding Cookies (A Tea to Honor Our Ancestors)
Mexican Chocolate Cookies with Chili (A Tea to Honor Our Ancestors)
Chocolate Chip Cookies (A Tea for Our Elders)
 

 I am fascinated by the idea of a Lemon Fruitcake filled with golden raisins and nuts rather than the usual candied fruits. I found a similar recipe in the November 2004 edition of Gourmet Magazine and have been saving it for several years with the intention of making a few adaptations, adding a rum glaze and baking this cake as a Christmas gift for special friends. The recipe actually makes two large loaf cakes (9” x 5” x 3”,) but you could also make a large Bundt cake and perhaps a small loaf cake with the batter. Note that this cake bakes at a very low temperature for a long time—more than two hours. You will have to make adjustments if you choose to use different sizes of pans. As with all cakes, it is done when a thin knife or a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean, but you will want to start testing a little early if you use smaller pans.

​For the Cake:

• 1 pound golden raisins (3 cups)
• 4 ½ cups (1 pound) chopped toasted almonds
• 3 cups flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 2 cups (4 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 2 cups sugar
• grated rind of 1 lemon
• 6 large eggs, separated and at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 tablespoon warm water
• 1 (one-ounce) bottle pure lemon extract
• cooking spray containing flour
• For the Lemon-Rum glaze
• 2 cups sugar
• ½ cup light corn syrup
• ¾ cup water
• juice of 1 lemon
• 1 cup rum (or orange flavored liqueur)

​Preheat oven to 250° F
 
Special equipment: large mixing bowl, medium sized mixing bowl, small mixing bowl, small bowl, sieve or flour sifter, electric mixer, rubber spatula, aluminum foil, cookie sheet, citrus zester, citrus juicer, 2 (9” x 5” x 3”) loaf pans, parchment paper, thin knife, wooden skewer, 2-3-quart saucepan with lid, wire rack, plastic wrap
 
Makes: 2 large loaf cakes or 1 Bundt cake and 1 smaller loaf
 

1. Toast the chopped almonds in a 350°F oven on a foil lined baking sheet for 10 minutes, until lightly browned, stirring twice to prevent burning. Set aside to cool, and lower the oven temperature to 250° F.
2. Grate the zest from the lemon onto a paper towel and set aside. Squeeze the juice from the lemon and set it aside to use in the glaze. Spray the loaf pans with cooking spray and line with parchment paper. Spray the parchment and set the pans aside. Combine the raisins, lemon zest and nuts in a medium sized mixing bowl and toss with 1 cup of flour until well coated. Set aside.
3. In a small mixing bowl, sift together the remaining 2 cups of flour with ½ teaspoon of salt. Set aside. In a large mixing bowl with an electric mixer, beat the butter until light and fluffy. Add the sugar and beat again until very light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Add the egg yolks and beat until well incorporated.
4. Add the flour and salt mixture at low speed, and beat until just combined. In a small bowl, stir the baking soda into 1 tablespoon of warm water until dissolved. Add the baking soda mixture and the lemon extract to the butter mixture and beat on low speed just until incorporated.
5. Using a rubber spatula, stir in the raisin and nut mixture, including the flour remaining in the bowl, until none of the flour is still visible. Clean and dry the beaters, and beat the egg whites in a clean medium sized bowl until stiff peaks form. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter until the mixture is well combined. (It will be lumpy.)
6. Divide the batter between the two prepared loaf pans and smooth the tops with a rubber spatula. Gently tap the bottoms of the pans against the counter to release any bubbles. Bake until the tops of the cakes are golden and a thin knife inserted into the center of each cake comes out clean, about 2 ¾ hours. When the cakes have almost finished baking, make the glaze.
7. Combine all of the glaze ingredients except the rum in a 2-3-quart saucepan. Stir slowly over medium high heat until the mixture boils. Cover and boil until the mixture is clear and the sugar has dissolved, about 1 minute. Remove the glaze from the heat, uncover and let the mixture stand for 5 minutes. Stir in the rum.
8. Cool the cakes on a wire rack for 10 minutes; carefully remove the cakes from the pans, and remove the parchment. Replace the cakes into the pans, and poke holes into the cakes with a thin wooden skewer. Carefully pour the warm glaze over both cakes and allow them to continue cooling on the wire rack.
9. When the cakes are completely cool, wrap them in plastic wrap and then in foil, and store them in an airtight container at room temperature for up to two weeks or freeze them for one month.  This cake is best when aged for at least one day to allow the flavors to develop.

​Everyone has a reason to be thankful. If you have good food to eat, good health and the ability to pay your bills on time, you are especially fortunate. Most of the people on earth cannot claim all three of these blessings. However, the gift of life is itself a blessing, and many other gifts, such as wisdom, patience, kindness, peace of mind, a sense of humor, the ability to appreciate the beauty of nature, art, music and friendship and especially love are treasures for which we need to be forever grateful. For this reason, Thanksgiving is a holiday truly to be treasured.
​

​Once a year we pause to give thanks, and the symbolic focus of our gratitude is an enormous traditional meal shared with family and friends. For one day we stop worrying about calories and cholesterol, suspend any grudges we may have against our various relatives and share food and friendship with generous hearts. I love Thanksgiving for its simplicity. Nobody goes over the top with decorations or gift giving. There are no special songs to sing or places to go other than the dining room, and of course the satellite tables for the children.
​

​Almost every family serves the same meal every year, and even though we don’t normally eat red Jello with miniature marshmallows, somehow Aunt Juanita’s special red gelatin, molded and surrounded with celery stalks filled with peanut butter, seems really tasty on Thanksgiving. Most of these family menus do contain a few quirky items that have somehow become part of a shared multi-generational tradition. My mother-in-law, Misae, was a great cook and always had a perfectly roasted turkey on the table, but the high point of the Higashi family Thanksgiving meal was her green bean casserole, made with frozen green beans, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and canned onion rings.
 

​My family’s Thanksgiving oddity was boiled eggs in the turkey gravy. This was something my mother, Betty Murdock, always served, and nobody was sure where this custom originated. One year my nephew Mike had the audacity to question the culinary value of eggs in the gravy. His aunts and uncles, including me, shut that little whipper-snapper up quick and fast with a passionate defense of the beauty of a boiled egg, placed in the hole in the middle of a pile of mashed potatoes and covered with gravy. That boy learned his lesson!

​I would like to share our family’s traditional Thanksgiving menu with you. As our mother grew older, we all helped out by bringing a special dish to lighten the load on her. Later, Wayne and I hosted Thanksgiving for several years at our home in Los Gatos, California. It was during this era that Wayne discovered Turducken. This outrageous invention, a whole boned turkey stuffed with a whole boned chicken which itself is stuffed with a whole boned duck, became a huge hit, and fortunately we were able to order the prepared but uncooked Turducken at the local meat market. I have been a vegetarian for more than twenty years, the only vegetarian in either of our extended families. I try not to preach on the subject, and am not fussy. However, cooking meat can trigger a bit of a panic attack, as I don’t want to over-cook, under-cook or generally mess up the meat I am cooking for the people I love.
 

​Turducken is especially nerve wracking, as it needs to be roasted for about fifteen hours at a very low temperature, and it is difficult to discern when it is done. I use a meat thermometer, which doesn’t seem to move for hours on end, and by Thanksgiving morning, after roasting it all night, I’m in a tizzy that the Turducken may not be done by the time the guests arrive. Somehow it has always worked out; everybody loves the Turducken, and there is plenty for our friends and family to take home with them. Sending food home is part of our family’s tradition, and my sister-in-law Joyce has been known to show up with her own Tupperware.
         

​Our menu includes five desserts, six if you include the divine home-made Apple Gelatin, which can be served with the meat along with the Cranberry Ginger Sauce, and later placed on the dessert table where it would pair beautifully with the Gosby House Gingerbread. Other dessert offerings include Pumpkin Praline Pie, Chocolate Pecan Tart, the fabulous Sticky Date Pudding with Caramel Sauce and classic Iced Chocolate Brownies. We are pretty sure that no one at the original Thanksgiving celebration had ever heard of chocolate, as Montezuma’s gift to the world had not yet found its way to Massachusetts. However, we include chocolate in our Thanksgiving feast for friends and family members who cannot face a major holiday, or indeed even an ordinary day, without chocolate. You know who you are, and we are there for you!

Several of the items on our traditional Thanksgiving menu also appear in one of our Afternoon Tea menus on our website myteaplanner.com. I will indicate where those recipes can be found, just in case you are ready to add a new dish to your traditional family Thanksgiving menu. The weekend after Thanksgiving Day, you might want to host an Afternoon Tea for friends and family members who are still in town for the holiday. Check out our November Post-Thanksgiving Tea on myteaplanner.com. Many of the items on the menu make use of Thanksgiving leftovers, like turkey, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls and gingerbread. The Gingerbread Trifle is especially yummy, and if you haven’t made a trifle for a while, take a look at Kathleen’s September 2016 Blog, Cakes and Tea, where she teaches you how to make Pastry Cream and how to construct a Trifle. This way you can keep Thanksgiving going for the whole weekend.

Murdock-Higashi Family Thanksgiving Menu
 
Turducken
Mashed Potatoes
Turducken Gravy with Boiled Eggs
Cranberry Ginger Sauce (recipe follows)
Sage Bread Stuffing (use a package and add extra ingredients)
Wild Rice Dressing (recipe follows)
Steamed White Rice (for the Higashi side of the family)
Creamed Peas (made from scratch by Kathleen’s dad, Rudy)
Sweet Potato Casserole (made by Kathleen brother, Peter)
Macaroni and Cheese (made by cousin Richard’s wife, Connie)
Dinner Rolls and Fresh Bread (provided by my brother, John)
Apple Gelatin (August Family Reunion Tea, myteaplanner.com)
Gosby House Gingerbread (California Tea, myteaplanner.com)
Sticky Date Pudding with Caramel Sauce (A Tea for Our Elders, myteaplanner.com)
Pumpkin Praline Pie (recipe follows)
Chocolate Pecan Tart (Kathleen’s Blog, Cakes and Tea, August, 2016)
Iced Chocolate Brownies (An American Southern Tea, myteaplanner.com)
​

​Many of us grew up eating jellied cranberry sauce from a can on Thanksgiving, but today it is easy to find fresh cranberries at the grocery store and simple to make your own cranberry sauce. My favorite home-made cranberry sauce includes orange juice, orange zest and chopped candied ginger. This zippy tasting sauce can be made a couple of days before Thanksgiving and refrigerated. Leftover sauce is delicious on vanilla ice cream for a festive Cranberry Sundae. Or add some to the Gingerbread Trifle at your Post-Thanksgiving Tea.
 
1 bag (12-16) ounces fresh cranberries, washed
grated zest of 2 oranges
1 cup fresh orange juice (from 2-3 oranges)
1 cup sugar
¼ cup finely chopped candied ginger
 
Special equipment: large sauce pan, wooden spoon, citrus grater, citrus juicer, one-quart glass jar with tightly fitting lid, decorative crystal bowl with spoon and saucer for serving.
 
Makes: about 3 cups
 

1. Place the rinsed cranberries in a large sauce pan, and add the orange zest, orange juice, sugar and chopped candied ginger. Bring to a boil over medium heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the cranberries have started to pop, about 4 minutes.
2. Stir and mash the cranberries with the back of a wooden spoon. Taste the mixture and add up to ¼ cup more sugar, a little at a time, if it tastes too tart. Cool to room temperature; then transfer to a large glass jar with a tightly fitting lid and refrigerate until ready to serve.
3. To serve, pour some of the Cranberry Ginger Sauce into a decorative crystal bowl, and place the bowl on an attractive saucer with a silver soup or jelly spoon. The saucer under the serving bowl will help prevent the Cranberry Ginger Sauce from dripping onto your best holiday tablecloth.

 

Sage Bread Stuffing is one of my favorite Thanksgiving dishes. Sometimes the dressing, also called stuffing, is baked inside the turkey and comes out moist with turkey juices. This does not necessarily work with a Turducken. When we have purchased prepared Turducken, some meat shops put layers of stuffing between the birds that are placed inside each other. Others do not. In any case, there is not much room for stuffing if the birds are already stuffed with another bird. But we still need our holiday dressing. You can make your own and bake it, moistened with chicken broth, in a casserole dish. I take the easy route and buy prepared stuffing mix, which is just dried bread cubes with a few spices added. To this basic mix, I add a large chopped onion and two stalks of chopped celery sautéed in plenty of butter along with about four finely minced sage leaves and a cup or so of sliced fresh mushrooms. I add freshly ground pepper and follow the package directions for the amount of chicken broth to add to the mix. My mother always added oysters to the dressing, and apparently oysters were on the menu of the first Thanksgiving.
 
While I do believe that Sage Bread Stuffing is a key component of the Thanksgiving table, I like this recipe for Wild Rice Dressing even better. Although it takes a while to prepare, it is easy to make and has a very authentic, historic quality with the inclusion of wild rice, familiar to Native Americans, as well as cranberries, herbs and nuts. Why not serve both? If oven space is limited on Thanksgiving, you can prepare the Wild Rice Dressing a day early and store it in the refrigerator in a covered casserole, bring it to room temperature, and rewarm it for about half an hour at 350° F while the Turducken is resting and you are making the gravy.
 
1 pound (16 ounces) wild rice
6 cups of chicken broth (use canned broth for convenience)
2 onions, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
¼ cup flat leaf parsley, stems removed and leaves chopped
4 fresh sage leaves, finely minced
½ cup (1 stick) butter, plus more for buttering the casserole dish
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup dried cranberries
½ cup toasted slivered almonds
 
Preheat oven to 350° F (After the rice is cooked)
 
Special equipment: large cooking pot with lid, wooden spoon, skillet, knife, cutting board, 2-quart casserole with lid
 
Makes: about 12 servings
 

1. Place the wild rice in a cooking pot and add the chicken broth. Bring to a boil on medium high heat. When the mixture starts to boil, turn the heat down to low, cover the pot and simmer for about 1 hour. Check to see if the rice is fully cooked. When the rice is done, remove from the heat and let the rice steam for another 10-20 minutes with the lid on.
2. While the rice cooks, melt the butter in a large skillet and add the chopped onions and celery. Sautee, the vegetables, stirring with a wooden spoon to prevent burning, until the onions begin to wilt and turn golden. Add the parsley and sage, stirring, and continue to stir fry until all of the vegetables are cooked, 10-20 minutes, total.
3. Stir the cooked wild rice and add the cooked vegetables and herbs. Add the cranberries, slivered almonds, salt and pepper, and stir with the wooden spoon until all of the ingredients are thoroughly mixed. Butter the inside of a 2-quart casserole dish and spoon the rice mixture into the casserole. Cover and bake for about 1 hour. Serve immediately or at warm room temperature.

​Pumpkin Pie is an American gem, as necessary for the Thanksgiving dinner as Turkey and Cranberry Sauce. After all, we are pretending to replicate that first Thanksgiving meal shared in 1621 in Plymouth Colony between the Wampanoag native people and the recently arrived immigrant refugees of English ancestry. This first Thanksgiving would have included food that was available in what is now Massachusetts, where wild turkeys, venison, cranberries, pumpkins, squash, corn, walnuts and a lot of shell fish were readily available, though historians suggest that the colonists had not actually gotten around to making cranberry sauce by 1621. Today, it is the spirit of the event, if not the exact menu, that we re-live in our Thanksgiving gatherings, and that includes Pumpkin Pie!
 
For years, I have been making a Southern version of Pumpkin Pie that includes a thin layer of crunchy pecan or almond praline under the spicy pumpkin custard, and my family members have never complained about the historic inaccuracy of this really delicious pie. This recipe makes two nine-inch pies, enough for everyone in the family to have a slice.
 
1 package refrigerated pie crusts, such as Pillsbury
 
For the praline layer:
 
6 tablespoons butter, softened
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
2/3 cup toasted and chopped almonds or pecans
 
For the pumpkin custard:
 
4 large eggs
1 can (15 ounces) pumpkin
1 can (12 ounces) evaporated milk
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
 
To serve with the pies: 1 pint chilled whipping cream, combined with 4 tablespoons powdered sugar and beaten until soft peaks form
 
Preheat oven to 450° F for the praline pie crust layer and 350° F for the pumpkin custard layer
 
Special equipment: medium sized mixing bowl, large mixing bowl, electric mixer, 2 nine-inch pie plates, 2 eight-inch pie plates or tart pans, wire rack, rubber spatula, medium sized decorative bowl and spoon for serving the whipped cream
 
Makes: 2 nine-inch pies, about 16 servings
 

1. Make the praline layer: In a medium sized mixing bowl, combine the butter and brown sugar and beat with an electric mixer until creamy. Stir in the toasted, chopped almonds. Set aside.
2. Prepare the pie crusts according to the package directions, and flute the edges to make an attractive rim. Press half of the praline mixture onto the bottom of each pie crust, using your fingers to make an even layer on both crusts. Place an 8” tart pan or pie plate over the praline layer of each pie crust to prevent the crust from collapsing during baking. Bake the praline-covered crusts at 450°F for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool on wire racks for 10 minutes. Carefully remove the 8” tart pans covering the praline layer. Lower the oven temperature to 350° F.
3. Make the pumpkin custard: In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs lightly; stir in the pumpkin, granulated sugar, brown sugar, salt and pumpkin pie spice. Beat briefly, just to combine. With the mixer on low, slowly beat in the evaporated milk. Scrape the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula.
4. Slowly and carefully, pour the custard over the praline layers in the two cooled pie crusts, dividing the custard evenly between the two pies. Bake the pies for 50 minutes until the centers are set but still soft. Do not overbake, as the custard will continue to set as it cools.
5. Cool the pies on wire racks until they reach room temperature and serve immediately with chilled, softly whipped cream. If you cannot serve the pies immediately, refrigerate them until time for dessert. Whip the cream immediately before serving the pies. Place the whipped cream in a separate, decorative bowl, and let the guests serve themselves.

 

​Autumn in Central Europe is breathtakingly beautiful, and we were fortunate to cruise the Danube from Budapest to Passau and on to Prague just as pears were ripening and chestnuts were falling along the gorgeous old river. Before boarding the riverboat, we spent a few days in Budapest where we stayed at the St. George Residence in the old Castle District, an elegant and tastefully decorated former private home just steps away from the Matthias Church. As we rolled our suitcases into the lobby, Wayne asked the concierge if there was an elevator to our second story room. The man responded, apparently without sarcasm, that this building was seven hundred years old and was constructed before elevators were invented. Up the stairs we went, understanding at last the true meaning of the word “luggage.”

​That evening in the hotel restaurant, we had a lovely dinner of-- what else? Hungarian Goulash! This hearty beef and onion stew, enriched with the deep, earthy flavor and autumnal orange hue of sweet Hungarian paprika, seemed the perfect sustenance for an adventure through ancient places that have witnessed the changing course of human history.  The first venerable place we visited turned out to be one of the most beautiful of our entire journey. Matthias Church, our neighbor in the medieval Buda section of the city, and still an active Catholic parish church, was founded, according to tradition, in 1015 by St. Stephen, King of Hungary. Many significant events have occurred at this church over the centuries. The coronations of several of Hungary’s kings took place here, as well as royal weddings and burials. During the Turkish occupation in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, the church was transformed into a mosque, with geometric and botanical designs in the Islamic style added to the interior walls. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the restoration of the Hungarian Kingdom, the religious treasures that had been sequestered in Bratislava were returned, but much of the Islamic art was allowed to remain. This melding of medieval Christian and Islamic religious art creates a rich and glorious tapestry, stunning to the eyes, as one enters this sacred place.

​Visitors are welcome to tour the Ecclesiastical Art Museum, within the church itself, including the medieval crypt and the St. Stephen Chapel. The second floor gallery houses a memorable collection of sacramental objects and relics as well as an impressive set of replicas of the Hungarian royal crown and coronation jewels. We must not forget that this church is a living place of worship, and Wayne and I had the opportunity to attend a Latin Mass there.  As the service began, the five-manual organ boomed from above with welcoming thunder. Then the ethereal voice of a lyric soprano filtered down from the choir loft like golden snowflakes, accompanied by the delicate strings of a chamber orchestra. At that moment, Plato’s assertion that beauty is always good, and good is always beautiful seemed more true than ever. And when well done, Catholic liturgy is one of the most beautiful living art forms in the world.
 
Many other beautiful moments awaited us in Budapest—the gorgeous Baroque Opera House, the huge castle complex with its medieval Fishermen’s Bastion high above the river, a visit to a charming old thermal bath house filled with bathers young and old, and bakeries overflowing with luscious Hungarian pastries, filled with poppy seeds and apricot jam

​Saying goodbye to beautiful, dignified old Budapest, we boarded our comfortable cruise ship heading upstream as swans glided downstream and fragrant blue spruce trees crowded along the riverbank. Our first stop was Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, a city of great antiquity with a complex history. This medieval wonderland is filled with gothic towers, fortifications, churches, and fortunately, charming pastry shops along the narrow, cobblestoned streets. Continuing up the ethereally lovely Danube, we approached Austria, passing farms with golden cows standing near large round bales of hay bordering the river. In the cool, fresh autumn air, gothic spires and Baroque churches reminded us of the opulence of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs who followed, creating a culture where art, music and beauty reigned for centuries.
 
Vienna, a jewel of a city, greeted us as we disembarked. Here we visited the glorious St. Stephen’s Cathedral and marveled at a Mozart and Strauss concert at the Habsburg Palace. This Baroque architectural masterpiece is home not only to the President of Austria, but to glorious art, furnishing and music, as well as none other than the Lipizzaner Stallions, whose “bedrooms” are in the palace itself. We met these handsome creatures by accident on a walking tour of the city.

​In Vienna we also visited Café Hawelka, one of the city’s grand old coffee houses. Founded in 1939 by Leopold Hawelka, and run by Leopold and his wife Josephine for sixty years, this unassuming little spot became the meeting place for Austrian writers and intellectuals in the Post World War II era. Here coffee, which in Vienna is preferred over tea, is served in the traditional way. Your cup of freshly brewed, strong coffee will arrive on a silver tray, accompanied always by a small glass of water, apparently to indicate the purity of the water with which the coffee was brewed. Pastries are also part of the Viennese coffee house tradition. Café Hawelka, still run by Leopold and Josephine’s son Gunther, specializes in Buchtein desserts, sweet yeast rolls filled with jam or poppy seeds. However, Wayne and I ordered Sacher Torte and Almond Cake, both of which were very fresh and perfectly presented. A Sacher Torte is a light-textured chocolate cake, split into two layers, filled with apricot jam and covered with a rich dark chocolate glaze. It is always served with freshly whipped cream on the side.

​The Sacher Torte is almost as famous as Vienna herself. This delicate cake was developed in 1832 by Franz Sacher, then a sixteen-year-old apprentice baker. Later, his son Eduard perfected the recipe while serving as Pastry Chef at the Demel Bakery and chocolate shop. Eduard established the Hotel Sacher in 1876, where this super star pastry is still available. Eventually, as the fame of the Sacher Torte grew, a passionate seven-year lawsuit over the ownership of the Sacher Torte evolved between the Demel Bakery and the Hotel Sacher, and was not resolved until 1963 with an out of court settlement. Finally, the Hotel Sacher was granted the right to sell the “Original Sachertorte,” while the Demel Bakery was allowed to decorate their torte with a triangular seal that reads, “Eduard-Sacher-Torte.” While the torte we ate at Café Hawelka was neither of these, it was certainly the best plain old Sacher Torte I had ever eaten. For those of you whose curiosity may have been piqued, I have provided you with a recipe for Sacher Torte at the end of this article, along with a menu for a “Coffee and Desserts of the Danube” party which you can host at home.
 
Back on the ship, we cruised through some of the Danube’s most beautiful landscapes where iridescent green-necked mallards floated downstream and dew-covered purple clover glistened in the autumn sunlight. We made brief stops at the beautiful medieval towns of Durnstein and Melk, both worth a visit for their historic and artistic significance. I am embarrassed to say that before this journey, Melk and its magnificent thousand-year-old Benedictine Abbey, was utterly unknown to me. Originally a royal palace perched high on a hill overlooking the river, the entire complex became an abbey in 1089 when Leopold II, Margrave of Austria, gifted it to the Benedictine order of monks. In the Middle Ages, the abbey became famous for its extensive library of manuscripts and its scriptorium where religious documents were laboriously hand written and decorated by the monks. Today, guests can visit the Abbey’s library and museum where a breathtaking collection of religious objects and manuscripts, many depicting liturgical music, are beautifully displayed. Stunned by the library’s treasures, we were nearly overwhelmed by the interior of the Abbey Church, redesigned in the 1700s in the Baroque style and considered one of the finest examples of Baroque architecture in all of Europe. The high, octagonal dome, twin spires, glorious frescoes, all filled with light from the many windows, create a golden glow that literally lifts the heart and leads the eye upward in a celebration of beauty that encompasses all of the senses.

​On to Salzburg, where the Von Trapp family of “The Sound of Music” fame is almost as important at Wolfgang Mozart. Of course we visited the birthplace of our favorite composer, right in the cobblestoned center of the old city. And as fate and good luck would have it, our visit to Salzburg Cathedral coincided with the St. Rupert’s Festival, a delightful old fashioned autumn fair. St. Rupert (660-710,) the Patron Saint of Salzburg, personally helped to lay the foundations of the magnificent Cathedral, and his remains are buried there. His feast day is September 27, and the fair takes place on the weekend closest to that date.

The festival was in full swing right in front of the Cathedral as we arrived. An oompah band was playing, and locals were dressed in dirndls and lieder hosen. A puppet show was in progress, and what is a fair without snacks? We indulged in chocolate covered pretzels with apricot jam, gingerbread, dark chocolate covered almond paste cookies and chocolate covered fruits. We also re-discovered the famous Mozart Chocolates (Original Mozartkugeln,) dark chocolate balls with pistachio and marzipan centers. These little homages to Salzburg’s favorite son are wrapped individually in paper with a colorful picture of Wolfgang himself, all dressed up in his white powdered wig. For those of you who can’t live another day without your own supply of Mozart Chocolates, you can find them on line, and the variety of boxes, wrappings and presentations is staggering.

​Though we hated to leave Mozart’s home town behind, the German city of Passau, which borders on Austria, offers delights of its own. Here we discovered that Passau’s gorgeous St. Stephen’s Cathedral houses one of the largest pipe organs in the world. This ancient church, rebuilt in Baroque style after nearly being destroyed by fire in 1662, stands regally on the highest point of the Old Town, its green onion domes glowing in the misty autumn light. We were grateful to arrive in time for the daily (except Sunday) organ concert and were treated to the sounds of a Bach Fugue with the 17,974 pipes enveloping the magnificent frescoes and stucco works and soaring up to the domes. Bach’s gloriously beautiful Baroque music found its perfect partner in the keyboards and carillons of this treasured Cathedral organ.

​A more down to earth treat was our visit to Simon Confiserie, a wonderland of chocolate and pastry in Passau’s Old Town. Here we were treated to generous samples of chocolates and the local marzipan flavored gingerbread known as Lebkuchen, “Love Cookies” in English. We bought a few packages of Original Passauer Elisen Lebkuchen, but none of them found their way home to share with family and friends. We apologize for our selfishness, but these spicy fruit and nut flavored cookies are truly divine. Elisen Lebkuchen have an interesting history. In the 1300s, monks and nuns started baking them by placing the sticky dough on unconsecrated communion wafers to keep the cookies from sticking to the pans. Contemporary bakers need only line the cookie sheets with parchment, but the edible wafers, known as Back Oblaten, are available from Amazon. Lebkuchen became famous around Nuernberg, which happened to be located on a medieval spice trading route, so the cinnamon, cloves and other “exotic” spices needed for these cookies were readily available. These little treats also contain candied orange and lemon peel and are traditionally topped with chocolate or white powdered sugar glaze and decorated for Christmas with whole almonds. We provide a recipe for Lebkuchen in the Coffee and Desserts of the Danube menu at the end of this article.

​Our last stop was the fascinating old and new city of Prague, a two-hour drive north from the Danube. After being on the river for seven glorious days, we enjoyed the drive through morning mist, pines, autumnal birches and charming family farms. More than a thousand years old, the city of Prague, the historic capital of Bohemia, is also a city on a river—the Vlatva. It is also a vibrant place where visitors can walk throughout the city and enjoy the wonders of the past and the present. There was a crisp, autumnal chill in the air as we set forth on foot to explore the massive Prague Castle complex including St. Vitas Cathedral, a glorious Gothic masterpiece and the most important church in the Czech Republic. Founded in 930 as a Romanesque church, the Gothic Cathedral was begun in 1344, and building continued for 600 years. The high perpendicular vaulting and rose windows are wondrous to behold.

​We also visited Lobkowicz Palace, the only privately owned building in the Castle complex. Here we enjoyed a lovely piano and viola concert in the Palace’s concert hall. Nearby at Villa Richter, we were charmed by an elegant, French influenced lunch in the lovely dining room high on the same hill as the Castle overlooking the beautiful city below.
 
On our final evening in Prague, we treated ourselves to the Mozart Dinner at the Grand Hotel Bohemia, a 1920s era Neo-Baroque extravaganza reminiscent of any number of Hollywood movie sets. In the opulent Boccaccio Hall, we relished our three course dinner from our Balcony Box as a costumed orchestra and opera singers thrilled us with Mozart’s music and arias between each course. Good food and “A Little Night Music.” Our happiness was complete.

​Coffee and Desserts of the Danube
 
More than three hundred years ago, in Vienna and other cities along the Danube, “café society” evolved as an interpersonal and aesthetic experience. Coffee Houses emerged as places where friends could gather to read the local newspapers, listen to a string quartet play the latest by Haydn or Mozart, and discuss art, literature and music. Guests were welcome to linger as long as they wished, savoring perhaps a Kapuziner (cappuccino) or a Kaffee Crème (coffee with a small jug of milk on the side,) along with a pastry such as Apple Strudel or the famous Sacher Torte.
 
Patrons of the arts often opened their own homes as “salons” where like-minded friends might be invited to hear Brahms or Liszt play their own compositions on the family piano as the guests sipped strong black coffee with cream and enjoyed freshly baked pastries. You and your friends can enjoy this Central European version of “Afternoon Tea” in your home. This is the time to use your silver tray, if you have one, to serve the pastries, along with your best china and linens.
If you have a tablecloth with lace, use it, and by all means, play some Baroque, Neoclassical or Romantic era chamber music as the guests arrive. You cannot go wrong with Haydn, Mozart or Brahms.
 
For this gathering, we will forgo the English-inspired sandwich and scone courses and focus solely on Coffee and Pastry to give you time to bake the pastries in the morning. European pastries are always best when they are truly fresh, and the recipes were developed before refrigeration. Genuinely fresh pastries are almost impossible to find in American chain coffee houses where the pastries languish in refrigerated cases for far too long, and yet are sold as “fresh” pastries. Your guests will be astounded at how wonderful fresh European pastries really are. The German and Hungarian cookies on our menu are also divine, and fortunately you can make then the day before your Coffee and Dessert party.
 
Beverages:
 
Strong Dark Coffee with Milk or Cream
Hot Chocolate with Whipped Cream: (Use the recipe for Hot Chocolate in Afternoon Tea for Children in the Afternoon Tea for Special Occasions section of myteaplanner.com and substitute freshly whipped cream for the marshmallows.)
Cherry Flavored Tisane
 
Cookies and Candies:
 
Lebkuchen:  German “Love Cookies”
Kiffles: Hungarian Cream Cheese Cookies with Prune or Apricot Lekvar
Mozart Chocolates (Order on line or purchase at a European import shop.)
 
Pastries:
 
Sacher Torte
Easy Apple Strudel

These cookies are very popular in Germany at Christmas time, but truthfully, they are so good that Germans enjoy them all year round. Lebkuchen are often referred to as “German Gingerbread,” although several of the recipes I researched contain no ginger at all. German purists use a spice mix, similar to Chinese Five Spice, to flavor these cookies. The mix is called Lebkuchengewurz in German, and the version of this mix that we will use does contain some ginger. Traditional Lebkuchen also contain candied orange and lemon peel, but we have opted to include freshly grated orange and lemon peel instead. If you wish to go old school, add about a third of a cup each of finely chopped candied lemon and orange peel to the Lebkuchen batter. You can find a recipe for homemade candied citrus peel in the “In Defense of Fruitcake” section of “A Christmas Tea” in the December calendar section of myteaplanner.com.
 
For the Cookies:
 
2 ¼ cups toasted whole almonds (some bakers prefer to use half hazelnuts and half almonds)
¾ cup granulated sugar
2 ½ teaspoons Lebkuchengewurz Spice Blend
grated zest of 2 oranges
grated zest of 2 lemons
1 ½ cups flour
2 tablespoons Dutch processed cocoa powder
½ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) butter, at room temperature
¾ cup light brown sugar
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
 
For the Lebkuchengewurz (Spice Blend:)
 
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground cloves
½ teaspoon allspice
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon ground coriander
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
½ teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon ground anise seed
 
For the Lemon Powdered Sugar Glaze:
 
1 cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
 
For the Chocolate Glaze:
 
6 ounces bittersweet (or semisweet) chocolate, chopped (or use a 6-ounce bag of chocolate chips)
1 teaspoon coconut oil
whole toasted almonds for decoration
 
Preheat oven to 350° F
 
Special equipment: spice or coffee grinder, small glass jar with tightly fitting lid, food processor, 2 baking sheets, parchment, flour sifter or sieve, medium sized mixing bowl, standing mixer with large bowl and flat beater, rubber spatula, 2 pitcher-style glass measuring cups, 2 teaspoons, wire rack, waxed paper, moisture proof metal cookie boxes with tightly fitting lids
 
Makes: about 30 cookies

1. Make the Lebkuchengewurz: In a spice grinder, grind any of the spices that you have purchased whole, such as cloves and anise seeds. Then combine all of the ground spices in a small glass jar with a tightly fitting lid. Shake to combine and set aside. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment and set aside. Grate the zest from 2 oranges and 2 lemons onto a large sheet of waxed paper and set aside.
2. In a food processor, combine the toasted almonds, granulated sugar and 2 ½ teaspoons of Lebkuchengewurz (Spice Blend) and process until the mixture resembles a fine meal, about 30 seconds. Add the orange and lemon zests and pulse a few times until well combined.
3. Sift the flour, cocoa and salt together in a medium sized bowl. Set aside. Combine the butter and brown sugar in a standing mixer and beat on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, and beat for about 1 minute after each addition, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Add the vanilla and beat briefly until it is incorporated into the batter.
4. At low speed, slowly add the flour mixture and beat only until combined. Scrape the nut mixture into the bowl and beat only until incorporated. Use your hands to roll the dough into balls, about 2 tablespoons of dough per ball, and lay the balls of dough on the prepared baking sheets about 2” apart.
5. Bake until the edges are set and beginning to brown, but the centers are still soft and puffy, about 13-18 minutes. The cookies will have a cracked surface and will look raw between the cracks. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheets for 10 minutes. Then transfer the cookies, still on the parchment, to a wire rack to cool completely.
6. Continue with the remaining dough, placing fresh parchment on the cooled baking sheets. When the cookies have cooled, prepare the glaze: Stir the powdered sugar and lemon juice together in a glass measuring cup until it reaches a spreading consistency. Adjust the amounts of lemon juice or powdered sugar as needed.
7. Combine the chopped chocolate and coconut oil in another glass measuring cup and microwave, 30 seconds at a time, stirring between intervals. When the chocolate has melted, stir until the mixture is smooth. Lay all the Lebkuchen out on a waxed paper-lined work surface, and ice half of them by spreading about 1 teaspoon of lemon glaze over the tops and spreading the glaze over the surface of the cookie with the back of the spoon. Use the same procedure to glaze the rest of the cookies with chocolate icing. Top each cookie with a whole toasted almond.
8. Lebkuchen can be served immediately after glazing or carefully stored for a few days. To store, wait until the glazes are completely dry, and store between sheets of waxed paper in metal cookie boxes with tightly fitting lids. 

These buttery, flaky little Hungarian cookies, called Kiffles, are easily translated into any culture. While our recipe calls for a prune or apricot filling, you could also fill the cookies with apple butter, almond paste or canned poppy seed fillling. The filling, called Lekvar in Hungarian, is really a thick fruit butter, traditionally made communally in large copper cauldrons at autumn harvest time when the fruits are ripe. Lekvar has a very intense fruit flavor, and it needs to be very thick, or it will melt and drip out during baking. We provide you with the recipe for homemade prune or apricot Lekvar, but if you prefer to save time, you can use a good commercial Lekvar such as Solo Prune Cake and Pastry Filling. Solo also makes very good Poppy Seed, Apricot and Raspberry Fillings. Leftover Lekvar is great at breakfast on buttered toast and can also be served in a small container with cheese and crackers.
 
Kiffles are old fashioned, handmade cookies, and it will take time to make them. Start the day before your Coffee and Desserts of the Danube party. Mix the dough and refrigerate it first. Then make the Lekvar while the dough chills. Make sure to schedule enough time for rolling out the dough and filling and shaping each cookie by hand. This process requires patience, but I think you will be happy with the results. These cookies are perfect for people who don’t like overly sweet desserts. The pastry contains no sugar, and the fruit filling, unlike jam, contains only a small amount of brown sugar, allowing the concentrated flavor of the Lekvar to provide the primary pop of natural sweetness to the Kiffles.
 
For the Pastry:
 
2-2 ¼ cups flour, plus additional for rolling the pastry
½ teaspoon salt
1 (8ounce) package cream cheese, softened
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
powdered sugar for dusting
 
For the Lekvar (Prune Filling:)
 
1 ½ cups chopped pitted prunes or chopped dried apricots, lightly packed
2/3 cups water
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/3 cup brown sugar, packed
 
Preheat oven to 375° F (after chilling the dough)
 
Special equipment: large mixing bowl, electric mixer, medium sized mixing bowl, sieve or flour sifter, disposable gloves, rubber spatula, citrus zester, citrus juicer, medium sized saucepan with lid, cutting board, sharp knife, wooden spoon, parchment paper, rolling pin, teaspoon, offset spatula, plastic wrap, 2 baking sheets, waxed paper, small glass jar with lid
 
Makes: Approximately 64 cookies
 

1. Make the pastry: In a large mixing bowl with an electric mixer, beat the butter and cream cheese together until light and fluffy, about four minutes, scraping the bowl with a rubber spatula. Sift the flour and salt together in a medium sized mixing bowl.
2. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in small amounts, and beat briefly after each addition, just until a soft dough forms. The dough should not be sticky. If the dough is too sticky, beat in about ¼ cup of additional flour. Form the dough into a ball, and use a sharp knife to cut the ball into 4 sections. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
3. Make the Lekvar: Combine all of the filling ingredients, except the brown sugar, in a medium sized saucepan, and bring the mixture to a simmer, stirring with a wooden spoon. Turn the temperature down to low, cover the pot, and simmer for 25-30 minutes. Check the pot frequently and stir again, making sure that the fruit mixture does not stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. Add a little more water if necessary.
4. When the mixture is very soft and thick and most of the liquid has been absorbed, remove from the heat and mash with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula. Stir in the brown sugar and mix thoroughly. Cool to room temperature and use immediately or refrigerate until ready to make the Kiffles.
5. Assemble the Kiffles: Place a large sheet of parchment on the work surface and sprinkle it generously with flour. Cover two baking sheets with parchment and set aside. Preheat the oven to 375° F. Remove ¼ of the dough from the refrigerator and roll it out on the floured parchment, to a thickness of ¼”, adding more flour on top of the dough if it sticks to the rolling pin. Try to keep the rolled out dough in the form of a square, about 10”-12.” With a sharp knife, cut the dough into 16 squares. Working with 1 square at a time, add about ½ teaspoon of fruit filling to the center and lift 2 opposite corners over the filling, pressing gently to adhere. Use an offset spatula to lift each filled cookie individually onto the prepared baking sheets.
6. Bake for 12-14 minutes, or until the bottoms are lightly browned, while continuing to roll out, fill, shape and bake the remaining 3 portions of dough, replacing the parchment on the baking sheets for each batch. Cool the cookies briefly on wire racks; then remove the Kiffles, still on the parchment, and sift powdered sugar over them. Serve the cookies immediately, or store them when completely cooled, in air-tight containers between layers of waxed paper. When ready to serve, lightly sift powdered sugar again over the Kiffles. You will have some Lekvar left over. Store it in a small glass jar with a tightly fitting lid and refrigerate. 

A Torte is a Central European style layer cake with some variety of icing or filling between the layers and icing on top. Some, but not all Tortes also contain ground nuts in the cake batter.  As we learned in Vienna, Sacher Torte is a chocolate layer cake filled with apricot jam and iced with a dark chocolate glaze. Two other famous European Tortes are the luscious German Black Forest Torte, a chocolate layer cake sprinkled with Kirschwasser (cherry brandy,) filled with cherry preserves and iced with whipped cream and the gorgeous Hungarian Dobos Torte, a five to seven-layer stunner comprised of layers of golden sponge cake filled with chocolate buttercream and topped with caramel. Sometimes Americans do not appreciate the slightly dry texture of Sacher Torte and other European style cakes that are lightened with egg whites. This is because Americans do not realize that Sacher Torte is always intended to be served with softly whipped cream, which adds moisture and texture contrast to the overall eating experience. Also, good Sacher Torte is brushed all over after it is baked with melted apricot jam to keep the cake moist.
 
For the Cake:
 
4 ½ ounces bittersweet chocolate
9 tablespoons (1 stick+1 tablespoon) butter at room temperature
1 cup powdered sugar
6 large eggs, separated
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ cup granulated sugar
1 cup cake flour
cooking spray to prepare the pan
 
For the Apricot Glaze:
 
One 12-ounce jar apricot jam
3 tablespoons brandy or rum, optional
 
For the Chocolate Icing:
 
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate
½ cup (1 stick) butter
 
1 pint softly whipped cream for serving
 
Preheat oven to 350° F
 
Special equipment: 9” spring form pan, parchment, electric mixer, large mixing bowl, 2 microwaveable glass bowls or measuring cups, one large, rubber spatula, medium sized mixing bowl, small sharp knife, wire rack, long serrated knife, decorative platter or cake stand, blender, pastry brush
 
Makes: one cake, 8-12 servings
 

1. Make the cake: Spray a spring form pan with cooking spray; place a 9” circle of parchment into the bottom of the pan and spray the parchment. Melt 4 ½ ounces of bittersweet chocolate in a glass bowl or measuring cup in the microwave at 30 second intervals, stirring until the chocolate is completely melted and smooth. Set aside. In a large mixing bowl with an electric mixer, beat the butter and powdered sugar until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes.
2. Add the melted chocolate and beat until incorporated; add the egg yolks one at a time, beating after each addition. Beat in the vanilla. Clean the beaters and beat the egg whites with the white sugar in a medium sized bowl until stiff and glossy peaks form. Fold the egg white mixture into the chocolate mixture with a rubber spatula, using an over and under motion, until no white is still visible.
3. Use the same technique to fold the flour into the batter. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top with the rubber spatula. Bake for 35-45 minutes, until a sharp knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Run a small sharp knife between the cake and the inside rim of the pan and remove the sides of the spring form pan. Continue to cool the cake on the pan bottom until completely cool.
4. Remove the pan bottom and the parchment and place the cake on a decorative platter or cake stand. Carefully cut the cake horizontally with a long serrated knife into two layers of equal size. Place the top layer on a sheet of parchment, and remove any crumbs from the platter.
5. Make the Apricot Glaze: Puree the apricot jam and rum in a blender, and pour the mixture into a large glass measuring cup. Microwave for 1-2 minutes until the mixture starts to simmer.
6. Brush the tops and sides of both cake layers with the warm jam. Pour a second layer of jam on the bottom cake layer and spread it evenly.
7. Make the Chocolate Icing: Microwave the 6 ounces of bittersweet chocolate and ½ cup of butter together in a glass measuring cup, stirring at 30 second intervals until the mixture is melted and smooth. Cool briefly until the mixture has a slightly thickened pouring consistency.
8. Assemble the Torte: Carefully place the top cake layer over the bottom layer and press gently to make sure the layers adhere and are aligned. Slowly pour the chocolate icing over the center of the Torte and let it drip over the sides. Make sure that the top is completely covered with icing. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Bring to room temperature before serving.
9. Just before serving the Torte, whip 1 pint of whipping cream with chilled beaters in a chilled, medium sized mixing bowl. To serve, cut the Torte into 8-12 slices and place a large dollop of whipped cream on the plate next to the slice of Torte.

​One afternoon, as we were cruising up the Danube, the Austrian chef on our ship gave us a demonstration on how to make Apple Strudel, a world famous pastry that is available in every town along the river. He even gave us our own printed recipe with detailed directions. This recipe appeared simple enough, a dough made of nothing more than flour, a pinch of salt, a little oil and a little melted butter. The filling also seemed very basic: apple slices, melted butter, cookie crumbs and brown sugar. But when we got to the following paragraph in the directions, I knew I would be in trouble if I tried making Apple Strudel at home:
 
Sprinkle a table cloth with flour. Roll the dough out as thinly as possible on the cloth. Place your hands, stretched out flat, under the dough and draw the dough over the back of your hand so that it becomes thinner and thinner. You will know the dough is ready when the pattern on the table cloth is recognizable through the dough, or when you can read newspaper print through it.
 
It seemed to me that one needed to have learned this “simple” procedure from one’s Austrian grandmother and practiced it several hundred times throughout childhood, under Granny’s doting supervision, to get the knack of it. Sadly, neither of my grandmothers was Austrian, or Hungarian, Slav, German, or Czech, for that matter. For the benefit of my readers, and for my own peace of mind, I have decided to take the coward’s way out and offer a recipe for Easy Apple Strudel, adapted from a very reliable cookbook by Anita Borghese entitled Just Desserts.
This recipe uses packaged phyllo pastry, which is already thin enough to read a newspaper through.
 
One very helpful take away from the chef’s demonstration, however, was the cookie crumbs. These are essential for making really good Apple Strudel. You can use either shortbread-type cookie crumbs, ground up in a food processor, or fine bread crumbs, but don’t leave the crumbs out, as they serve to soak up the apple juice as the pastry bakes, thus keeping the juice from leaking out onto the baking sheet and making a nasty, burned mess of the Strudel. The chef also pointed out that additional ingredients, such as raisins, cinnamon, chopped nuts or grated lemon zest can be added to enhance the flavor of this already delicious pastry. If possible, make the Apple Strudel shortly before your guests arrive so they can enjoy it while it is still warm.
 
1 package of frozen phyllo, thawed but still in the package
3 medium sized, tart apples, peeled, cored and thinly sliced
½ cup light brown sugar
¼ cut chopped, toasted almonds
¼ cup raisins
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
½ cup (1 stick) melted butter
½ cup fine dry bread crumbs or fine cookie crumbs
 
Preheat oven to 400° F
 
Special equipment: medium sized mixing bowl, paring knife, citrus zester, rimmed baking sheet, aluminum foil, damp kitchen towel, pastry brush, cutting board, sharp serrated knife
 
Makes: 6-8 servings
 

1. Toss the apple slices, brown sugar, nuts raisins, cinnamon and lemon zest together in a medium sized bowl. Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil and brush the foil with melted butter.
2. Place a damp kitchen towel on the work surface. Open the package of phyllo and lay 1 sheet on the towel with the long side facing you. Brush with melted butter and sprinkle with bread crumbs. Add a second sheet of phyllo, brush it with melted butter and sprinkle with bread crumbs.
3. Gently spoon the apple filling along the long side of the phyllo nearest you, forming a row of filling about 3 inches wide. Using the long side of the towel to help you, lift the towel, roll the filling-topped phyllo into a roll and place it on the prepared baking sheet, seam side down. Brush the outside of the pastry with melted butter, and tuck in the ends to prevent the filling from leaking out.
4. Bake the Strudel for 20 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 350° F, and bake for another 15 minutes, or until nicely browned. Remove the Strudel from the oven, and cool it briefly on a wire rack. While the Strudel is still warm, remove it from the baking sheet, still on the foil, and transfer it to a cutting board. Using a sharp serrated knife, cut the Strudel into abut 6 portions, each approximately 2” wide. Serve immediately.

Be careful what you put on your bucket list. You might end up visiting a place that feels a lot like staying at home—fifty or sixty years ago. You might find yourself in Australia. For those of you who love nostalgia, “Happy Days” and familiar forms of fun, this giant island continent is the place for you. So channel your inner Fonzie, and off we go.
 
Our adventures in Australia begin in Melbourne, a southern harbor city with a passion for coffee, Asian Fusion food and a raging bar scene. As you rub elbows with the thousands of twenty-something hipsters who pack the upscale waterfront bars, déjà vu could set in and you might start thinking that you’re in Seattle or San Francisco before all those pesky troubles of the world started drawing your attention away from your next pick up line. Wayne and I, who had plenty of good times in San Francisco back in the day, arrived in Melbourne in February—mid-summer—and just as damp and chilly as summertime in the city where Tony Bennet left his heart. We zipped our fleece jackets up over our aloha shirts and set out to see the sights.

​We later lunched at Chin Chin, a trendy Asian Fusion restaurant on the radar of the young urban professional set. The place was so packed we ended up with seats squashed into the waiters’ serving station. One glance around confirmed that we were the only diners over thirty, but we did enjoy the well-seasoned and well-prepared Thai-ish food from the ambitious menu of appetizers, curries, rice and noodle dishes, salads and desserts. Duck, wagyu beef, prawns, and fresh tuna appeared in various preparations, with basil, chili, coconut and lemongrass as the go-to seasonings. Wayne dryly observed that if the proprietors of Chin Chin knew what that phrase meant in colloquial Japanese, they might have chosen a different name for their restaurant.
 
While in Melbourne we also enjoyed lunch at Maha, a lovely contemporary Middle Eastern restaurant located in a basement off a side street, (21 Bond Street.) We chose the six course lunch, which they were happy to prepare as a vegetarian meal for me. Wayne preferred the meat version, which included calamari with saffron and tomato, pomegranate braised beef cheeks, and a duck preparation with pomegranate, cumin roasted carrots, and Persian aged rice with barberries and almonds. I was delighted by the local olives, baba ghanoush (cooked, mashed and flavored eggplant), and smoked hummus. Dessert was a fanciful baklava “cigar” with spiced syrup and honey ice cream. Maha also offers a “Bar Special” lunch that features a pomegranate glazed pork burger, with pickled red cabbage, and coriander peanut butter hummus, served with an Almaza Pilsner beer.
 
Before leaving Melbourne, we visited Gewurzhaus Herb and Spice Merchants (gewurzhaus.com.au) at the massive Queen Victoria Market. At seventeen acres, the Queen Victoria, established in 1878, is the largest open air market in the Southern Hemisphere. After viewing row after row of meats, fish, shellfish and vegetables of every kind, we came upon the Gewurzhaus, a friendly place that sells chocolates and cooking equipment as well as a huge assortment of spices, many imported, but ground and prepared in Melbourne. We purchased little jars of White Truffle Salt and Black Truffle Salt to take home as gifts, and some luscious chocolate bars for ourselves. The Milk Chocolate with Black Truffle Salt has a deep, earthy flavor, and other enticing combinations are available, such as Merlot Salt Dark Chocolate and Chipotle Chili Dark Chocolate.
 
We flew from chilly Melbourne to sweltering Uluru, (previously named Ayer’s Rock,) passing through a time warp into pre-historic Australia. Pre-historic is a European concept, as the indigenous people who held this huge monolithic stone sacred, had chronological memories that went back millennia to the “Dreamtime,” a period of early human civilization before recorded history. Human beings settled around Uluru about 10,000 years ago, and the Pitjantjatjara tribe, with members still living in the area, believes that Uluru was formed by ancestral beings during the Dreamtime.

​Americans treasure the Grand Canyon, and Australians rightly treasure its opposite twin, Uluru, which juts up above the eroded sandstone surrounding it rather than downward through water erosion like the Grand Canyon. When we arrived, the surrounding hot, flat region was bone dry, and there were so many flies buzzing around that we had to wear nets over our faces to prevent the flies from entering our mouths or flying up our noses. Still, the place was hauntingly beautiful, and the red sandstone does shift colors at dawn and dusk. We explored the ancient cave paintings created by the Pitjantjatjara people using natural pigments in red, yellow, orange, gray, black and white. Many of the symbolic designs are circular in nature, and this motif, along with the colors used at Uluru, are still popular with native Australian artists today. 

​As we were admiring Uluru’s rock art, lightning strikes started in the surrounding dry flatlands. Then thunder began to boom. Suddenly a downpour hit Uluru, and torrential rain rushed down the mountain, filling the dry water holes, creating puddles all around the monolith and flooding the area while soaking all of us to the skin. As we lookup up at the sheets of water pouring out of the sky, we were astounded to witness spontaneous waterfalls rushing down all over the surface of Uluru. No harm came to us or to any of Uluru’s visitors that day, and we felt privileged to have experienced what we learned later was the heaviest rainfall on Uluru in thirty years.

Near Cairns we spent an evening at the Tjapukai Aboriginal Culture Center, a bit of a touristy place, but owned by the local Tjapukai tribe and a source of fascinating information about one of the world’s most ancient cultures. In a spirit of good fun, our young hosts and hostesses taught us about indigenous dance, folklore, medicine, cultural values, music and food. A young woman gave a very lucid lecture on the leeching processes used to develop ancient medicines and foods, and a young man gave us a demonstration on the various uses of the boomerang. I was pleased to learn that the boomerang, when used on other human beings, was not intended as a lethal weapon. A competent boomerang thrower could hit a trouble maker in the shoulder with a shot that would disable him for about three months, giving him time to think about adjusting his behavior in the future. 

​We were mesmerized by the digeridoo music played by another young man as we were served a well prepared and tasty meal of local indigenous foods. Some of our meal was baked in a Bayngga Oven, an underground fire pit similar to a Hawaiian Imu. A hardwood fire is lined with Tea Tree bark to which ginger and lemon myrtle leaves are added for flavor. Then hot volcanic stones are placed on top. Meat, yams, fish and eggs, wrapped in leaves are cooked in the oven and served on plates made from candle nut leaves and eaten with the fingers. Kangaroo meat was available for those who wished to try it, as were mussels and prawns and lemongrass-scented tuna. Desserts included a bounty of fresh fruits as well as Davidson plum cheesecake and Lemon Myrtle tarts.

Our whirlwind tour of Australia concluded in Sydney, where we roasted in the blistering heat, even as we explored the famous ship-inspired Opera House and visited the charming one-hundred-year old Toranga Zoo. There we observed Tasmanian devils, echidnas, a platypus, koalas, and lizards and visited the zoo kitchen where all of the animals’ food was prepared. Then we were off to the beach where human Australians like to spend as much time as possible. 

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Undaunted after a sweaty cruise of the harbor, we took a “foodie tour” of some of the local favorites. First we visited P. R. Raineri’s Delicatessen, a happy, family-owned Italian place run by Peter and his wife Sarina for over thirty-five years. We were offered generous samplings of cheeses, antipasto, olives and olive oils. The staff, many of whom seemed to be related, couldn’t have been more welcoming, and Peter’s offers an excellent selection of best quality Italian foods. Then we were off to the Sydney Fish Market where we indulged in Fish and Chips amid a mind-boggling array of every sort of edible sea creature, including lobster-like crustaceans called “bugs” in Australia.
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​We made another stop at a rather quirky place, Harry’s Café de Wheels, a venerable old food truck selling English style savory pies topped with mashed potatoes, mashed peas and brown gravy. Not a light lunch, but Harry’s offered a refreshing whiff of nostalgia and a gentle reminder that food can be fun. 

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​Gelato Messina, our final stop, was more than good fun. It was manna from heaven on a hot summer day when only ice cream will do. Australia’s favorite gelato shop, with four locations in Sydney, offers a stunning array of gelato and sorbet, from the familiar to the innovative. Some of the choices we found especially intriguing were: poached figs in marsala, Italian nougat, milk chocolate with chocolate peanut fudge, salted caramel and white chocolate (the top seller,) dulce de leche and apple pie, and pear and rhubarb. Oh, which to choose?
 
Throughout our travels in Australia, we stopped to visit nature preserves where we had priceless opportunities to interact with this isolated continent’s unique animals. Our final animal experience was at Featherdale Wildlife Park, north of Sydney. Not exactly a zoo, at this park the animals are relatively free to wander as they wish, and the visitors can feed them, pet them and observe them face to face. Here we enjoyed petting the koalas, feeding the kangaroos, wallabies and wombats, admired a rather aloof and regal dingo and marveled at an array of lovely birds, including penguins, cockatoos and owls. We believe that our lives are profoundly enriched by the very presence of these rare animals who share our world.

We cannot leave Australia behind without enjoying Afternoon Tea in this former British colony, now the Commonwealth of Australia. Two of our favorite Afternoon Tea experiences were in Sydney. The first was the Palace Tea Room in the Queen Victoria Building, one of the most beautiful shopping centers in the world. Designed by Scottish architect George McRae and built between 1893 and 1898, this massive, cathedral-like Romanesque Revival structure occupies an entire city block in downtown Sydney. Adorned with columns, arches and a gorgeous central stained glass dome, this unforgettable place has been restored to its original purpose—shopping. Exhausted by wandering from one shop to another, we needed refreshment.

The Palace awaited. This sweet little shop offers a classic British- style Afternoon Tea with seating either inside the Tea Room or out on the galleria. We chose inside seating at a lovely marble table (white tablecloths seem to have disappeared from Australian tea parties.) There was a good tea selection available—Wayne chose Licorice-Ginger, and I had Paris Vanilla Spice, both quite good, and even better because they were served in pretty individual teapots in the Wedgwood Cuckoo pattern, a colorful design of flowers and birds. Two-tiered servers of the same pattern also presented our excellent freshly baked scones with mixed berry jam and just-made sandwiches, which included egg salad, spicy crab salad, and savory “cookie” sandwiches. The generous array of sweets included mocha macarons, chocolate mousse petits fours, very special home-made lime marshmallows, tiny banana cream tarts, and mini vanilla cupcakes with cream cheese icing.

Our second truly memorable Afternoon Tea experience took place at the Cortile Lobby Lounge at the Sydney Intercontinental Hotel on our final day in Australia. This tea was served as a buffet with domed chafing dishes for the warm savory items. There were good fresh sandwiches with not the slightest hint of refrigeration, and waffles as well as scones. The scones were different from any I had ever eaten, not pastry-like but quite delicious. They were baked in the shape of muffins and had the texture of a slightly sweet, dense, cake-like bread. These interesting scones were served with a very thick vanilla bean whipped cream, strawberry jam and Nutella. Lemon slices were available for the tea, which was served in plain white china teapots. We drank very good Green Sencha and Black Darjeeling tea. White cloth napkins accompanied the table setting, but again no tablecloths. A colorful selection of macarons highlighted the sweets table, including black currant with candied violet filling and raspberry with raspberry vanilla filling. Candies and biscotti added to the festive ambience of this generous tea buffet. Even though our adventures in Australia were over, this Afternoon Tea in Sydney did what every Afternoon Tea aims to do. It made us feel, at least for a brief time, that all is right with the world.
 
For those of you not quite ready to let go of that pleasant feeling of wellbeing our time in Australia has evoked, turn to Afternoon Tea for Our Elders in the Special Occasions section of myteaplanner.com. This menu celebrates the classic tea experience and features one of our all-time favorite desserts: Sticky Date Pudding with Caramel Sauce. Another trusted recipe from Gourmet magazine, this 1997 offering from Australia’s island state, Tasmania, produces a rich golden cake, studded with chopped dates and smothered with warm, buttery, home-made caramel topping. In either hemisphere, this tea time favorite will keep us smiling for a very long time.