Stories & Soliloquies

Tag: hygge

• A Fairy Tale Feast, Part 1: Apple, Cheddar, Beer and Potato Soup

  Posted at 12:00 pm by michellejoelle, on October 3, 2016

  In any given fairy tale, myth, epic, or story, I am always drawn to descriptions of feasts. Often they come after a long journey or a period of deprivation, and so the welcoming of home and hearth and most importantly, dinner, offer warmth and comfort as well as food. I linger over the descriptions of the offerings on the table, and how good they must seem to the weary travelers in the story. While I do not as yet have my own fairy tale cottage (I dream!), I can make my very own fairy tale feast. Now that Fall is upon us, I’ve decided to share some of my favorite attempts to recreate that cozy feeling.

  So welcome, weary traveler, to the first course in my Fairy Tale Feast: Apple, Cheddar, Ale, and Potato Soup.

  

  The first recipe I want to share is one I’ve modified from an existing recipe for a Slow Cooker Cheesy Beer and Potato Soup from the food blog Baked by Rachel. It looks like a great recipe as is, but I really wanted to include apples, and then I had to rebalance the ingredient quantities to accommodate the change. I also don’t use a slow-cooker, and I don’t imagine a fairy sprite would either, so I had to experiment a little with the execution of the recipe. All quantities are rough measurements based on what I had available, and can be rounded up or down based on what you have on hand.

  Time

  Prep should take about 10 minutes, and cooking time clocks in at a little over an hour, but may vary depending on your heat settings. It requires fairly close attention throughout, however.

  Tools

  • Large pot, stainless steel or cast iron
  • Stick blender, potato masher, or other blending apparatus
  • Cutting board
  • Chefs knife

  Ingredients

  • 4 cups of Butter Potatoes, chopped
  • 1 small-medium apple, small diced
  • 1 medium sweet onion, diced
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 bottle of Honey Brown Ale
  • 2 cups of vegetable or mushroom stock
  • 1.5 tablespoons of a butter
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 7 ounces medium cheddar cheese, shredded
  • salt and pepper

  Directions

  1. First, mise en place. Wash and chop the potatoes, apple, onion, and garlic, and shred the cheese. Cheese en place. I don’t pay too much attention to chopping my ingredients too neatly or with too much precision. When in the land of faerie, embrace the rustico treatment.

  

  2. Next, in a large pot, heat butter on medium heat until melted, then add onions and apples. Cook until the onions are translucent. Then add the garlic, a dash of salt, a dash of pepper, and stir.

  3. Add beer, and bring to a boil.

  

  4. Then add potatoes, and another dash of salt and pepper. Stir, and then bring to a boil again.

  5. Once boiling, add in your vegetable stock. Bring to back to a boil one more time, and then lower the heat. Cover, and let simmer for 40 minutes.

  6. While waiting, clean up the kitchen as much as possible, prep rolls for baking, make a salad to go with your meal, or mingle with weary travelers who have come to you for help on their journey.

  7. When 40 minutes is up, test the potatoes with a fork. They should pierce easily. If they feel hard, let them simmer for a bit more until they’re ready for mashing, then remove from heat for blending.

  8. Blend all ingredients in the pot. I use a stick blender for this purpose, but you could also use a potato masher for a more rustic, handmade feel, or pour the mixture into a regular blender and blend in batches, and then return to the pot when the mixture is mashed/blended into desired texture.

  9. Stir in cheese and heavy cream, and another round of salt and pepper. Cover and let simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, so that the cheese melts in evenly.

  10. Check the texture. Mine looked a little thin at this stage, so I let it simmer for another 5 minutes uncovered to steam off some excess moisture. Also, my rolls needed a few more minutes, so it worked out nicely.

  

  And that’s it! Serve hot and enjoy with a roll, some leafy greens, or a bottle of Honey Brown.

  Check back in a few weeks for the second course in my fairy tale feast, a recipe created in detail by my husband and I: Forager’s Pie.

  Posted in The Waste Book | 9 Comments | Tagged beer, fairy-tale, feast, food, hygge, potato soup, recipe, soup, vegetarian

• Sacramental Imagining Part 1

  Posted at 8:49 am by michellejoelle, on October 28, 2013

  I started this essay after meditating on my preference for writing and reading in environments that are beautiful, natural, majestic, cozy, and old – environments that have texture and history and meaning unto themselves, which smell like old books or pine needles in the rain, with light filtered through stained glass, or a large window overlooking trees or a stream.  There’s likely a significant amount of hygge involved.  Somewhere along the way, I found myself once again returning to the topic of a writer’s responsibility to a reader, and so I’ve decided to break this essay into two parts.  In this first part, I focus on my experience of writing as it is rooted in my physical surroundings.  In part two, I turn my attention to the potential consequences of experiencing writing in this way.

  Part 1: The Writer

  I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to realize this, but I most often get inspired to write at the most inconvenient times.  When I’m at a conference, listening to papers in an historic classroom.  When I’m wandering around on cobblestone streets in a beautiful city.  When I’m hiking by a waterfall in the woods.  When I’m waiting for a train on a rainy day and world feels sad and beautiful.  When I’m out with friends and I’ve just had a fascinating conversation and everything feels just right.  These are the moments when I feel most like writing, and am least prepared to do so.  When I’m at a desk, during work hours, and have all the time in the world, just about nothing comes to mind.

  And it’s always inconvenient, because I like my outdoors environment to be as rustic and un-manicured as possible, and my indoors time to be antique and historic, or else personalized and full of memories.  In short, I like to be in a space that is storied and rich with texture, as opposed to a clean and simple new space meant to limit overstimulation and distraction in favor of efficiency.  I like old things, artful messiness, overgrown gardens, and untouched landscapes.  I like the ruins of an old dock strewn over a tumult of rocks better than white sandy beaches, ancient and outdated libraries with cavernous halls better than sound proof study rooms, and an old chair with too many blankets by a drafty window than a temperature-controlled room with an ergonomic seat.  I read better, and I write better.  Ideas and images come to me here better than when I’m set up properly in a clean or conventional space.

  These are just my personal aesthetic preferences, but realizing how this attunement to my physical environment affects my literary imagination raises some questions about place and imagination that go beyond just my taste.  Reading and writing is supposedly an interior function, allowing us to see with our mind’s eye something utterly different than what is immediately around us.  We’re supposed to soar over our environment to another place by the sheer power of our imagination, guided by words which call ideas to mind that are foreign to our experience and make them ours, pushing aside our present thoughts, feelings, and sensations.  The power of words is supposed to be that they can make us forget who we are and where we are such that we can transcend reality as it is.

  But more and more I discover that my experience of reading and writing is greatly elevated when I am in a place that has something more to offer me than merely what I “need”.  I don’t know if the quality of what I produce improves, but it certainly feels better to me.  I will sacrifice comfort for ambiance because the beauty of a rich environment has a dual function for me: it somehow grounds me in my bodily experience, yet untethers my imagination and sets me free.  While I know that for many this aesthetic experience is not necessary, I think that it adds something an author couldn’t create through pure contemplation.

  For me, writing and reading are best when they are bodily experiences.  The transcendence seems not to be over and out of the body and its present surroundings, but indelibly linked to them.  The transcendence, for me, is not just bodily – it’s sacramental.  The smell of old books and the haze of stained glass windows in the vastness of an old hall do more than make for a pleasant background: they call to my subconscious attention a host of emotions, memories, and influences that seep wordlessly into my imagination, coloring what I see with my mind’s eye, adding depth and richness to my train of thought.  It adds texture to the main voice in my head, which seems like it should succeed best when it drowns all that out, but instead does better when it stands as the tip of an iceberg of sensory experience.  This added texture allows the images to get traction – if they were smooth and clear they would glide right by, merely imparting a fleeting glimpse of a story rather than gripping us utterly and pulling us in, as words are meant to.  As stories are meant to, when you read them, and as I’m finding, when I write them as well.  Underneath the story is, if I’m doing my job right, an unspoken wellspring of unwritten feelings and thoughts and questions and hopes and images.

  Check back next week for part two, where i will explore the reader’s side of the equation.
  Posted in Essays | 0 Comments | Tagged hygge, nature, writing

• The Art of Hygge

  Posted at 12:36 am by michellejoelle, on October 18, 2013

  Hygge sounds like my kind of thing.  It sounds like big breakfasts, and getting snowed in, and the warm glow of Christmas lights.  It sounds like the feeling I continuously try to cultivate in my writing and in my life.

  From Fathomaway.com,

  A love of or need for hygge is an important part of the Danish psyche. Hygge is usually inadequately translated as “coziness.” This is too simplistic: coziness relates to physical surroundings — a jersey can be cozy, or a warm bed — whereas hygge has more to do with people’s behavior towards each other. It is the art of creating intimacy: a sense of comradeship, conviviality, and contentment rolled into one.

  It’s the perfect description.

  Posted in The Waste Book | 1 Comment | Tagged favorite words, hygge

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