Baby, it’s cold outside!

It’s been soul-suckingly cold this week, but not rainy, as you can see. It really is a myth that it rains in Seattle all the time. (But that doesn’t mean you should move here. Seriously…our traffic already sucks.)

So, it was a perfect day to stop in for a steaming bowl of Pho on Capitol Hill, since we needed to go running errands, anyway. We were gathering ingredients for a fruitcake recipe that does not double as a doorstop. We got it out of The Oregonian newspaper way back in 1992, and it’s basically a lot of dried (not candied!) fruit and nuts just barely bound together by a spiced batter, and then soaked in pear brandy for 2-3 weeks. A lot has changed since 1992. Back then, I had trouble finding the wide array of dried fruits called for, so I had to substitute candied for some of them (didn’t help that I was working as a reporter in a teeny tiny town in the middle of eastern Oregon sagebrush-and-cattle country that was sorely lacking in natural food stores or other non-traditional food shopping options). Also, the Clear Creek Distillery pear brandy the recipe calls for cost a LOT less back then. Probably because the distillery was newish, and so was pear brandy, more or less. That’s OK…the recipe is worth it. At least I remember it being worth it.

OK…now back to my regularly scheduled program of studying and paper-writing. Only one more week before final exams!