You might need light sweaters and some extra calories this weekend if you are going to walk around Chestertown and enjoy the spectacle that is Downrigging Weekend. Your mother was right, and breakfast is still the most important meal of the day, so start it off with something tasty. Keep the pencil shavings and twigs for during the week, and gobble up some hearty apple-sultana cinnamon swirls. Save room for sultana scones, too.
My mother was the odd duck on our block who handed out boxes of raisins on Halloween. Can you imagine the shame? While Mom was imposing her sensible vision of order on the neighborhood, I was dancing from house to house, scarfing up as much forbidden candy as I could get. Other households doled out wonderfully decadent candy bars unknown in our house: Baby Ruths, Butterfingers, $10,000 bars, Dark Hersey bars, Clark bars, and Three Musketeers. Such lavish loot! But I lived in the house where crimson boxes of Sun-Maid raisins were the Halloween treat. My mother could well have been handing out toothbrushes. If she were still alive, she probably would be enthusiastically giving out bags of organically-sourced kale chips to all the little Blueys and sand worms and Hermione Grangers who would have come knocking on her door.
I do not mean to disparage raisins completely, but every once in a while, it seems perfectly reasonable to enjoy a kid holiday; something extraordinary and special. Be kind, and generous, with your little ghosties and ghoulies tonight – let them enjoy to spoils of kid-dom. Go ahead – give out Snickers bars. Tomorrow will be time enough to revert to the healthy and home-baked path to righteousness and good health. And to enjoy the Schooner Sultana and Downrigging. https://downrigging.org There will be tall ships and blue grass music, and all that Chestertown has to offer.
The rest of the world enjoys “sultanas” – we Americans have Thompson seedless raisins. (And, of course, Chestertown enjoys the tall ship Sultana.) Don’t quibble. Bake. You can use raisins, golden raisins, sultanas or currents in these recipes. Raisins and Sultanas
Your kitchen will smell wonderful and autumnal while you are baking apples, raisins and cinnamon. This is excellent preparation for Thanksgiving, which is just around the corner: Sultana Cinnamon Swirls
I just love the mechanics of rolling and cutting the dough for these cinnamon rolls. My children grew up with store-bought, vacuum-sealed Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for special breakfast events. These are better. These are much more delicious, and haven’t been doused in preservatives. Cinnamon Rolls
Of course, Food52 always has good ideas: https://food52.com/recipes/24943-grandma-bercher-s-cinnamon-rolls Have a couple of cinnamon rolls, don your sweater, and take to the Chestertown streets. Watch out for the geese.
The inimitable Mary Berry has a recipe for homemade scones: Mary Berry’s Scones
“We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea – whether it is to sail or to watch it – we are going back from whence we came.”
-John F. Kennedy
Here is a link to all that is happening this year for Downrigging Weekend
Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the
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