pie or no one likes change

I have been composing a song, sung to the tune of "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly."

There was a sister who couldn't bake a pie
I don't know why, she couldn't bake a pie,
perhaps she'll cry.

There was a sister who couldn't make the crust,
even her mother grimaced in disgust,
she couldn't make a crust and she couldn't bake a pie,
But I didn't know why she couldn't bake a pie,
Oh Heavy sigh!

You get the idea.

Pie after pie was down right inedible. The best I could muster was passable, probably not poisonous, better than boiled tongue, but would rather have cinnamon toast for dessert.
And pecan pie is my favorite pie and I kept trying.

After the Thanksgiving pie crust debacle I gave up for a while. Then the new year and its 2 month baking moratorium was looming so I decided that I really wanted a pecan pie. The only one I ever make is the cook's illustrated. I decided that in the interest of research, something I'm coming to view as another word for misguided experimentation, I made Dorie Greenspan's pie. Dorie Greenspan is no baking Magus. Some things are wonderful and some things are too sweet or too weird. Her pecan pie was both. The crust, even though I dirtied the food processor to make it, still dripped butter in the floor of the oven and created a smoke emergency. Then I took her advice and put a cookie sheet under the pie pan. While it catches the dripping butter, this direction bewilders me. There isn't supposed to be dripping butter so I'm not sure why she does that. The bottom of the crust was raw. It was nasty and the filling has espresso powder in it, and it was also sort of opaque. The flavor was off-putting and cloying, the nuts were mealy, the crust, as I've said, raw and soggy and too hard where it wasn't raw.
I was despairing. I am the sister who can't bake a pie.
But I had a few more days and I really wanted that pecan pie. So I went back to my favorite recipe. No one likes change, least of all me.
I did the crust in the food processor. I fluted the edges so they stood tall and away from the edge of the pan, well inside the edge of the pan. I prebaked, I glazed and sealed it with an egg yolk, I warmed the filling before pouring it in the crust, I checked for doneness and took it out when it was still jiggling.
I know my sister doesn't like pecan pie. I'll let her tell you why. But this one is sublime. It is everything a pecan pie should be and it is sending me into the baking moratorium on a cloud of sticky gooey sweetness and crunch all tempered with some perfect whipped cream. And I am delighted to be the sister who mostly can't bake a pie, but every now and then produces one that makes up for all the previous disappointments.
If only all my failings came with such a silver cloud.

Stella's cake

Stella has been very lame for a week now. The first visit to the vet yielded a diagnosis of an infected nail bed and a prescription for antibiotics. When these had no effect I called the vet who suggested amputation. I suggested a second opinion.

Today’s second opinion was something of a comedy of errors. I arrived to a waiting room full of nervous dogs and their anxious companions. I think the people actually have it worse, because they feel responsible for the animals and therefore guilty of something. The vet took one look at Stella and requested x-rays. This meant a trip back across the skating rink of a parking lot to the other building. X-rays taken we slid back to the original building. Then back to the x-ray building because the tech had x-rayed the shoulder and wrist, not the paw. Finally back to the examining room again, Stella slipping and sliding on three legs across the ice.

The vet took one look at the x-ray and said the toe has to come off. She showed me the x-ray and I could clearly see that the last digit of the right-most toe was a formless mass. Where the other bones showed crisp lines, clearly delineating flesh from bone, this was a tangled ball of lines and shades. If you had zoomed in on that specific bone it would have looked like a black and white picture of a tangled pile of yarn and pudding.

This could be a result of infection or it could be a tumor. I don’t know if she said cancer, or if I heard it ringing in my head. I know she said biopsy. I know she said that she didn’t know how much of the toe they would have to take.

I know it is unlikely that this will be a serious problem. Most likely the toe will come off and she will limp for a month or so and then be fine. Most likely it is not cancer, or if it is, most likely it hasn’t spread. My last dog Sasha had one eye removed because of cancer and she lived with a marble in the socket and the eyelid stitched closed over it for many years.

But it is the first signal of what I know is to come. The first chill breeze of autumn felt as the summer sun dips behind the mountains. You can see its glow on the other hills but it no longer warms you. I know that someday she will be gone, that I won’t have her soft ears to rub, her constant presence, her eyes always following me, without raising her head. I know that someday she won’t follow me from room to room, limping up and down stairs even though I tell her not too, that I’ll be right back. I tease her about pathological devotion, and once my sister told me that it works both ways.

After crying in the car and crying in the kitchen, I reached for the KitchenAid. I made an orange cake, with grated orange rind and orange oil. As Margaret said, baking is something you can control. It requires concentration but not too much. You know how it will come out. And if it collapses it will still taste good. It made me feel a bit better.

 

if it's not one thing...

Just when we get the recipe right...

 

any excuse to bake

I got a new non-stick bundt pan. I was tired of buttering and flouring and still the cake would stick, at least chunks of it and it seemed like a lot of work for pretty paltry outcome. So I decided that unless I can use parchment paper, it is Pam or non stick for me. I'm fascinated by the silicon pans but also a little troubled and so I haven't bought a silicone bundt pan. I got a regular non stick and I baked the Morning Apple Cake.
This is a cake that I made a hash of a few months ago, but still marked it down as my favorite apple cake.
I followed the directions. OK, I chopped the apples in the food processor instead of grating then and I substituted some brown sugar for white, but other than that, and a little extra salt, I followed the directions. And it baked, and it baked, and it baked. The recipe calls for 1 hour at 325. I went an hour and half, finally got a clean tooth pick and took it out and let it cool in the pan, as instructed.
When it was cool and I turned it out of the pan, it slid right out. A thing of beauty.
I had a piece. It was all but runny in the center. Not a moist cake, a raw cake.
The recipe required me to peel and chop 5 apples and that is time consuming, so now I was mad. Cursing Emily Luchetti and her f&%@ing Stars f!*^ing Desserts, I fell asleep composing the email I might send her, the review I'll give her book on Amazon.
The next day I tried again. And this time, as my sister would say, "I cooked the shit out that fucker!" 2 hours at 375. It was a little less easy coming out of the pan but it emerged intact and the result was a very moist cake with a marvelous apple flavor. You wouldn't serve it to company but you would be delighted to have it around. I'll hold off on reviewing Emily's book.
I wasn't sure if maybe, God Forbid, it was the new shiny slippery pan that was causing the problems. So today I made the Cake Bible pound cake. I've made that often, I know it, I like it, I trust it. The pan was too big, but other than that, it baked that cake just fine and released it when asked.
My bf asked me why I was baking a third cake in as many days and I explained it all to him. He said, "You don't really need an excuse to bake."

expiration dates

I think a note on expiration dates might be in order.
Expiration date refers to safety; shelf life refers to quality. Something about "Shelf life is the recommendation of time that products can be stored, during which the defined quality of a specified proportion of the goods remains acceptable under expected (or specified) conditions of distribution, storage and display." That's from Wikipedia.
But I'm more interested in an individual's interpretation of those numbers.
For something that I really need to work, yeast or baking soda, I'll be pretty strict about the expiration date. Since yeast is a "live thing" I won't use it after e.d., baking soda, I might give it a year.
Anti-inflammatories, I'll go several years. Sugar, honey, chocolate? I don't know, I never reach that date.
Perishable foods, I go less. I had food poisoning once and it instilled in me an excess of caution. Which is what differentiates me from my terrier. He gives himself food poisoning at least once a month eating from the myriad of deer carcasses that hunters leave strewn about. This results in vomiting-- in my car, on my carpet, on the sofa, in my bed, and also diarrhea-- on the carpet, in my shower, on his bed, both, always in the middle of the night. At least once a year, one of those bouts of food poisoning lands him in the hospital on IV fluids. But a week later, still shaky and mournful, he will drag himself down to the now older and even more fetid and putrid carcass and have another go.
The expiration date I pay closest attention to? The date on the bottle of hydrogen peroxide I squirt in the back of his throat to induce vomiting before he can actually poison himself and ruin my night.

Many cultures believe that eating certain foods on New Year's Day brings luck throughout the year. Lentils and other legumes, which look like coins and swell when cooked, are thought to bring financial prosperity. Greens like kale, collards and spinach also symbolize financial good fortune, because of their resemblance to paper money. Pork too, because of its high fat content and richness, is thought to bring prosperity.

I am superstitious. It drives my husband crazy when I grab his hat off the bed, or insist that he put the knife down before I will pick it up. He didn’t grow up with our grandmother, whose Catholic’s belief in the supernatural was not limited to the Holy Ghost. If someone spilled the salt at dinner a snowstorm of salt flew over left shoulders all up and down her long mahogany table.

Combine my inherently superstitious nature with the last 18 months, and it seemed only prudent to begin the New Year by making a lentil soup with the Christmas ham bone, carrots, celery, onions and kale. I found a jar of yellow lentils in the pantry and went to the store for the rest. I was unsure of the exact age of the lentils, though I knew they were Old. Just that morning I threw out a box of gelatin with an expiration date of June 1993. New England thrift also runs deep in this family. How stale can lentils get? You just cook the heck out of them, and they‘ll get soft. It’s not like they taste great anyway, so you aren’t sacrificing any flavor. I didn’t buy Fresh Lentils.

I washed the Old Lentils, added them to the pot with chicken broth, water, some celery and the ham bone. Simmered for about an hour, figuring an extra 15 minutes would compensate for their age, and went to add the carrots and onions. No going. The lentils were crunchy. More simmering. Add more broth. At 8PM we ate leftover ham and broccoli, so at least we got the pork and something green which could at least be said to resemble the color of money.

More simmering. More broth. After two and half hours I added the rest of the vegetables and simmered some more. Finally at 10 o’clock, after three and a half hours of simmering, I turned it off and went to bed.

This morning I pureed the paste and it assumed the texture of quicksand - individually identifiable grains of crunchy lentil suspended in a slurry of lentils, broth and vegetables. I was too disheartened to notice how it tasted.

So my question is – if you plan a special soup to usher in prosperity for the entire year ahead but you make it with old lentils because you are too thrifty/cheap to buy new ones, and the soup sucks, what does that portend for the year ahead? And is it better to eat it or does that further solidify a mode of penuriousness? Should I toss it and start over?

A clue: this morning the realtor called to say that the person who was going to come look at our house had decided not to.

In with a Bang

Lunch:
2 glasses of eggnog
2 turtles