Thinking about Pie

OK, I’m riffing on a recent post (see below) by a friend, but I found her thoughts with me this afternoon as I made pie dough for this week’s Thanksgiving festivities. As I happily measured and patted the stickiness that I hope to turn into two lovely pumpkin pies, I realized that my pie journey had been a long one and that, while my pastry skills are still just OK (and that I am, in turn, quite OK with OK), both my baking and my life skills have really changed since the dark days of the boxed Jiffy pie crust (baked with love and fun, but zero skill), frozen pie crusts (just yuck), and the gloppy par-baked goo that went right into the trash (looking back, no love for pie or self in that mess).

I have learned that making pie requires achieving some minimal inner peace and an acceptance of oneself. For me, I needed to accept my own imperfections, acknowledge I needed help, ask for that help, and then trust my own hands and instincts to make it happen. At the same time, I had to learn that pie dough is not perfection, a ragged mess might actually be a step in the right direction, mistakes can be fixed, and – at the end of the day – it’s just a pie crust.

Regardless of what experts will tell you about baking being a science (and it normally is), to make a pie crust, you need to surrender yourself to the Pastry Gods, take a breath, and go with what feels right, even if it doesn’t seem so at the time.

Here’s hoping that the lovely round discs in the fridge will turn into something tender and flaky for Thanksgiving.

For much more eloquent recent pie musings than mine:

Zen pie by Love and Onions -
My friend and pie teacher becomes the student.

GIVE THANKS! Caramel Mascarpone Pumpkin Pie by Confections of a (Closet) Master Baker
This will certainly be next year’s pumpkin pie filling attempt. Super-detailed photos and notes on from a professional baker on her version of pie dough take a lot of the mystery out of the process.

Sautéed Honey Bananas

Faced with a number of bananas that appeared shortly before dinnertime (see previous post on the largesse of neighbors), I was inspired to make up come for dessert. I got to thinking back to my childhood and to fried or honey bananas, something a bit like this.

Dessert in restaurants was always special – our family might have eaten out often, but dessert was not a regular part of our dining experience. Once in a while, when I was truly lucky, we ate at a fancier-than-some Chinese restaurant and could order the banana dessert. I don’t remember its name, or really much more than that the bananas were fried, perhaps shocked in cold water, and coated in some very sticky honey. The insides were warm and gooey; the outsides were crisp and sweet. And my chocolate-preferring little self loved every fruity bite.

Without the energy to research this childhood treat, I threw some items together to make sautéed honey bananas:

Melt some butter in a non-stick frying pan, perhaps a tablespoon.
Let it melt (but I bet brown butter would be awesome).
Add a good amount of honey, a little cinnamon, and a smidge of nutmeg.
Let it all heat into a gooey sauce.
Add some halved and quartered bananas, heat them through for about 5 minutes and turn them to coat.
Serve warm in a bowl. Or over ice cream. Or under ice cream that’s been topped with homemade chocolate sauce…
Enjoy.

Banana Nut Muffins

Long-awaited rainy day. Quiet with a kid off to a birthday party, and here I am avoiding most of the to-do list. Perhaps because of the bananas. A neighbor bought 40 (yes, 4-0, forty) pounds of bananas the other day for $2. We graciously accepted some of her frugal bounty.

Two days later, we've had banana-yogurt smoothies and sautéed honey bananas. And another pound still sat on the kitchen counter, begging to be useful. Well… there’s always the peel, freeze, and forget about them option.

Cool, wet weather and quiet afternoons tend to make me think about baking. For some reason, muffins have been on my mind. And then I thought, OK, muffins are quick and easy.

Presto! What I did with my weekend:

This recipe can be found in the Joy of Cooking as Banana-Nut Muffins. For giggles, I swapped out the AP flour for whole wheat pastry flour and the walnuts for toasted pecans. And since 3 people cannot (should not?) eat a dozen muffins within 24 hours, I used vegetable oil and baked in muffin liners to keep them a moist for at least a day or two. Leftovers will be frozen and, hopefully, not forgotten.

First Quarter Results

Sad fact: since going back to work, I sometimes think of my life in terms of fiscal years and quarters.

This year will end with my saying good-bye to my thirties and hello to whatever’s next. I have decided to take inspiration from myself – for a change – to celebrate my getting to the next birthday milestone. In the last year-and-a-half, I have more or less figured out the work-family balance and the kid-family balance and the PTA-volunteerism-balance and a few other balances that make sense for our family. Nowhere in there is a family-work-ME balance.

And so, slowly, 2012 will be a little bit about trying harder to find the time to do things for myself, be they for my health or sanity or sheer entertainment.

Approaching the end of the Q1, I have a list of what I’d like to do and some tentative results.

In no particular order:

1. Get a physical
2. Get a massage and facial
3. Get another massage. And maybe another facial...
4. Figure out how to bake a chewy chocolate cookies
5. Find a dermatologist and make appointment
6. Get a mammogram
7. Exercise more
8. Tweak my hair cut and color
9. Finally read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and the Hunger Games
10. Get a second opinion on my eyesight, or lack thereof
11. Get away for a girls’ weekend

Results are in, and I have knocked off items 1 and 2, have concrete plans for 11, and am working on 7. Not too shabby, I think!

Wherein we revisit my 2010 resolutions...

Hmmm...happy March!

Sometime in January, I belatedly thought to address my little note about why I even started this little blog.

So, here I am now, adding this little update for 2012: Still cooking, cleaning much less, exploring more via internet than anywhere else, but always attempting to nurture my family and trying to figure out when and how to say "no" to some of the demands on all of us.

I think the idea, two years ago, was to take some time for myself and explore what I do, try new things (like blogging and knitting), and maybe share it with a few interested parties.

I can report the knitting as a complete bust, but I am more mindful of cooking and trying new projects in the kitchen. And that the blog isn't complete, totally dead. Yet.

Falling...

Once again, I had the best intentions of adding my small voice to the world o' blogs. I was all set to talk about the bounty of our summer CSA boxes:

Then I thought about the fall harvest:

And now I'm in the midst of Thanksgiving cooking and Christmas plans!

Mulling what to do next...

Helicopters don't fly... they just beat the air into submission

For some reason, this blog has morphed into one about cooking, mostly. Yet part of my life, my job, my day-to-day is also parenting. In making a home for my family, being a Mom is probably my first and last concern every day. That said, this Slate article has been making the rounds on Facebook and elsewhere. It links back to both a 1979 checklist of first grade readiness and another blog post on Free-Range Kids. As the parent of a first-grader, these posts really made me think.

Can your child meet 10 out of the 12 criteria for 1979 readiness? We were doing great

4. Can he draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored?

until

8. Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend's home?

And thus the rounds on the internet...

No. My child cannot "travel alone in the neighborhood" and never has. And no one would expect it of either of us. But it did make me think that maybe, in being there all the time for our kids, we're all a little too "there."

I firmly believe that raising a child means helping him or her grow into a responsible adult who can go out into world with the self-knowledge, confidence, and basic skills to make good choices and function well. "Socialization" has been my watch-word since our first trip to the playground. And this list showed me that the standards used to be a lot lower. (Come on - first graders are reading chapter books and drawing with perspective now!) Yet some of those important, basic, SOCIAL skills were mastered much earlier.

So I am reminded that, sometimes, being there means taking a big step back and letting go. Not that I'm going to be the only mom the in neighborhood who doesn't walk her child to and from the bus stop (a school no-no)...but I'll think about it.

Summer Kuchen

Once again, an abundance of summer fruits called to me and inspired to me to just do something already with them. This time, I had plums, peaches and still more blueberries. Since I have not mastered savory fruit dishes, my mind turned to baking... even with the record-setting 100+ degree heat we’d been suffering.

The cake itself is somewhat closer to a Tortenboden – a tart crust – than an American yellow or pound cake. It’s a bit dry and crusty, relying on the sweet juiciness of the fruit to make it all work. However, calling it cake seems so much more accessible and summery than a torte. You can bake this in a regular cake pan and plunk the fruit right on top of the batter without any need for fancy tart pans and glazes or neatly arranged fruit pieces.

The original version of the recipe called for peaches, but any combination of your favorite summer fruit will do. I tweaked it a bit to soften and sweeten my fruit ahead of baking and to up the nuttiness of the cake. My cake may have been a bit drier than the original recipe, but it worked well. And leftovers became even more moist as the cake absorbed the fruit juices. At the same time, the almond flavor was more pronounced a day later, tasting a little like marzipan. If you don’t have almonds in the pantry, it is fine to use 1 cup of all purpose flour.

Served with a lightly sweetened, loose whipped cream, this is absolutely perfect and harkens back to all kinds of childhood memories of summertime and the endless wait for the grown-ups to decide it was time for Kaffee und Kuchen.

Summer Kuchen
Adapted from The Joy of Cooking’s “Fresh Fruit Kuchen”

You will need:
• A 9” round cake pan and butter to grease it.
• ¾ cup AP flour + ¼ cup ground almonds
• 1 ½ tsp baking powder
• 1/8 tsp salt (1/4 tsp if using kosher salt)
• 1 tsp + a dash of cinnamon
• 8 tbsp (1 stick) of unsalted butter, room temperature
• ¾ cup + 1 tbsp sugar
• 2 eggs, room temperature
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/8 tsp almond extract
• 2 to 2 ½ cups fruit (peeled and sliced if necessary)

Move one oven rack to lower third of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees.

Liberally grease a 9 inch round cake pan.

Combine fruits in a bowl with 1 tbsp sugar and 1 tsp cinnamon. Let macerate while oven heats and butter softens.

Whisk together in one bowl the flour mixture, baking powder, dash of cinnamon, and salt.

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until pale yellow and fluffy. Beat in one egg at a time and then add vanilla and almond extract.

Stir flour mixture into butter/egg mixture until just combined. This will yield a very thick batter. Spread evenly into bottom of prepared cake pan. Top with an even layer of the fruit. Some cake may remain uncovered, which is fine.

Bake about 40 to 45 minutes until top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the cake only comes out clean. Cool before serving.

Suburban Commando

Every now and again, I go a little crazy and get into what I've termed "suburban commando mode."

Being a Suburban Commando requires one to complete series of tactical maneuvers and some serious supply chain management in order to meet all the items/errands on a checklist within a limited kid-free window while simultaneously planning and cooking meals, doing laundry, and handling other household matters, maintaining the role of primary caregiver for said child, and sustaining minimal contact with work.

It can make you tired.

While this has been going on every since I gave birth oh-so-long-ago, it's gotten more frenetic since I returned to work. The Suburban Commando is doing all the housewifery in half the time!

Today was pretty easy: water garden before family woke and needed shower, start working, start laundry, get kid to camp (with sunscreen applied, lunch, snack & water bottle in tow), tank up car and go to ATM, drive home, move laundry to dryer, "finish" work, shower, start more laundry, drive to post office, craft and grocery stores, come home to continue laundry, plan dinner menu for week, and eat lunch. Still on tap: pick up kid, go to dentist, finish laundry, maybe go swimming, dinner, bath time, and then get everyone to sleep.

Yeah, today is my "day off" when I don't go into the office.

Berry Good Times Today

Ah, it's still blueberry season! The grocer is practically giving them away, and that has led to blueberry crisps, pies, muffins, cereal toppings, and plain ol' handfuls while passing through the kitchen. Good times.

I never did make that Father's Day berry pie (although the butter was yummy), but I think taking the time to think it through makes up for the lack.

My pie-making is much improved from last summer, and we had a truly lovely blueberry pie last weekend.

See?

This morning, it was some quickly made muffins eaten al fresco. Did you know it takes less than an hour to go from opening a cookbook to eating fresh blueberry muffins? Alas, the butter on hand was store-bought. Can't ever seem to make all the cooking projects happen all at once!

Summer Dinner Party: S'more Pie

An abundance of marshmallows, left over from winter's hot chocolate, made me search for a way to use them. I came across this on the Epicurious website.

Adapted from… Chocolate S'more Pie

Gourmet, November 2006
Yield: Makes 6-8 servings

For crust
1 graham cracker crumb crust, baked and cooled completely or purchased, pre-made

For chocolate cream filling
7 ounces bittersweet chocolate (not more than 70% cacao; not unsweetened), finely chopped OR 7 oz of bittersweet chocolate chips
1 cup heavy cream
1 large egg, at room temperature for 30 minutes and the broken into a small container and slightly beaten

For marshmallow topping
3-4 handfuls of mini marshmallows

Directions:
1) Make chocolate cream filling:
Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 350°F.
Put chocolate in a large bowl.
Bring cream just to a boil in a 1- to 1 1/2-quart heavy saucepan. (It will bubble a bit on the sides, but not in the middle.) Then pour hot cream over chocolate.
Let stand 1 minute, then gently whisk until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth.
Gently whisk in egg and a pinch of salt until combined and pour into graham cracker crumb crust.

2) Bake until filling is softly set and trembles slightly in center when gently shaken, about 20 to 25 minutes.

3) Remove from oven and top with marshmallows.

4) Cool pie to room temperature on a rack (filling will firm as it cools), about 1 hour, and then refrigerate.

5) Brown topping before serving:
Preheat broiler.
Transfer pie to a baking sheet. Broil 3 to 4 inches from heat, rotating pie as necessary, until marshmallow topping is golden brown, about 3 minutes.
Cool pie on a rack 10 minutes.

Summer Dinner Party: Flank Steak Recipe

This is our go-to summer grilled recipe. It's Emeril's Grilled Marinated Flank Steaks and it's fabulous. The meat is marinaded earlier in the day, the steak cooks up quickly, and dinner is ready for guests with little active cooking time. And it's so much nicer than burgers and dogs. We serve with homemade coleslaw or a medley of grilled vegetables.

Tips from my husband, the grill master in our home:

Rob makes his own version of Emeril’s Essence. Essence is available in most stores OR you can buy any kind of Creole seasoning mix. We also prefer Sherry to red wine, but have used both successfully. We marinate for at least 4 hours, flipping the meat every couple hours, and then remove from the fridge an hour or so before cooking. Grill about 8 minutes on each side for medium-rare and do NOT cut into it for another 5 minutes after it comes off the grill. Oh, and we’ve never bothered to reserve the sauce and boil it, etc. like it says below.

Grilled Marinated Flank Steaks
Recipe courtesy Emeril Lagasse, 2000

Ingredients
1 (2 to 3 pound) flank steak
1/2 cup dry Sherry or red wine
1/2 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons Creole seasoning, recipe available via the link above
2 tablespoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Directions
Place the flank steak in a large, plastic resealable bag. In a 2-cup measuring cup combine the remaining ingredients. Pour the marinade mixture into the bag with the steak, seal and marinate in the refrigerator at least 4 hours and up to 12 hours in advance.

Preheat a gas or charcoal grill. Remove the steak from the marinade. Pour the marinade into a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to medium-low and simmer the marinade for 10 minutes. Remove saucepan from the heat and keep warm. Place the steak on the grill and cook to desired doneness, about 6 minutes per side for rare. Transfer the steak to plate and let stand for 5 minutes before carving. Cut the steak across the grain into thin diagonal slices, and serve with the marinade sauce.

A lazy summer dinner party

Entertaining is not my thing. Cooking and cleaning, yes, but providing a warm and welcoming home to people not actually living in said home? Not so much. Slightly obsessive people with control issues (however self-aware) really have no business trying to play host.

Once every blue moon, my husband and I either choose to invite friends over for a meal or are sort of talked into throwing a party. Last week, we did the former and it was wonderful. Here's what I learned about throwing a successful summer dinner party:

1) Invite people you like and who don't need to be impressed.
2) Make most of the meal ahead of time.
3) Have the kids eat outside while the adults are inside.
4) Go barefoot.
5) Have another glass of wine, sit down to enjoy your meal, and talk to your friends.
6) Check on the kids now and again, but let them figure out what to do. Ours invented elaborate outdoor games and then chased fire flies.

Phoning it in...

School's out, summer's begun and - for the first time - childcare is a necessity, not a luxury. Momma's got to work. Happily, with some juggling, Momma's also been able to swing some time working at home to accommodate this first week of half-day camp that someone HAD to attend. (Momma might also be a sucker, that that's another post.)

So I'm finding myself phoning into conference calls, looking at the Crackberry more than usual, and bending over backwards to be present in my professional life. The thing is, the housewifery doesn't take the summer off either. Oh no! Simultaneous to working from home, there are swim lessons and housework and the demands of a whiny joy of spending time with a child free from school. And we're somehow on the hook for hosting summertime parties too.

My original thought with this blog was to mull how home-work and paid-work (private versus public sphere if you will) overlap in my own life, and to make sense of it for myself. Of course, what I've concluded so far is that they collide more than overlap. If anything, there's a constant (mental) battle between the two and all I can do is find some joy in whichever "work" occupies my present. Living in the moment, if you will, but living in the moment with about 5 brain cells devoted to the next moment.

It's all very tiring and, despite having some pride in my home and my family, and a genuine like (if not love) of cooking, June has been mostly about phoning it in as a housewife too. I confess, I just about gave up for a few weeks. Little-to-no cooking, minimal cleaning, and working just enough to ensure that each family member had enough clean clothes to make it to school or work. Thus passed most of June.

And, we also threw a small party where our guests did not seem to notice that it was a truly lazy summer gathering. More later on how to host a lazy summer dinner party...

Random tip: removing eggshells from broken eggs

While I would love to do that one-handed egg-cracking trick, my cooking style is a touch messier. And my sometime assistant, age 6, is not much neater about it. Thus we eagerly tried this trick, first seen by us on a Jamie Oliver (sigh...) show.

To remove a broken piece of eggshell from your cracked eggs, fish it out with another piece of eggshell. They will find each other and it's so much easier than going in there with slippery fingers.

Blueberries and Butter

Blueberry season! With our local grocer selling blueberries as a buy one pint/ get 2 pints free, and a husband with a yearning for pie, I sense another weekend baking project. It IS Father's Day tomorrow and a girl's gotta practice her pie crust.

Meanwhile, I started Saturday by baking 2 sourdough loaves and making some butter. Will have to write a bit more on the latter, as it evoked some food memories and prompted quite the inspirational riff about what to do with almost a pound of the stuff.

Knowing which side one’s bread is buttered on

About a year or so ago, I was lucky enough to attend a "carb heavy" Girls' Night Out that included a lesson in bread making. Wine, cheese, fresh bread, girlfriends... it was great. And I came home with my still-unnamed new pet, sourdough starter. And I baked a couple loaves, as seen here. (Yes, I really, really did it -- totally from scratch!)

Then the summer heat kicked in, and the idea of turning on an oven sounded horrific. Life went on. Yet, periodically, I would stumble across my yeasty, gassy little friend in the fridge and give it a feed. My daughter has now asked for homemade bread, our recent record-setting heatwave seems to have ended, and I think this is the weekend.

Perhaps I'll go all out and make Alex Guarnaschelli's homemade butter to spread on top.

Strawberry Cake via Smitten Kitchen

Yum...I tried Smitten Kitchen's Strawberry Summer Cake a couple weeks ago and it was all that Deb promised. And more.

Once I sliced it up and added a dollop of lightly sweetened whipped cream, I was transported back to childhood. The flavors caught me off-guard and almost brought me to tears, reminding me of the Erdbeertorte mit Sahne that played such a huge role in childhood summer visits to Oma. The only thing different was the presentation.

traditional Erdbeertorte mit Sahne

Make this NOW before berry season is gone!

Random tip: a clean cheese grater

To avoid a mess, spray your cheese greater with some cooking spray (like Pam) before you start grating. When you're done, rinse and pop in the dishwasher. Comes clean every time.

More food contestants!

Not that more than maybe 3 people read this, but...

In addition to voting for Mary Beth Albright on the Next Food Network Star since she is, after all, a fellow Throat*, my actual friend Jennifer Beckman is in the Pillsbury Bake-Off.

You can vote for Jen's Toasted Coconut-Brownie Bonbons too. Just click "vote."


*I suggest being really careful about Googling "throat." This one is specific to Johns Hopkins!