Brewing

Jul 17, 2009 | This Life

A Midsummer Tea

 

You will need:

• Harney and Son’s Vanilla Comoro Tea: 2 sachets
• Harney and Son’s Midsummer’s Peach Tea: 1 sachet
• 8 cups of water
• Lots and lots of yummy sunshine

The hardest part is waiting.

 

* Tip: I use a bit of painter’s tape to keep the sachet tags from dropping into the tea while it’s brewing. It’s easy to work with and won’t leave a sticky residue on your favorite pitcher. 

Happy Birthday, IZ

Jul 13, 2009 | This Life

Happy Birthday, Baby! I won’t tell my readers what you did in the next frame. Promise. 

 

IZ: “I love your ability of stretching out a birthday celebration over an entire week.”

Me: “Hey! It’s not my fault your sister could only come out this weekend and Harry Potter doesn’t start until Wednesday. Wait, are you complaining?”

IZ: “No, I’m just noticing it’s kinda your thing.”

 

It is my thing, and when I’m 90 every day is going to be my birthday. And yours! 

Getting Ready

Jul 11, 2009 | This Life

 

Snickers keeping watch over the preparations on the porch

 

It’s Saturday. In just a few short hours our celebration begins. The  cake is baked but still needs a good frosting. The house is clean, but will probably get one more pass with the vacuum if I know IZ. I even tackled the horror that was our refrigerator and returned victorious!  Most of my list is lined-out and there is just enough time to do a bit of gardening at a leisurely pace. 

But first, I think I’ll wake this household with scones and coffee. Because, around here, scones are an important part of the “getting ready” ritual. 

Abundance

Jul 10, 2009 | This Life

 

 

One of the perks of living in this small town has to be the ardent dahlia fanciers who are generous enough to share their passion. Every summer, several homes set up flower stands offering their prized blooms for sale. It’s become the my little luxury, despite all the roses blooming in my own yard. Each week, I stop by my favorite stand and scoop up an armful. Really, who can argue with $2 bouquets? 

It’s still a wee bit early in the season, but I took a chance and was delighted to discover that my favorite haunt had exactly two bouquets left. Just enough!  Which, when you think about it is an excellent way of viewing abundance.

Avert Your Eyes, Martha Stewart

Jul 9, 2009 | This Life

About that pie crust. . . 

 

When we were first married, Iz and I moved sight unseen into a tiny apartment in Seattle. Leaving California was an adventure. But after a few months of nasty notes left on our car telling us to “go home” and the onset of less than warm weather, homesickness set in. Big time. And I did want good southern girls do when they’re homesick. I baked.

I’d always been a baker. Not much of cook, but I am a veritable Rumpelstiltskin with sugar.  However, pie was always my mother’s purview. And pie, my dear friends, is sacramental in our culture. You show up to my Aunt’s for Thanksgiving and you’ll count no less than half a dozen different pies. Cherry, Apple, Pumpkin, Mince, Chocolate, Pecan, Lemon Meringue. Plus a Banana Pudding thrown in for good measure. It’s a southern thing, we eat pie. 

I left pie baking to the professionals and focused on cake and brownies and cookies–oh, and out of this world truffles, which technically fall under candy, but you take my point. It wasn’t until my early married life that I decided I would not be intimidated by pastry. I would seize my unused pastry cutter and get on with it. I set out to perfect my crust making ability and well, that takes practice.

Poor IZ. For awhile he got a pie a week. Apple. Because I abhor Apple pie, and I figured if I made a pie I didn’t like, I wouldn’t eat it. That and we were dirt poor and apples were dirt cheap Over and over I made pie crust and I discovered it was darn easy and I was very good at it. Beautiful pie after beautiful pie was consumed, because it’s IZ’s culture to never let a pie go to waste. I like that about him

It was years before I realized I didn’t know squat about making pie crust. While I owned a copy of every book Martha Stewart had written at the time, I didn’t bother to crack one on my odysey of pie baking. There was no point. Everybody knows that you when you make pie crust dough, you use Crisco. Well, everybody in my world. It says so right there in my Vintage Better Homes and Garden’s Cookbook. 

(Although, I do have one Auntie who uses the pat-in-pan method which calls for oil. Her crust is, by  far, the best I’ve ever had.)

Years later, many many pies later, I would discover that the recipe page for pie crust in that very vintage cookbook had disappeared. If you ask me, Martha took it on one of her visits to my house. She denies that, however, suggesting it probably got lost in one of my many moves.  

Enter Martha and her butter based pie crust recipe.   It was omen. I grasped the opportunity to study as an acolyte at the shrine to Martha that was my kitchen. I mean, how hard could it be?

Apparently, butter is not Crisco. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t master Martha’s pie crust with any consistency.  In fact, each succeeding attempt just got worse. The crust never seemed to come together–either too lumpy and thick resembling short-bread or too thin and oily and refusing to actually be crust.  Tasty they might be, but beautiful they were not.  My pies, made with love and quickly consumed were ugly. I would serve them with a well-honed qualification, “It’s delicious but ugly.” And that’s how my pies ended up with the moniker “Butt Ugly Pies.” You see the pun right? Because my then 9 year old did and it stuck!

I’m pretty certain in all her years of baking, Martha never turned out a Butt Ugly Pie. I was a failure. I couldn’t make a pretty pie. Not even if Martha was sitting in her shrine, dressed in linen and well heeled shoes giving pointers. No amount of sprinkling ice water was just right, no method of measuring flour made me more competent, not even the best in pastry cutters could solve my problem. 

You’ll blame it on humidity or poor technique. My butter wasn’t cold enough, my flour wasn’t gourmet enough. But honestly, it’s because Martha is a Northerner. If she’d been born in the South, she’d be baking pie crust with Crisco and you wouldn’t be reading this.

So this 4th of July, I put a moratorium on Butt Ugly Pies. No more. I bought some butter flavored Crisco and made pie like all good southern girls do. I looked at IZ and flatly proclaimed, “I don’t really care about your arteries, my pie is going to be beautiful.”

And it was.