Good Egg

On the Move

2011-09-05T18:20:00.000-07:00

I don't usually dread packing up my house and moving to a new one, but this is the first time I've had to move a whole kitchen. Gadgets, glassware, 15 pie plates and way more cast iron than the average 21st century girl should have. I've been thinking a lot about Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott's how-to writing book, where she tells a story about how her father helped her through a bout of grade-school writer's block by telling her that she should write her report about American fowl "bird by bird." It's good advice, and not just for writing. "Box by box, " I'm telling myself as I pack four years of life into cardboard and bubble wrap. That and what my friend Kristen texted me a night I needed help: Keep everything get more boxes. Like this one, full of twenty years of writing notebooks.

I'm also on the move in hyperspace. Allow me to introduce you to my brand new all-pie-all-the-freakin'-time blog: Pie-Scream. In my posts I’ll treat you to pie poems, recipes, tips, interviews, and a bit of natural history. Good Egg will remain online, but this will be my last post here. I hope you'll join me at www.pie-scream.com. It's a Wordpress site, so you can follow my posts and "like" the blog on Facebook much more easily. Obviously, I hope you will. Thanks so much for reading and baking and commenting with me over the years as I wrote bird by bird, box by box, and blog by blog. The future is pie. I'll see you there.

More from the Iowa State Fair

2011-08-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

1. Shortly after Mom finished grad school in Iowa City, my parents left the state. Dad had visited the Pacific Northwest when he was a teenage boyscout on a canoe trip. While high on evergreens and humidity-free air, he decided it was the best place on earth. Mom wanted to be where Dad was, so when he got a job in Kennewick, that was it: moving day. They didn't mind that Kennewick was a suburb of the Hanford Nuclear Site, or that it was in the desert. It was in Washington State. It wasn't Iowa. That was good enough.

2. No one ever sat me down and told me the true story of how two young, ambitious, left-brained Iowans ended up in Washington state with a poet for a daughter and a lawyer for a son. I couldn't tell you where I got my information or even if it's accurate because I'd rather not ask. I like my story. I like it so much that I wouldn't be surprised to find out I made it up.

3. When I was a child, we didn't go to Hawaii or Mexico or the Grand Canyon for summer vacation. We went to Omaha, Carroll, Makoqueta, Dubuque and Waterloo. In all the important ways, my summer vacations haven't really changed. My Aunt Gail lives outside Des Moines now, so now I go to Des Moines. I decided to come here instead of applying to a fancy writing conference this summer not because I'm not ambitious, but because when a super cool lady who lives in the American Gothic house offers to host you for a writing and baking residency and set you up with a pie-judging gig at the Iowa State Fair, you don't say no. You say yes, board a plane, and go meet your new friend Beth Howard. Besides. I can write in Iowa. I'm doing it right now.

4. The worst pie I had at the Machine Shed Pie Contest was a sour cream raisin pie that used fat free sour cream and 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves in the filling. Teresa from Kitchen Collage in Des Moines says that you can't understand the appeal of raisin cream pie until you try one made with unpasteurized full-fat sour cream. That's how it's supposed to be made: with the rich and piquant ingredients a farmer has on hand during winter. I awarded first place to a lightly-spiced full-fat specimen decorated with cookie cut-outs and crenellated whipped cream because I did not want to stop eating it. That's the number one sign of a great pie.

5. The best pie I tasted at the Iowa State Fair was a first prize rhubarb pie with a glorious crust and just a touch of orange peel in the filling. I can't remember the name of the baker, but I know people heard it a lot that afternoon. Four or five women took most of the top honors even though we judged blindly. "The old pros come with clipboards," my aunt said, "and mark off their wins and losses."

6. About a half hour before the show started, a guy named Dale sat down across the aisle and struck up a conversation. I was cold at first, the way I'm cold to people who want to talk to me on the bus. Then I felt foolish--he's not hitting on me, I realize. He's Iowan. He just wants to chat. I'd say the Iowan habit of chat is unnerving, but it's not--it's disarming. What's unnerving is my reticence. Where did I learn to be wary of nice strangers? How does my "Seattle freeze" help me get along in Seattle?

7. Dale took a couple days off from his construction company ("I've built over 700 decks," he said, and I wondered where all that wood came from) to get up at three in the morning and bake perfect lemon meringue and peach custard pies. Later that afternoon when he won second place for his gorgeous lemon meringue pie, Aunt Gail heard him dismiss the award. "I'm not interested in second place," he said, but he kept his wide smile. Every time one of the old pros bagged another blue ribbon, she smiled modestly and waved to the appreciative crowd as if she was surprised. Except for a pretty blond woman named Kathleen, who grinned and clapped like she just won a bunch of money. Which, come to think of it, she might have. Beth Howard warned me that people take this competition very seriously. I've started to see what she means.

8. As part of my judging duties I was supposed to whisper feedback into my writer's ear. My writer's name was Carol. We're both hard of hearing. "Don't mark them down too harshly," she advised as she showed me the ropes. "The good ones will rise to the top anyway and there's no reason to make everyone else feel bad. People try really hard here." This is going to be a little like a writing workshop, I realized, except that I have to put the art in my mouth.

9. As the judging wears on, my feedback begins to fit a pattern, much like it does when I give my writing students a feedback sandwich. Flavorful crust, but tough. Nice meringue! And, Excellent peach flavor, but the filling is a bit too gummy. More lemon juice next time? "Don't take too long with any of the pies," Carol says. "Just decide and go. You've got a lot to cover." Carol isn't joking. They ask me to do the peach pie category next. "It has twelve, is that okay?" says a nice lady with napkins. "Yep," I say. "Bring it on."

10. I want to talk about how one should not make peach pie. I don't mean in general. I mean in the way I saw it made at the Iowa State fair. First of all, peach pie should never be garnished by one long white hair that makes the front row of the audience gasp when I pull it out and hold it up in shock. But mostly, peach pie should not be made with almond extract. It makes the peaches taste canned. Teresa at Kitchen Collage says the difference between successful addition of flavoring to peach pie is the use of an almond emulsion instead of flavoring. "Extract sits at the front of your mouth like bad salsa, while an emulsion is a back-end flavor. It should linger on your palate, not overwhelm the peaches." I say to hell with it all and use just a little nutmeg, salt, and lemon so all we taste is perfect peachy peach. Why Iowan bakers overwhelmingly relied on almond extract to flavor their pies makes absolutely no sense to me--I mean, they're so proud of whether or not they use Colorado or Missouri peaches. Why would they mask them in flavoring? Is it possible that people like the taste of canned peaches out here? I just can't believe it. If someone out there has a clue, please give it to me.

Tomorrow I drive to Eldon, Iowa, home of Beth Howard's Pitchfork Pie Stand and a bunch of houses Grant Wood didn't get around to painting. To be continued...

Greetings from the Iowa State Fair

2011-08-20T19:49:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting on my Aunt Gail's screened-in porch in Des Moines, Iowa, trying to figure out where the cicadas are. Anyone from the midwest knows exactly what cicadas sound like, but somehow after all my summer vacations here I'd forgotten how shrill and persisent and loud they can be, and always somewhere leftward in the middle distance--though that might just be my deaf right ear missing the rightward frequency.

Anyway, I'm not in Iowa for the cicadas. I'm here for the pie. Yesterday I judged the Machine Shed Pie Contest at the Iowa State Fair. There was so much to see and do that I can't possibly say it all in one blog post, so I'm going to try little vignettes over the next week. The first one is short: see my ice cream cone? That's what they call a "single scoop" in Iowa. I'd post a picture of a pork chop on a stick, but I ate mine too fast.

Photos from a Pie Marathon (plus Whiskey Peach Galette)

2011-08-19T07:29:00.000-07:00

Nine of sixteen pies

Maple Blue-Blackberry Pie

Apple Bacon Roquefort Pie

Blackberry Marmalade Galette

Mumbleberry Pie, Cherry Galette, and Whiskey Peach Chery Galette

Veggie Quiche with Green & Yellow Beans, Chard, Chevre, and Herbs

Fresh Berry & Marscarpone Pie

Lovely Pie Assistants (Jen & Kristen)

Buddies

If the pie buffet is larger than twelve pies, you can't just give your customers a menu. You have to give them a tour too. Thanks to Jen for letting me set a flour bomb off in her kitchen (13 pies in 16 hours!), thanks to Kristen for hawking my wares from the doorway so loudly and convincingly that I think I met half of Capitol Hill (or at least half of Capitol Hill's sweet lovers). Thanks to the dude from Florida who came in with an almost-finished 16 ounce cup of Molly Moon's ice cream shake and, after admitting that he'd already had a cupcake at Cupcake Royale, bought a huge piece of mumbleberry pie. And of course, thanks to Cakespy for hosting the best pie stand yet--it really is the sweetest shop in Seattle.

The last Pie Stand of 2011 will be in September. If you'd like to come, send me your e-mail.

My new favorite August pie is peach whiskey galette. It's really just an adult take on the peach ginger pie that won Best in Show at Cake vs. Pie last year, which proves to me that the best way to make up a pie recipe is to start with one that works and refigure a couple ingredients. Galette dough is easier to work with than an American-style butter crust, and it's a cinch to just throw in a plate and fold over fruit. I prefer ryes over bourbons for sweet pies because bourbon is already so sweet. I would suggest that you try rye with lemonade or ginger ale while you're waiting for your galette to cool, but I bet you've already thought of that.

Not a whiskey peach galette, but you get the idea.

Peach Whiskey Galette

Consider doubling this recipe to make two galettes. Just freeze one and bake it later.

1 recipe galette dough

3-4 large peaches or nectarines

3/4 cup clover honey

juice from 1/2 a lemon

2 shots Bulleit rye whiskey (about 3 to 4 ounces, depending on your shot glass)

pinch of salt

pinch of nutmeg

1/4 cup tapioca flour

a little milk

demerara sugar

Prepare galette dough and refrigerate while preparing the filling.

After removing the pits, cut peaches into 1/4-inch thick slices and place them in your pie pan. Pile them up in the pan until they're level with the top, then dump them into a large bowl. This is a reliable trick for figuring out how much fruit you'll need for a full pie that won't overflow in your oven. No need to peel the peaches unless they're really fuzzy.

Add honey, lemon juice, whiskey, salt, and nutmeg. Stir gently to mix, then taste. Adjust lemon and whiskey as needed. Once the filling tastes just right to you, add the tapioca flour and set the mixture aside.

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Retrieve the galette dough from the refrigerator and roll it out on well floured wax paper. This dough can be quite wet, so it's really important to keep everything well floured and unsticky. If you have a pastry scraper, use it to move the dough 45 degrees (clockwise or counter--it doesn't matter) between each stroke of the rolling pin until the dough is too large to move easily. Once it's about 1/4 inch thick, roll it over your rolling pan (helping it off with the dough scraper all the while), center it over the pie pan, and place the dough into the pan. You could also just place the pan upside down over the dough and flip the whole thing over. Peel the wax paper off at a sharp angle and tuck the galette dough into the edges of the pie plate. Leave the dough edges alone for now.

Pour your peach filling into the galette crust and smooth it into a soft mound. Then grab the edge of the galette dough and bring it toward the center of the pie. Grab another edge about four inches or so from the last point and bring it toward the center of the pie. Do this all the way around until your galette dough looks rustic and pleated, and holds all the fruit just where it needs to be: in the pie.

Brush with milk and sprinkle with demerara sugar.

Bake on 425 for 15-20 minutes until the crust is blond and blistered. Lower the temperature to 375 and bake for 30 to 40 minutes. You'll know this galette is done with the crust is golden and the filling bubbles slowly.

Pie Stand at CakeSpy on August 6

2011-07-28T11:41:00.000-07:00

Pie Stand returns! This time I'm setting up shop at CakeSpy (415 E Pine Street, Seattle), the sweetest space in Seattle. I'll have slices and hand pies for sale, including a couple fresh fruit and gluten free pies. We're open from noon until I sell out, so come sooner rather than later. Kids and small dogs welcome. This is a good time to get your whole pie orders in, so let me know now if you'd like to take a whole pie home by e-mailing me (kate.lebo at gmail). Copies of A Commonplace Book of Pie will be for sale at the shop.

The Menu

Peach Bourbon hand pies

Vanilla Cherry hand pies

Mumbleberry Pie

Rhubarb Ginger Pie

Peach Cherry Galette

Fresh Fruit & Mascarpone Pie

Lemon Shaker Pie

Apple Bacon Roquefort Pie

Asparagus Chevre & Thyme Pie

Fresh slices are $3-5, whole frozen pies are $35 for one, $60 for two.

For more info about CakeSpy, visit cakespy.com or cakespyshop.com. Please note the shop is not a bakery, it's a space for people who love baked goods. See you there!

Nosy Girl

2011-07-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

My friend ‎Elizabeth has the coolest blog. It's called Nosy Girl. It's all olfactory all the time. She asks scientists and writers and other interesting people what they smell like and what they like to smell. They give her answers and a nosy self portrait. She turns the self portrait into a star chart and posts it all on the internet. You read. This week, she interviewed me.

I'm visiting friends and family in Portland this week, so if you're in the Portland/Vancouver metro area and you want to buy a pie, e-mail me quick (kate.lebo at gmail). I recommend rhubarb ginger or maple blueberry, but of course I'll make you anything.

Peach Rhubarb Pie

2011-06-23T08:31:00.000-07:00

Cheap butter is a pastry killer. After scoffing at bakers who insist on expensive European butter, I bought a couple pounds of Darigold butter on sale. Embarrassing pastry incidents ensued immediately. Because I wanted to be able to use cheap butter (I'm unemployed and almost broke, after all) I ignored the signs, blaming the weather, refrigerator temperature, human error, the way Jason always wants me to see something cute Swiffer is doing right when I start rolling out the dough, until, finally, I took a couple hunks of Darigold dough to a photoshoot for the Washington State Fruit Commission and let myself be photographed having a pie disaster.

They had asked me and fourteen other bakers to contribute recipes to a pamphlet about Washington State-grown stone fruit. We were supposed to make pies while they took our pictures, so I was determined to make my pie and my person particularly photogenic. I got a haircut. I wore eyeliner. By some miracle, I did not get sunburned while riding horseback in the Methow Valley the weekend before. But Darigold had other plans for me--I could tell the minute I took the dough out of the commercial kitchen-sized refrigerator. It was hard. Unforgiving. I brought my disaster-waiting-to-happen to my prep station and asked Wendy Sykes of Four and 20 Blackbirds for help. Wendy was game. "What do you need me to do?" she asked. "Just be there," I said. "You sound like you need some wine," she said. I did. She got me some. Can you see why Wendy is my new favorite pie friend? She stood by with encouraging words as my dough smashed into floury fatty pieces under my rolling pin. I made a face and a deprecating remark. "Don't worry, " she said, "it's going to taste just fine."

The problem is the water content: cheap butter is made with more water than higher-fat European butters, so its chills harder. Waiting for the dough to warm up a bit only leads to the dreaded "warm but cold" phase, as Wendy put it, where the dough sticks to your rolling pin and breaks and the butter chunks don't roll easily. I had to patch and cajole and try not to let the heat of my frustration melt the pastry altogether. The bottom crust was a mess, but the top crust would be okay. I had a plan.

Cookie cutters. Martha Stewart loves them because they're cute. I love them because they flawlessly cover-up my pastry mistakes. My standby is a 3 inch biscuit cutter that cuts unruly pastry into small lift-able pieces that I can then layer on top of the pie. I use it for delicate gluten-free dough all the time (as evidenced here), and it worked like a charm for my pamphlet pie.

From now on I'm sticking to Land o Lakes and Kerrygold butter. Not even 2 for $5 Tillamook will tempt me.

While butter and I are on the outs, I'm trying out non-dairy fats like coconut oil, Crisco, lard, and Earth Balance sticks. My best success has been with Crisco so far. It isn't hippie-approved, but it is trans-fat free and extra flaky. A perfect complement to the tart-sweet jamminess of peach and rhubarb. Nectarines would work well for this pie too, and if you use a gluten free crust, you'll have a gluten free, dairy free, disaster free treat.

Peach Rhubarb Pie

One double crust pie recipe (butter or Crisco versions)

2 cups rhubarb sliced 1 inch thick

3 cups peaches, sliced 1/4 inch thick (unpeeled)

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup tapioca flour

pinch of salt

big pinch of nutmeg

juice from half a lemon

splash of whole milk or cream

demerara sugar

Prepare the pastry. Once it's done chilling, roll it out on wax paper until it is 2 to 3 inches wider than a 9 inch pie plate. Invert the pastry into the pan, center it, peel of the wax paper, and tuck it gently into the pan. Trim excess dough and form an upstanding ridge. Refrigerate the bottom crust while you make the filling.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

In a large bowl, combine the rhubarb and peaches with the sugar, salt, nutmeg, and a squeeze of lemon juice. Mix gently. Sample the fruit. If it needs more sugar or lemon juice, add them now. Then sprinkle tapioca over all and mix gently.

Roll out the top crust. Retrieve the bottom crust from the refrigerator and mound the fruit mixture in it. Invert the top crust over the pie, center it, and peel off the wax paper. Trim the edges so they extend only 1 inch beyond the pie plate, then fold it into an upstanding ridge. Cut generous steam vents in the top crust, brush it with milk, and sprinkle demerara sugar thickly over all but the upstanding ridge of the crust.

Bake on 425 degrees for 15-20 minutes, or until the top crust is blistered and blond. Lower the oven temperature to 375 degrees and bake for another 30-35 minutes, or until the filling is bubbling slowly through the vents and the top crust is golden brown.

Cool on a wire rack at least one hour before serving. Wrap leftovers loosely in a kitchen towel and leave them on the counter.

All-Shortening Pie Dough

2011-06-23T08:30:00.000-07:00

Crisco has a higher melting point than butter, so all-shortening crusts hold their shape a little better than butter crusts. They're also extremely flaky but less rich than butter crusts.

All Shortening Pie Dough

2 1/2 cups flour

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup of chilled Crisco

ice water

Fill a 2 cup liquid measure with about a cup of water, drop a few ice cubes in and put the whole thing in the freezer. It will chill while you prepare the rest of your crust.

Mix flour, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Drop the Crisco into the flour and use your fingers to rub it into the flour. I do this by scooping the mixture into my cupped hands and rubbing it firmly between my thumb and fingers, letting the mixture fall back into the bowl. It will be much softer than butter, so it will mix faster--be careful not to over mix! Continue until the mixture resembles coarse sand and the Crisco is in smallish chunks.

Pour ice water onto the dough in a thin stream. Use a circular motion so that the water hits different parts of the dough. I pour for three or four seconds, for probably 1/4 cup of liquid, but I don't measure anymore so it's hard to say. Go by feel. Mix the dough with your hands by lightly tossing it around the bowl (don't squish, mash, or crush it). Then firmly press a handful of it together. If it sticks together easily and is slightly moist, you've added enough water. If it falls apart or feels dry, add more water and re-toss.

Gather the dough into two balls, wrap them in plastic, flatten them into thick discs and refrigerate for an hour.

Flour a sheet of wax paper and roll the dough out on it.

For bakers with a pastry scraper: after the first roll, scrape the dough off the paper, turn it 45 degrees, and roll again. Scrape it up again, turn it 45 degrees, and roll again. Continue to do this until the dough is too large to move easily. This trick unsticks the center of the dough from the wax paper.

When the dough is large enough to cover the pie plate plus one or two inches extra, roll the dough over your rolling pin and roll it onto the pie plate. You could also flip the crust (on its wax paper) over the pie plate, center it, and pull the wax paper off at a sharp angle so that it doesn't tear the dough. Tuck the dough into the plate, taking care not to stretch it.

Form an upstanding ridge if you're making a single-crust pie. Leave the edges rough if you're making a double-crust pie. After you've poured the filling into the bottom crust, add the top crust. Trim the edges of the dough so they extend about an inch and a half over the edge of the plate, then crimp an upstanding ridge. Cut vents in the top crust before baking according to the instructions in your pie recipe.

Hello Again

2011-06-22T16:18:00.000-07:00

When I spend weeks away from the blog, I have a hard time getting it started again. If I was my own writing student, I'd tell me it's because I'm out of shape and out of (writing) practice. But in this case, that isn't quite the right advice. In the months since I let Good Egg go a little dark I've written so much that my right arm hurts every time I pick up a pen. Offline life (a.k.a. poems) kept me away. The more I didn't write you, the more I had to catch you up on; the more I had to catch you up on, the less time I had to tackle the task.

That's why today's metphor isn't going to be a well-run race. It's going to be a cannonball. Into something like this:

Some unconnected splashy thoughts:

When I started grad school last September, I was determined not to stop any of the writing practice I'd developed while working for Hugo House, this blog included. I then weathered a bout of malnutrition, a series of minor illnesses, recurrent arm pain and headaches, all thanks to my stubborn dedication to writing and the stresses of being a first-time teacher. By the time May rolled around, something had to give. I can't write poems, teach, be a student, a girlfriend, a sane human being, and a blogger all at once. I chose to let the blog go. When the end of summer break rolls around, I'll probably have to make that choice again. In the meantime I have a lot of pie to talk about.

I'm in business. Apple pie, peach pie, mumbleberry pie, gluten-free pie--you name it, I'll make it, freeze it, mark it with a B (or M, if your last name is Morrow) and sell it to you. Cream pies and savory pies available too. Consider this the start of the menu.

I'll make 4th of July pie, breakfast pie, barbecue pie, office party pie, I'm-not-sharing pie, and any old day of the week pie. PIE. Hit me up!

You can pay by cash, check, or paypal. I don't do delivery or the postal service yet, but I will meet you at a mutually convenient location if you live in or near Seattle. E-mail me at kate (dot) lebo (at) gmail (dot) com to place an order or ask a question.

I'm celebrating the start of summer break with a reading at the Fremont Abbey on Saturday. Ed Skoog is going to read too. We're opening for Ghosts I've Met and Jason's new band, Sons of Warren Oates. Doors at 7, show at 8 pm. Tickets are $7/$10. More info here.

Who Made Passing Time Our Judge?

2011-05-22T18:02:00.000-07:00

When I was a child of nine or ten, I began to tell myself that all I had to do to remember a moment was say "I'll remember this forever" and look really hard at whatever was happening in front of me. Everything was worth remembering. The duck shape a weeping juniper made in our front yard. Pine needles stuck in the blue plastic Velcro carpet of our family boat. My mother telling my father to get more milk and bread, and the way he firmly tied his feet into his shoes as he said, "yes dear."

What I remember most vividly from those mental recording sessions is a time I sat in the back of my parents' tan Ford Aerostar. While waiting for them to join me in the car, I stared at the closed kitchen door in the dusk of the garage and thought "I'll remember this forever." Forever isn't eighteen years, but it's all I've had since then. So far, I remember that moment and the one that came before it--the one where I decided this was a moment worth remembering--perfectly.

I started writing poems at about the same age. As I've gotten older, I've begun to see the relationship between these two intensely private, possibly pointless habits. Richard Hugo first made the connection for me in the "Statements of Faith" chapter in The Triggering Town:

"One problem for modern poets is the wholesale changes in what we see--the tearing down of buildings, the development of new housing, the accelerated rate of loss of all things that can serve as visual checkpoints and sources of stability...

With the accumulated losses of knowns, the imagination is faced with the problem of preserving the world through internalization, then keeping that world rigidly fixed long enough to create the unknowns in the poem (Rilke spoke of his.) Today, memory must become thought's ally. Though the process becomes more complicated and challenging, I believe the accelerated loss of knowns accounts for the increasing number of people writing poems."

In other words (or, at least, in my other words), as I started to understand how the passage of time would change everything around me, including my parents and brother and the big house we lived in, including the 4 foot 9 and three-quarters girl-angle with which I saw the world, I answered that realization with stubbornness. I wanted to hang on. I wanted to keep things. I'll remember this forever. Those memories eventually turned into poems, or, as Hugo would say, the "unknowns" of my poems.

Don't get me wrong, I've never written a poem about sitting in a Ford Aerostar and I have no intentions to do so. The specific moments aren't important--the nouns of the thing. It's the verbs--the saving, the capturing, the keeping. For me, writing poems has always been about reenacting an experience in a way that helps the reader feel it too, and by doing that I'm able to defy the passage of time, which is way of defying death. No, not exactly. By doing that I make something that mattered before matter again. Or matter anew. Good poems enact something. Maybe I'm talking about empathy. Maybe I'm talking about art. I'm not sure.

Photos can enact memory, but they do it differently. This photo of a rhubarb custard pie will always remind me of how, on the first almost-sunny day of 2011, Jason and I decided to throw a barbecue, and that barbecue turned into a party, and that party ate all of my rhubarb custard pie while drinking all the beer in Ballard before going home at midnight so that my landlord, who lives below us, wouldn't wonder if he'd rented his house to frat boys. The magenta smear of rhubarb as captured by my iPhone's hipstamatic isn't an accurate representation of how the pie really looked, or even tasted (rhubarb custard is a rich cream taste, not a hot neon taste), but the unreality of that red is a lot like what that Saturday felt like: a vitamin-D mood surge that provided a brief respite from the seriousness of teaching and schoolwork and rain rain rain. That day, that pie, and those friends made the whole month of May feel like one night.

It's May. Startling, isn't it? Wasn't it just January? In three weeks I'll finish the first half of my MFA program. In three weeks I'll be ecstatically and anxiously unemployed while I try to rest, write, get back into a regular pie routine. My main source of income will be sales of A Commonplace Book of Pie, bake sales, and the occasional loan from my folks. I'm worried about paying the rent. I'm excited to be a writer for another summer. What's the cliche? It can't come fast enough.

Rhubarb Custard Pie

from a pamphlet by the Washington State Hothouse Rhubarb Council

1/2 a double pie crust recipe (cut the measurements exactly in half)

3 cups diced rhubarb

1 1/2 cups sugar

3 tablespoons flour

pinch of salt

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

2 eggs

2 tablespoons milk

1 tablespoon butter

Prepare the pastry. Roll it out on wax paper until it is 2 to 3 inches wider than a 9 inch pie plate. Invert the pastry into the pan, center it, peel of the wax paper, and tuck it gently into the pan. Trim excess dough and form an upstanding ridge. Refrigerate the bottom crust while you make the filling.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Wash and dice unpeeled rhubarb and mix with sugar, flour, salt and nutmeg. Beat eggs slightly, then add milk and mix. Combine with rhubarb mixture. Pour into your pie shell and dot the surface with small chunks of the butter. Bake on 400 for 50 to 60 minutes. The pie is done when the crust is golden and the center remains firm when shaken gently. The custard will be translucent and slightly settled at the bottom of pie.

Cool on a wire rack for at least an hour. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Note: I stole the title of this blog entry from Sarah Lindsay's excellent poem Zucchini Shofar.

Gummy Cake to the Rescue

2011-04-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

When I offered Lindsey a square of this weekend's baking experiment, she said "Did you just call that gummy cake?" before she said "okay." I got the recipe from Erika; she got it from her Indonesian mother. On the last day of winter quarter, she brought this cake to her Indonesian language class at UW and then let Kristen and me inhale the leftovers while we crammed for finals in the Suzzallo Reading Room. "I think the texture freaked them out," she said, "but my teacher loved it."

Gummy cake is called gummy cake because it's gummy. It probably has an Indonesian name, but Erika has been calling it gummy cake since childhood, so that's what I'm going to call it too. Imagine coconut-flavored mochi and you'll have a good idea of what the texture's like.

The gumminess comes from using a whole box of Mochiko rice flour, which means--you guessed it--gummy cake is naturally gluten free. For those of us who love gluten-intolerant people, or who are gluten tolerant ourselves, simple homemade confections like this one are a necessary antidote to the frustration of running out of, say, sorghum flour, and not knowing what the heck you can substitute without ruining the whole damn gluten free mess. Molly Wizenberg's Winning Hearts and Minds Cake has been a similar godsend for a year now. Just substitute a tablespoon of gluten free flour mix and bam! Instant chocolate sin.

Friday night, when I was desperate to bake something simple, something that wouldn't need eight different flours and agave nectar, gummy cake saved my sanity and my sweet tooth. It isn't elegant, but neither is Molly's chocolate cake. Elegance isn't the point. Ease and taste, gluten free--and friends. That's the point.

Gummy Cake

1 box (16 ounces) Mochiko sweet rice flour (you'll probably find it in the Asian food aisle)

1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, room temperature

1 1/3 cup sugar

2 eggs

a pinch of salt

1 14-ounce can coconut milk

10 ounces of whole milk or water

1/4 cup (approx.) gluten-free bread crumbs

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease a 10 by 13 inch baking pan.

Cream butter and sugar with an electric beater on medium speed. Add eggs and salt. Beat until combined. In a separate bowl, mix coconut milk and whole milk until combined.

Add one third of the milk mixture to the butter and sugar mixture. Mix with a cake spatula just until combined. Add one third of the flour to the butter and sugar mixture. Mix just until combined. Continue alternating the addition of thirds until all the ingredients are combined.

Pour in the greased pan and bake for 30 minutes. Then sprinkle gluten free bread crumbs on top and bake for another 20 minutes. Cool on a wire rack, then cut into squares. Leftovers store remarkably well. Just use an airtight container and leave them on the counter.

4 Courses

2011-04-25T18:22:00.000-07:00

4 Courses/Richard Hugo House/Wednesday April 27/6:30 pm. The evening's concept is simple: we'll read you stories about food while you stuff your face. "We" is me, Langdon Cook, Martha Silano, and Kevin Craft. I'm going to bring a slew of new poems from a Commonplace Book of Pie. Here's the stuff:

Appetizers

Butterscotch Bacon Bites, Crisp Apple

Spring Vegetable Succotash Toast

Second Course

Marinated Beet Salad, Arugula, Sherry Vinaigrette

Third Course

Asparagus Leek Tart

With Tritical Berry Risotto

Fourth Course

Tom's Triple Coconut Cream Pie Bites

And fruit pie from High 5

Amazing, right?

Tickets are $15/$10 for students and seniors and available by calling (206) 322-7030, or coming by Hugo House.

I hope you can join us!

Sky Ltd.

2011-04-22T18:50:00.000-07:00

The difference between dye and pigment:

Dye is water soluble and pigment isn't.

Indigo is the only dye that made it into the rainbow.

Pause Again

2011-04-06T19:30:00.000-07:00

I caught myself a nasty little stomach bug this week, the kind where you're so flat on your back sick that even watching TV feels too exciting. Today I managed to leave my house for a walk around the block and caught this stoplight on camera. If the Clash hosted a photo contest, I would send in this one for "Should I Stay or Should I Go?"

Since my diet has been mostly clear liquids this week, and no one needs a recipe for how to make a glass of water, I thought I'd point you in the direction of two of my favorite blogs. They inspire me every day.

Jessica Bonin's One a Day. She paints one watercolor a day, 365 days a year, and writes beautiful prose to accompany her subjects. This sugarbag is my favorite of the past couple weeks. I have oh so many favorites.

Elissa Ball's Haiku Diary. 5/7/5 syllables, 365 days a year. Her haiku capture the beauty and humor in the quirky and prosaic moments of everyday life. As you can see from her April 5 entry, she writes haiku even when she's sick. Haiku like these:

Damage Done

Wet sidewalk at night.

Under my shoe: sudden crunch

of a snail’s shell. Aaaah!

Airing of Opinions

Fanning my armpits

on the sidewalk. Old man says,

“Face it. You’re just hot.”

Enjoy!

Pause Unpause

2011-03-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

Last week we fell off the grid. This is what the land of no Internet looks like.

It's called Doe Bay.

All day, Jason wrote songs and read Annie Dillard's The Living, which takes place in the far distance of that first picture, in what we think was Bellingham but maybe was Canada. Or more of Orcas Island.

Every night I gave myself a neckache by knitting too long. Every morning I cured it in the clothing optional hot tubs.

At four days, our fall could barely be called a vacation. Whatever it was, we both needed it.

And now we're back! If you like to make things, or read things, or eat things, and if you live in Seattle, this is going to be a good week.

On March 31, join me for Scrap: a Chapbook-Making Work Party. I'll teach you how to make your very own Commonplace Book of Pie, or poetry chapbook, or blank journal, or whatever. You have ideas. Bring them! We'll bring the paper and thread. The party is at Scenic Drive, the sewing collective at 611 E Pike Street. $5 entry is optional, and gets you paper and materials. And PIE. For more info, click here.

The sixth annual Seattle Edible Book Festival returns on April 2. Entrants (that could be you) create and bring a piece of edible art related to books. It can pun on a title, refer to a scene or character, look like a book, or just have something to do with books. Whatever the inspiration, it must be edible.

Every type of book--children's classics, detective novels, biographies, fiction and non, poetry, short stories--will be sculpted from a smörgåsbord of foodstuffs. Imagine The Brothers Karamatzah, S'more and Peace, Alice in Wonderbread, The Bun Also Rises, Goodnight Moon Pie, Curd Vonnegut, and so many more brainy, beautiful, silly, clever and tasty transubstantiations of books we love into treats we eat! For more information on how to enter and where to go, click here.

Spring quarter also starts this week, which means I'm up to my eyeballs in English. Homework calls....have a great week!

What Helped Me Through Winter Part 3

2011-03-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

The future. In three months we'll all be able to sit in the Henry Art Museum's outdoor sculpture court on sunny days.

This court is accessible through Molly's Cafe, the only place in the University District that serves Stumptown coffee and the only cafe on all of UW's campus that makes a better than good cup. I started coming here before morning classes during the first week of school. There's a skybridge over 15th Avenue that students clomp up and down all day to get from the bus stop to campus; the Henry's front door is at the University end of the bridge. That first day, a little green sandwich board alerted me to Molly's presence. Yes, both of these businesses are the sort of places that make you feel like you're on a first name basis with them.

To get to Molly's, go in the Henry's front doors and tell the questioning receptionist that you're headed for the cafe (if it's Bob Rini, say hi and be extra nice). Then walk past the desk, past a bank of windows, past the entrance to the original Henry (it was remodeled and expanded to three times its original size in 1997), then take a right and walk down two flights of stairs. At the bottom of the second flight, you'll see Molly's. It seems to be a place where grad students, teachers, Henry staff, and arty undergrads hang out. The baristas are all friendly and good looking. Most importantly, they all make great lattes. They know my name and they know my drink. This is where I write. This is where I get lunch. When I drug myself out of bed on the dark winter mornings, this is what I looked forward to.

I've never been to Molly's when the weather is good enough to have coffee in the sculpture court--and I'm not sure why it's called that, I see no sculpture. So every morning when I order my coffee, I look out the glass doors and imagine what it will be like to sit outside, in the sun, and drink it while the buses on 15th lumber by.

The perfect recipe for this story isn't one I can make myself, but thousands of people across the country can, and hundreds can do it superlatively well. Particularly if they work for Caffe Vita, Cafe Fiore, or Stumptown coffee. Have you guessed it yet? My daily favorite, my daily addiction: one gorgeously poured, thick foamed double-tall latte.

What Helped Me Through Winter Part 2

2011-03-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Knitting.

Like cooking, knitting starts with a hunger for materials and spins out of control from there. In December, I fell in love with Noro Japanese wool. The tag says "hues of nature," though the crazy vibrance of their many skeins stretch the credulity of this motto (or the credulity of nature). One that keeps calling to me, but one I keep leaving on the shelf because it's so tacky, is a magenta, soft pink, ice blue, and Kelly green skein in silk and cotton. These are colors of little girl dresses--not grown-up girl scarves, I thought--until I realized one day during a poetry class daydream that this skein is the same color as my name. K is pink. A is red, but can be raspberry or magenta. T is green. E is ice blue. Maybe I've created an association by looking for one, but still, I like the idea that this instinctive attraction is actually a recognition of myself. What does it mean, then, that I keep putting it back on the shelf to pick other, more sophisticated or demure skeins?

Sometimes all that fuels a knitting project is excitement for the next yarn. Sometimes it's a new pattern. One January weekend at her Bow house, Heather taught me how to knit this simple shawl and I've been obsessed ever since. Just finished my fifth shawl this weekend, in fact. See how knitting is like cooking? That moment in the yarn store among the stacks of colored cotton and silk and wool and nylon are like those moments in the produce aisle or bulk section or butcher counter when the raw materials of food call out from their plastic and glass to be made into something. If just for the sake of how lovely it feels to cut, chop, peel, slice, pound, spread, saute, roast, reduce, and drizzle. How the finished product is, hopefully, lovelier and even more useful than its materials.

Knitting, like cooking, is all about nouns and verbs. And it's warm. I don't have to explain how much sense it makes to have a winter hobby that warms you as you do it.

For those of you who know how to read knitting patterns, here's the pattern that has kept me sane and busy through all the dark days.

What Helped Me Through Winter

2011-03-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

Over November birthday drinks, Brian McGuigan told me he felt unstoppable--and all because of vitamin D. "I actually feel like getting out of bed in the morning," he said. Vitamin D can do that? I thought. I should have believed him. When Lisa's baby James was born last January, he was perfect except for one thing: like all babies born in the west Northwest, he needed vitamin D supplements. Doctor's orders. The University of Washington Medical Center's on-hold music isn't music, it's a vitamin D advisory for people who spend too much time indoors. The Seattle Times would call vitamin D deficiency an epidemic if it was news, but then it would also have to make news out of rainshowers and latte art and QFC's sale on salmon steaks.

I've long suspected that my vitamin D levels were low-to-nonexistent, but I thought of that possibility as a one-liner on par with "Seattle is soooo rainy." Ha ha. Then, in December, sick as a dog and looking for help, I followed my doctor's suggestion to start taking 4,000 - 6,000 IU with breakfast. Sometimes I eat breakfast only so I can take my vitamin D, actually. Funny how a whole meal fell off my appetite's palate (I love how that word sounds like "plate") when I'm at my busiest. Which is, of course, when I need breakfast most.

Vitamin D has been called the cure for the common cold, seasonal depression, joint aches, and malaise. Brian swears he has twice the energy he used to, and the pace with which he's been blogging about Heavy, working on his one man show, and doing his usual magic at Hugo House seems like proof enough. Me? I'm just glad to not wake up mad anymore. Add "waking up on the wrong side of the bed" to the list of maladies vitamin D can cure. And (I have to mention this) the pills are beautiful translucent gold ovals. When I was a kid and really bored, I'd steal a few from my mother's medicine chest, prick them with a sewing needle, and pop their contents into my hands just to see if the inside was a pretty as the outside. Lends a whole new interpretation to pill popping, doesn't it?

The pie version of vitamin D is cherry cranberry pie. Two round red fruits, one sweet and one sour. A little almond extract and a lot of sugar to bind them. It was a spur of the moment, "What do I have in the freezer?" sort of recipe that turned out better than okay and provided breakfast for a whole week. What really made this pie like a sunbreak was the lard I used in the crust. After taking a gluten free pie class with Kate McDermott this February, she converted me to lard. This lard. Or this lard. Or this one. Not that Manteca crap you can get at Albertson's. Nice lard will make your pie crust divine. By "divine" I mean it will be ineffably, immeasurably better than all-butter or Crisco crust. I don't know why. It just is. Cheap lard will make your crust taste the way cheap bacon looks as it sweats white fat into the pan. Gross, right? If you're going to try this pastry recipe, mail order a tub or two of fine lard. I'll bet you shipping and handling fees that it'll make you say goodbye and good riddance to Crisco.

Lard Pastry

2 1/2 cups flour

8 tablespoons cold lard

8 tablespoons cold unsalted butter

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon salt

Fill a 2 cup liquid measure with about a cup of water, drop in a few ice cubes and put the whole thing in the freezer. It will chill while you prepare the rest of your crust.

Mix flour, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Cut the butter and lard into tablespoon-sized chunks and drop them into the bowl with the flour. I follow Kate McDermott's instructions and casually scoop 8 tablespoons out with a metal tablespoon. If one scoop is too big, I make the next small.

Use your fingers to rub the butter and lard into the flour. I do this by scooping the mixture into my cupped hands and rubbing it firmly between my thumb and fingers, letting the mixture fall back into the bowl. Continue until the mixture resembles coarse sand and the butter is in smallish chunks. Thanks to the heat of your hands, you'll be able to smell the butter at this point. It's okay to have a few big chunks. Kate McD says it's good to have a few walnut-sized pieces and handful of almond-sized pieces, but most should be about the size of a pea.

Pour ice water onto the dough in a thin stream. Use a circular motion so that the water hits different parts of the dough. Another thing Kate McD taught me was that being firm with the dough means you need less water, so pour only about four tablespoons (1/4 cup) to start. Mix the dough with your hands by lightly tossing it around the bowl (don't squish, mash, or crush it) and then stirring it briefly but briskly with a fork. Then firmly press a handful of dough together. If it sticks together easily and is slightly moist, you've added enough water. If it falls apart or feels dry, add more water and re-toss. Go by feel.

Gather the dough into two balls, wrap them in plastic, flatten them into thick discs, massage any cracks out with your thumbs, and refrigerate for an hour.

Flour a sheet of wax paper and roll the dough out on it.

For bakers with a pastry scraper: after the first roll, scrape the dough off the paper, turn it 90 degrees, and roll again. Scrape it up again, turn it 90 degrees, and roll again. Continue to do this until the dough is too large to move easily. This trick unsticks the center of the dough from the wax paper.

Cherry Cranberry Pie

3 cups (or so) frozen pie cherries

2 cups (or so) frozen cranberries

1 cup sugar

1/3 cup flour

juice of half a small lemon

1 teaspoon almond extract

1 pinch salt

small pinch nutmeg

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

extra sugar for dusting

Make the pie crust and refrigerate for an hour.

To measure your fruit, first get out your pie plate. Fill it with cherries and cranberries until the fruit is about level with the top of your plate. This assures that your pie will be as fruit-full as possible without spilling juice all over your oven. Pour the fruit into a large bowl and wipe your pie plate clean.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Roll out the bottom crust and drape it into a pie pan. Refrigerate while you prepare the filling.

Add, sugar, lemon juice, salt, nutmeg, and almond extract to your cranberries and cherries. Toss gently to mix. Taste. Adjust lemon juice and sugar if needed. Sift the flour over the mixture and toss gently to mix again. Turn the filling into the chilled bottom crust and smooth it with your fingers. Dot the top of the pie filling with butter.

Roll out the top crust, drape it over the filling, and peel off the wax paper. Crimp the crust into an upstanding ridge and make generous steam vents. You can brush the crust with milk or egg white wash (egg whites and water) to help it brown. Sprinkle sugar over everything.

Bake at 425 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes until the crust is golden brown. Rotate the pie front to back and reduce the heat to 375 degrees. Bake until bubbling, about 30 to 35 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack at least two hours before serving.

(Pie) I Forgot to Mention

2011-02-28T16:57:00.000-08:00

Brand spankin' new copies of A Commonplace Book of Pie are now bound and ready to be yours. A big thank you to Rosanna Kvernmo of Iron Curtain Press for her impressive job on letterpressing the covers. If this book inspires you to make your own, I hope you'll consider asking Rosanna to help you out.

Another big thank you to everyone who has adopted or are considering adopting one of these adorable little creatures into your very own home. It doesn't take up much space, and it brings dessert. Order your copy by clicking here or on the sidebar's "Read My Zine" photo. They're also for sale at Elliott Bay Bookstore, Pilot Books, Third Place Books, The Lucky Dumpster, Cakespy Shop, Chin Music Press, and (once I drop some off this week) Open Books. If you'd like to carry copies or know some good non-Seattle cook and bookshops I should contact, shoot me an e-mail at kate.lebo at gmail dot com.

Also! In honor of Pi Day on March 14, I'm helping judge Cakespy's Pie Slam. From Jessie Oleson's sweet Cakespy blog:

Did you miss National Pie Day on January 23rd? Aww, poor thing. But don't despair, because in the effort to keep you fat and happy all winter long, CakeSpy and Four and 20 Blackbirds are teaming up to host Seattle's first Pie Slam on March 14 (the "other" pie day...Pi Day!), at CakeSpy Shop, 415 E. Pine Street in Capitol Hill. Here are the details:

Cake and Pie Peace Talks Result in Seattle’s First Pie Slam

Seattle, WA – While the media has been heralding the demise of the cupcake and the ascension of pie – two Seattle bakers have come together in peace to hold Seattle’s first writing and baking contest – the Seattle Pie Slam.

Jessie Oleson, artist and blogger of CakeSpy fame, and Wendy Sykes, owner of the baking business Four and 20 Blackbirds decided there was no room for malice in the world of dessert and came up with the concept of a Pie Slam.

“It’s a writing contest and a pie contest, all baked into one,” said Sykes. “The concept is loosely based on a poetry slam, but in this contest the plot must contain pie. And the writer/baker is judged not only on the content and quality of the story -– but also on the quality of the pie.”

“It’s not just pie in the sky,” said CakeSpy Jessie Oleson. “this crusty confection has inspired many a taste memory, and we’re ready to celebrate these stories at the Pie Slam!”

The event will be held at Oleson’s Capitol Hill gallery on Monday, March 14th at 6:30pm. True, while National Pie Day already happened in January, for those of you who missed it, “Pi Day” is just another chance to celebrate pie!

For more details on entry rules, prizes and judges, email jessieoleson@gmail.com!

Friends: though it seems like winter will never get through with us, we're over halfway through with winter. Drink something warm, eat something sweet, and hang in there.

A Bluebarb State of Mind

2011-02-21T16:53:00.000-08:00

The movie Waitress and Portland's annual Pietopia contest invite us to think about how pie can represent an emotional state. In Waitress, for example, "My Husband's Gonna Kill Me Pie" is gushy red raspberry filling with a violent squirt of chocolate sauce smashed into it the way the protagonist's husband might smash into her if he knew she was going to leave him. It's the only pie that has ever scared me. Pietopia takes the idea a step further by soliciting recipes and essays that describe a state of being, like Chemo Therapy Pie, Homesick for Miami Pie, and Red Door Rhubarb Pie. My last Pietopia entry was "I'm Throwing Out My To-Do Lists Cherry Pie," so named because of the early July week when I drop everything I'm doing so that I can pick my neighbor's pie cherries before the crows get to them. It's a celebration of summer, of ignoring responsibility, of doing something messy, hot, and physical instead of cerebral, goal-oriented, and lame.

If you'll entertain that idea with me for awhile, then let's talk about Bluebarb pie. The filling is quintessentially Northwest, with a handful of blueberries to soften the sour punch of piled-high sliced rhubarb. It's quintessentially mid-February because all the fruit has to come from the freezer. It's quintessentially my mid-winter mood because it's a little blue, a little sour, but it's trying really hard to be sweet.

Bluebarb pie isn't a showstopper. Not like strawberry chiffon or butterscotch banana cream. But what it lacks in fancy it makes up for in fruit. After all, February isn't strawberry weather. Rain doesn't complement the sophistication of pears or the optimism of cherries. Rain is dowdy. It ruins my hair and freezes my shoulders into a protective seasonal crouch. Where berries are delicate and bright, rhubarb is husky and tart. Bluebarb pie is modest. Bluebarb pie will stain your jeans if you drop it in your lap. Bluebarb pie makes no promises of better weather, but it will keep you warm.

My friend Erika is a native-Washintonian sort of person who tries to balance seasonally depressive bitching with cheerful reminders of how February in Seattle is beautiful. She gently pointed this out to me last week when were walking home from class. "Beautiful compared to what?" I asked.

"March," she said.

Plenty of time to pass the Bluebarb.

Bluebarb Pie

one recipe double crust pie pastry

4 cups frozen sliced rhubarb

1 cup frozen blueberries

1 cup sugar

1/4 cup tapioca flour

half a lemon

small pinch of nutmeg

pinch of salt

1 tablespoon of cold, unsalted butter cut into small chunks

milk

demerara sugar (for dusting)

Follow the instructions at the link above to make and roll out pie pastry. After you've tucked your pie dough gently into a pie plate, leave the edges rough and refrigerate the plate.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

In a large bowl, combine the fruit, sugar, tapioca flour, nutmeg, and salt. Gently squeeze the lemon into the bowl, stir, and taste. If the filling needs a little brightening, add more lemon juice. If it needs a little sweetening, add another 1/4 cup sugar. Set the bowl aside.

Roll out the top crust on floured wax paper. Retrieve the bottom crust from the fridge. Pour the fruit filling into the bottom crust and dot it with the butter. Flip your top crust over the filling and peel the wax paper off at a sharp angle. Trim the top and bottom crusts so they extend only an inch beyond the pie plate, then form an upstanding ridge with your fingers. Refrigerate the whole pie for 15 minutes (this is a new step introduced to me by pie sage Kate McDermott; she says it's perfectly alright to leave the pie in the refrigerator overnight at this point).

Retrieve the pie from the fridge. Cut generous vents into the top. Brush the top crust with milk and sprinkle it with demerara sugar.

Bake on 425 degrees for 15-20 minutes. Once the crust is blond and blistered, turn the oven down to 375 and bake for 35-40 minutes until the crust is golden.

Cool the pie on a wire rack for at least an hour. To store leftovers, loosely wrap the pie in a towel and leave it on the kitchen counter.

The Heart is Not Heart Shaped

2011-02-14T17:00:00.000-08:00

Fresh flours for my Valentine by Jessie Oleson

The year since Jason was diagnosed gluten intolerant has been a time of discovery, frustration, healing, sickness, compromise, and saying "Fuck it, let's go get some sushi." I am thankful that he finally knows why he felt so crummy all these years. I mourn for all the foods we can no longer share. I've learned that romantic intimacy is a balance between dependence and independence where too much fusion equals confusion and too much independence just plain isn't as fun as being together. That's why figuring out how to feed each other sometimes feels like the crucible of our relationship. What's for dinner when he can't eat anything I want to cook? Or when I don't want to eat anything he can eat? I don't think we'll ever figure this question out. That's okay. I've learned that the answer changes every day.

Said A.J. Liebling

2011-02-02T18:29:00.000-08:00

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

A Commonplace Stack of Pie

2011-01-29T12:19:00.000-08:00

I am excited to announce that the third pressing of A Commonplace Book of Pie is nearly ready.

Aren't they gorgeous? This time around I worked with Rosanna Kvernmo of Iron Curtain Press to letterpress another 300 covers for my little-zine-that-could. She based the design on Jennifer Borges Foster's original and printed them on recycled chipboard.

Have you ever seen an actual letterpress? They're huge! Bigger than two woodstoves! And made of cast iron! With so many moving parts! Rosanna knows how to work them all. I took a video of her printing process so you could see how this amazing antique machine works.

Copies will be bound and ready in the next couple weeks, but you can pre-order them on Etsy now. Treat yourself to a slice of literary pie. You know you want to.

Good Old Fashioned Cause and Effect

2011-01-22T22:42:00.000-08:00

Last month I found out that I was malnourished. I had to get a blood test and talk to a doctor to find this out. "Seriously?" I asked her. "For lack of a better word," she said, "yes."

I was low on protein, low on vitamin D, anemic, and in a state of ketosis. My body was just plain out of gas. While she wrote down my list of deficiencies and a corresponding list of cures (iron capsules, protein shakes, flesh, soy, salt), I thought about the last time this happened. Except that time I literally ran out of gas.

That morning I'd seen the gas gauge's little amber light blink on, but I didn't stop at the Shell station. I didn't stop because I had committed to writing poems for an hour before work every morning, and if I pulled over for gas I would have less writing time. At 9 am, this choice felt like a badge of honor, like proof of my commitment. At 5 pm, stalled on the 45th street Aurora Bridge off-ramp with cars whizzing around my emergency lights, I didn't feel so smug. While my friend Jacob ran up the hill in search of a gas can, I sat there in the middle of traffic cursing my idiocy.

Norm saved me. In dress, Norm was a total Seattle dude--flannel, nerd glasses, uncombed blond hair. In manner, he was anything but. He'd stopped his car behind mine, walked out into traffic and rapped on my window to offer help. "Just put your car in neutral and steer," he said. "I'm going to push it up the hill with my bumper. Cool?" He was direct. Cool wasn't a question of whether or not I was cool with the plan, it was a question of if I would be ready for it.

He started his car. I waited for the grind of metal on metal and then it came, softer than I'd expected, and I was moving again. My gas and brake pedals felt limp, like someone had let the air out of them.

Pretty soon I was sitting pretty in the gas station parking lot on Fremont Avenue and 46th Street, and he was back at my window again. "My name's Norm. How the heck did you run out of gas?" Maybe he called me a dummy. I can't remember because I was so happy to be rescued that I didn't care. I was a dummy. A dummy who let her car run out of gas practically on purpose. "I won't do it again," I promised him. "Have a good one," he said, then got back in his car and drove off down the hill.

Back at the health clinic, Doc Eva was telling me how the human brain is one of the biggest muscles in the body. I don't know if she meant this literally or figuratively, but I liked what she had to say next. "When we're thinking hard and learning new skills or being creative, our brains burn a lot more calories than you'd expect. You might be losing weight because you're writing poems. Have you been getting headaches?" Sure, I said, but then I'd drink another latte. She smirked. "That's what all my busy patients say."

I write about food, I thought. I eat all the time. But then I remembered the evenings I drank a latte or a beer to calm my hunger long enough to let me finish my homework. How by the time I was done working, I often wasn't hungry anymore. But so what? I'd gone through periods of being too busy to eat three squares a day. I'd lost my appetite before. Maybe I thought I might lose five pounds. What's the harm in that? I figured that if I was cooking good meals whenever I had time to cook, I'd be fine.

I was wrong. And dizzy. And headachy. And stressed. Eating well-cooked food does not equal eating well.

Doc Eva's prescription, in a nutshell, was red meat and rest. She sent me home with vitamin supplements and energy bars, ordered me to start eating 2000-2500 calories a day, and told me to chill out.

Which brings me to my New Year's resolutions.

1) Trust rest. This will be harder than it sounds.

2) Eat more steak. This will be easy.

In our house, Jason makes steak the best. I hover and watch and try to replicate the perfectly seared outside and nearly bloody inside, but so far my steak is merely competent. On steak night, Jason's job is the meat and potatoes. My job is to make something green and stay out of his way.

Sometimes I saute kale and sometimes I steam broccoli, but no matter what I make chimichurri, a bright green paste of parsley, olive oil, and simple seasoning that has banished A-1 sauce from our house forever. Jason's best friend Brady learned the recipe when he worked at an Argentinian restaurant. I say "recipe" loosely since Brady's not really a recipe kind of guy. When I make this, I try to follow his example by ignoring my measuring cups and going by taste. Hopefully that will work for you too.

Here's one more resolution for 2011: I will not run out of gas. This time, that's a promise to myself.

Chimichurri

1 bunch flat-leaf Italian parsley

1 or 2 minced garlic cloves

extra virgin olive oil

white balsamic vinegar (white wine or champagne vinegar works in a pinch)

cumin

salt

pepper

Wash the parsley well and spin or shake dry. Chop finely, using all the leaves and most of the stems. I usually throw the stem ends out. When I say chop finely, I mean that once you think you're done chopping, chop again. I suppose a food processor would do this job in seconds, but that's less fun than a sharp chef's knife a little elbow grease.

Combine parsley and garlic in a small bowl. Pour about four tablespoons of olive oil and 2 teaspoons of vinegar into the bowl and mix. I like my chimichurri when it's a loose paste, like pesto. Add more olive oil to loosen things up, if needed. Add a big pinch of cumin, then salt, pepper, and more vinegar to taste. Mix well.

Serve dolloped on top of seared steak. Store the leftovers in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to two weeks. We also like to mix it into potato salad and use it as pistou for soups.

Pie Party 2011

2011-01-10T15:39:00.000-08:00

January 23 is a strange day to nationally celebrate pie. Consider the rain, the seasonal depression, the unavailability of fresh local fruit above the Mason-Dixon line. Maybe below it, too, though I hear you can harvest strawberries in February if you live in New Orleans. What's the big idea of scheduling a pie holiday in the dead of winter when seasonal ingredients are limited to nuts, custard, sugar, raisins, and mincemeat? Don't tell me that the real pie day is March 14, International Pi Day. That's cute for math geeks, but this pie fan isn't convinced that we should share our holiday with an infinite number just because it happens to be a homonym.

I guess July 4 was already taken. How about May 8? No, that's International Outdoor Intercourse Day. What about June 22? That would put Pie Day at the height of strawberry season in the Northwest, when surely lots of other fruits are in season all over the country. So what if June 22 is already Chocolate Eclair Day. Surely a fancy frosted doughnut doesn't deserve prime calendar real estate, at least not compared to the whole of pie-dom.

How do I start a holiday reassignment campaign? Do I write the American Pie Council? Do I petition the president? I know he has way more important things to deal with right now, like tragic random parking lot murders and assassination attempts on congresswomen. Pie can't bring Christina Taylor Green back, heal Gabrielle Giffords, or fix the failures of our mental healthcare system, but it can comfort our simplest needs whether we're in crisis, on holiday, or having ho hum middle-of-the-week moment. What if more people were like pie maven Beth Howard, who found consolation and healing in pie-baking after her husband suddenly died. Who else believes that the world needs more pie, and not in a "pie is the new cupcake" sort of way? That's what a summer pie holiday could celebrate. Warmth, abundance, community, craftsmanship, generosity, fun. I'll take those six nouns and a slice of apple pie over a Democratic majority in Congress (as nice as that would be) any day.

Who's with me?

While we're gathering signatures for our new and improved National Pie Day, let's not forget to eat a piece two Sundays from now. If you live in Seattle, I hope you'll join me on Sunday, January 23 from 6:00 to 9:00 at the Salmon Bay (Ballard) Eagle's Club. Mary Schile's yearly pie extravaganza will feature yours truly reading from A Commonplace Book of Pie, musical performances of pie songs from a comPIElation of performers, and a Pie Dinner Party in the upstairs hall. Admission is free with a pie in hand or $10. Children welcome. All proceeds benefit The Marsha Rivkin Center for Ovarian Cancer Research.

If you're on Facebook, check out the invite here. And while you're at it, why not become a fan of Good Egg?

Please take care of yourselves, invest in your communities, and eat more pie. Like this super-American version of that Greek classic, spinach and feta pie!

Spinach and Feta Pie

Dough for one double-crust pie (you could omit the sugar in the linked recipe)

2 pounds (or two packages) of frozen spinach, thawed and drained of excess water

6 to 8 ounces of feta cheese

1/2 cup heavy cream

1 egg

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Roll out bottom crust, place it in a 10-inch pie plate and refrigerate while preparing filling. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

In a large bowl, beat the egg with the heavy cream, salt, and pepper until will mixed. Add four ounces of the feta cheese by crumbling it into the liquid and stirring. Then add spinach and toss to coat. Add up to 1/4 teaspoon more salt to taste.

Roll out the top crust. Mound the filling in the pie shell and crumble the rest of the feta over it. Place the top crust over the filling and crimp an upstanding ridge. Cut generous vents, brush top crust with milk, and sprinkle lightly with kosher salt.

Bake on 425 for 20 minutes, then rotate the pie front to back and bake on 375 for another 35 to 40 minutes. Pie is done when juices bubble out of the crust (they won't be thick like fruit juices) and the crust is brown and golden.

This pie tastes best while it's still warm. To reheat, put it back in the oven on 350 degrees for 10 minutes or so. If you plan to keep this pie around for a couple days, put it in the refrigerator.

Said Jane Austen

2011-01-04T19:01:00.000-08:00

Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness. 

Unlikely Haiku

2010-12-23T12:58:00.000-08:00

Life will go its way,

Beauty can only be found.

Step aside — it's there.

~Anthony Bourdain

Two Quick Things

2010-12-20T11:22:00.000-08:00

One: A Commonplace Book of Pie makes a great stocking stuffer. You've probably heard that about everything from chocolate bars to eyelash curlers in the last month, but it's true!

Two: I only have thirty copies left. Buy them by Wednesday and I'll make sure they get to you by Christmas.

Click here to go to my Esty Shop.

Merry almost Christmas!

Freezer Cure

2010-12-18T18:26:00.000-08:00

Among the handful of traits I didn't inherit from my mother--including long legs, a scientific mind, and athletic talent--is the ability to use my freezer well. Well, I can use it. I mean, who can't stack a couple ice trays and smash a few pizza boxes and toss a bag of frozen burritos into their freezer? What I'm talking about is the ability to use the freezer to plan ahead, which doesn't just mean wrapping a discount pork loin in wax paper and plastic and labeling it clearly. It's the ability to then A) remember it's there and B) defrost the frozen item in time for dinner. Almost every time I try to be a good planner aheader, I waste oceans of warm tap water quickly defrosting something I forgot to take out of the freezer the night before, or I miss dinner by not defrosting the damn thing in time. Then I leave it to rot in the refrigerator.

This shouldn't be a problem! This should be as simple as making ice, or softening butter! I've watched Mom do this a million times. But for me, it's not easy. Why? I've asked my pathetic cuts of frigid meat. All I can figure out is that Nick must have gotten those genes.

Mom is also famous for forgetting frozen tupperware'd blocks of soup for years at a time. An exaggeration, yes, but if you saw how full her freezer is, you too might want to carbon date your dinner before digging in.

I think limited freezer space is an appropriate price to pay for always being prepared with soup, especially when the cook is sick. While I rested and waited to get better over the last couple weeks, I wished I'd had the presence of mind to make some chicken noodle soup before I fell ill. It was hard enough to eat, let alone cook, so more often than not I ended the day on the couch with a reheated can of Amy's tomato bisque and a package of Saltines.

That's why the day after I started to feel better, I made soup. A great big pot of it. With cannellini beans, ham hocks, fennel seed and spoonful of red pepper. I always thought the beauty of bean soup was how cheap and filling it was. I've also thought that eating a food because it's cheap weakens its appeal--except in the case of banh mi, where the rule is "the cheaper the better." I've ruined several perfectly good chickpea and black bean recipes by over-serving them during the last few days of the pay period.

This particular bean soup might be cheap, but it doesn't taste that way. After two hours of simmering, cannellini beans gain a soft (I won't say velvet) texture that surprises me with every spoonful. Maybe that's the difference between using canned beans and dried beans. Maybe that's my slowly returning appetite talking. Whatever it is, it's good.

This recipe makes a huge amount of soup, so I took the liberty of freezing two-thirds of it in anticipation of winter colds. I'm not looking forward to the next time I get sick, but I am looking forward to successfully defrosting a homemade meal during a time of illness. We'll see if soup is one frozen meal I can't mess up.

Zuppa di Fagioli

from A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 large onion, finely diced

2 garlic cloves, sliced

2 bay leaves

2 pounds dried cannellini beans, picked over and rinsed

2 pounds smoked ham hocks

12 cups water

1 tablespoon fennel seeds, ground fine in a mortar or spice mill

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

salt and pepper

Warm the 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed stock pot over medium heat. Add the onions and cook gently until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and bay leaves and cook for a minute more.

Add the cannellini beans and smoked ham hocks. Cover with the water and bring to a boil. Skim off any surface foam and turn the heat to low. Simmer gently for an hour, stirring occasionally.

Add the ground fennel, red pepper flakes, and a spoonful of salt. Continue cooking for 1 hour more, or until the beans are tender and the smoked pork has begun to fall apart.

Taste the soup and season with salt and pepper. Cool to room temperature, then refrigerate overnight.

To serve, reheat the soup on medium, stirring frequently. Thin with a little water if it has thickened too much. Check the seasoning and adjust. Serve with chopped arugula, wilted greens or a little parsley.

2010-12-13T19:58:00.000-08:00

How to Cure the Post-Thanksgiving Blues

2010-12-08T19:29:00.000-08:00

Two and half weeks. That's how long I've been sick. I suppose it's always a bad time to be sick, but this particular being sick-ness has been especially disruptive and weird. Its main symptoms: whenever I try to read or write, I get a blinding headache and vertigo. Its secondary symptoms: general ickiness and fatigue. Ugh. What do you call a grad student who can't read or write? Somebody please tell me the punchline.

I'd rather be writing about pumpkin chiffon pie. Since I can't do that without giving myself a headache, here's a pretty picture and the recipe. You can make it gluten free by substituting the gingersnap crust for an almond flour crust. It's as light and airy as the name suggests because of egg whites and gelatin. If there is such a thing as a pumpkin cream pie, pumpkin chiffon is a kissing cousin.

Wait a second. If I have an appetite for pie, I must be getting better! What's the first thing you crave when you're recuperating from an illness?

Pumpkin Chiffon Pie

adapted from Simply Recipes

Crust:

2 cups crushed gingersnaps (several pulses in a food processor)

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

6 Tbsp butter, melted

Filling:

1 envelope gelatin

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 cup milk

3 eggs, separated

1/4 cup brandy or dark rum

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 14 ounce can of pumpkin puree

1 cup heavy cream

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325°F.

In a bowl, combine the crushed gingersnaps, ginger, and butter. Press the mixture into a 9-inch pie plate with the back of a spoon or your hands, making the top edge even all around. Bake the crust for 15 minutes or until it is lightly browned.

In a heavy-based saucepan, combine the gelatin, brown sugar, salt, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, milk, and egg yolks. Stir thoroughly. Set the pan over medium heat and cook gently, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens slightly. Do not let it boil!

Remove the mixture from the heat and let it cool. Add the pumpkin purée and the brandy. Refrigerate the mixture, stirring occasionally, until it thickens enough to form mounds.

In an electric mixer, beat the egg whites and granulated sugar until the form stiff peaks. Stir a few spoonfuls of the egg whites into the pumpkin mixture, then fold in the remaining whites. Pour the filling into the cooled crust. Refrigerate for several hours.

Fifteen minutes before serving, chill a metal bowl and electric beaters in the freezer. Beat whipped cream on medium high with sugar and vanilla until it forms hard peaks. Spread over the top of the pie, sprinkle with a little nutmeg and cinammon, and serve.

If there are leftovers, store them in the refrigerator.

How to Make the Best Flaky Pie Crust Ever

2010-11-21T11:42:00.000-08:00

Mom is having a pie crisis. Her e-mail arrived yesterday afternoon while Jason and I were on a belated birthday outing to Skagit Valley. It was the only clear day of the week, though the weather report threatened snow in Bellingham. We could see the storm coming over the mountains from our little lowland Toyota. Our first stop was La Conner, a river town where old people go to stroll slowly on the sidewalk and motorcyclists go to make a lot of noise and drink at the La Conner Pub, one of the two great bars in town. We went there to get a pub lunch at Nell Thorn, the other great bar in town. Jason had a salmon salad. I had fried polenta in Gorgonzola sauce. We shared two plates of oyster shooters and clinked our shot glasses before each gulp as if we were toasting something. The weather. The day. Jason thought they were better than the oysters at the Walrus and the Carpenter, that new oyster bar on the near end of Ballard Ave. I think W & C's Shigoku oysters are still the best little morsels I've ever put in my mouth, but Nell Thorn's oyster shooters give them a run for their money. They're served with cocktail sauce and a dollop of pesto. Better than chocolate. Better for you than raw kale. The French consume about 125,000 tons of oysters a year, half of them over the Christmas season. In the past week I've consumed about forty oysters, no exaggeration. That's some gorgeous math.

Anyway, Mom is having a pie crisis because she has to make the Thanksgiving pies this year. "There's been a request for pecan," she says, which means my grandmother has asked for the old fashioned version of this super-sweet dessert. That means chopped pecans floating in a soft jelly of Karo syrup and brown sugar. It's not my mom's favorite way to make it, but favorite foods aren't what the Lebo Thanksgiving is all about. We prefer to honor tradition, even if it comes from a plastic bottle and tastes slightly of, well, plastic. That's where I'm messing things up a bit--okay, a lot--this year. For the first time in my whole life, I'm not going home for Thanksgiving. "You are not here and I have to make the pie," Mom says. "Surprisingly, this is a bit frightening as you have been the pie maker for all major holidays for the past several years." Jason and I are hosting my immediate family at our house the day after Thanksgiving, so the "bit frightening" feeling is mutual. Will we have enough silverware? Will my family be comfortable sharing one tiny bathroom for 48 hours? Will the cat sleep on my dad's face? Do I already know the answer to these questions? I do: Probably.

Even though Grandma can't make a pie crust to save her life (by her own admission), Mom worries every year that her crust won't pass Grandma's inspection. It's a dynamic that was set up long before I ever paid attention to how food made people feel. She approaches pie crust the way Grandma approaches left turns through busy intersections. Nervously. Second-guessing and then going for it.

Mom taught me how to make pie crust in a metal bowl on the kitchen counter four or five Thanksgivings ago. I remember her carefully measuring and sprinkling water over butter and flour, but after that, I don't remember much. I wish I could. Seems like every pie maker should have a richly told story about learning to make pie crust with her materfamilias. This is not to say Mom's pie crust is forgettable, absolutely not. Just that what I remember isn't her crust. What I remember is how she fretted over whether or not she made a good crust.

To all you would-be pie makers out there: good crust needs a light touch and confidence. Lacking confidence, practice and patience will do. Mom, don't worry. You have plenty of both.

For those of you who get nervous about feeling your way through a recipe, try this method of making extra flaky pie crust. It uses exact(ish) measurements and has specific instructions for how to touch, mix, chill, and roll out the dough. Pie crust beginners who are on the line for making Thanksgiving pies might get better first-time results with this recipe.

More experienced pie crust makers (Mom, I'm talking to you) should try this recipe. It's based on what I learned from Kate McDermott, who taught me to rely on what I feel, smell, hear, taste, and see when I'm making pie. The result is as flaky as the recipe above, but easier to roll out because it helps me fine-tune the water content without fooling with the dough too much. It takes a measure of confidence to feel comfortable eyeballing the amount of flour/fat/water you're using, but the first time this recipe works well for you, you'll never go back to your fussier methods. Vodka and food processors be damned!

Extra Flaky Pie Crust

2 1/2 cups flour

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

1 teaspoon salt

12 tablespoons of chilled unsalted butter

1/2 cup chilled Crisco

ice water

Fill a 2 cup liquid measure with about a cup of water, drop a few ice cubes in and put the whole thing in the freezer. It will chill while you prepare the rest of your crust.

Mix flour, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Cut the butter and Crisco into tablespoon-sized chunks and drop them into the bowl with the flour. Use your fingers to rub the butter into the flour. I do this by scooping the mixture into my cupped hands and rubbing it firmly between my thumb and fingers, letting the mixture fall back into the bowl. Continue until the mixture resembles coarse sand and the butter is in smallish chunks. Thanks to the heat of your hands, you'll be able to smell the butter at this point. It's okay to have a few big chunks. Kate McD says it's good to have a few walnut-sized pieces and handful of almond-sized pieces, but most should be about the size of a pea.

Gather the dough into two balls, wrap them in plastic, flatten them into thick discs and refrigerate for an hour.

Flour a sheet of wax paper and roll the dough out on it.

A Double Helping of Birthdays

2010-11-14T15:31:00.000-08:00

Today I am the exact same age my mother was the day I was born. I've been anticipating today even more than my birthday--which is tomorrow--and not just because I have a massive amount of homework due on Tuesday. If you did the math between those two sentences correctly, you'll have deduced that my mother's birthday is the day after mine. If you didn't, then your response might be similar to my friend Talia's, who said, "Wait--does that mean your mother was 14 when she had you?" Not quite. On November 15, 1982, my mother was 27 years and 364 days old. For another nine hours, so am I. I'll have a lot of birthdays in this life (I hope) but today is the only day like today. To this sentiment, Jason says "Duh."

Every year on her birthday, Mom tells me I was best present ever. Growing up, we shared birthday cakes and birthday dinners, but I was usually the only one who got an official birthday party. Mom is the sort of woman for whom modesty is also a form of generosity. She loves to give presents; she doesn't like to draw attention to herself. My first year away at college, Dad forgot both of our birthdays because I wasn't around to incessantly remind him that November 15 was coming up, coming soon, here! Most husbands would have spent that November 16 in the doghouse, but my mother is also an extremely forgiving woman. I should be the one saying she was the best birthday present I've ever gotten. Now that I'm old enough to know so, I do.

I think I'm going to make a cake for my birthday. I know! I'm supposed to be obsessed with pie. But that's the thing about my birthday: growing up, it was always my special day, a day when I could eat my favorite meals with my favorite people and make a fuss about myself. Me me me. Then, the next day, Mom Mom Mom. I was a total brat (still am), yet the circumstances of my birth taught me how to gracefully share. That includes dessert. For gluten-intolerant Jason, pie is poison; in our household there will be no such thing as birthday pie. And anyway, while pie and I have a longstanding relationship, carrot cake was my first love. Mom loves carrot cake too, and for that reason our shared birthday cake was often this homely confection.

Like my mother, this particular carrot cake is anything but homely. I found the recipe five years BGFE (Before the Gluten Free Era) and was intrigued by the substitution of flour for a dozen eggs. I still don't understand baking chemistry, so being able to exchange a solid for a liquid to make a moist, dense, but definitely cakey cake seems like a miracle. Lately ginger and brandy have been my go-to ingredients (I'm convinced ginger tea and French brandy with a little honey is better than vitamin C), so they both make appearances here. The most necessary component of this cake is the most traditional: glorious gobs of cream cheese frosting.

Share. Don't mess with tradition. Mom's essential ingredients for an older, wiser, happier birthday.

Flourless Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Cake

1/2 cup raisins

3 tablespoons brandy

12 eggs, separated

1 1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/3 cup honey

1 1/2 cup carrots, grated

2 cups almond flour

1/2 cup pecans, chopped

1/2 cup crystallized ginger, chopped roughly

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Frosting

4 cups powdered sugar

2 8-ounce packages cream cheese, room temperature

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

4 teaspoons vanilla extract

Soak the raisins in brandy and set aside while preparing the rest of the cake.

Prepare two 9-inch cake pans by lightly greasing them with butter and lining the bottoms with parchment paper. The extra effort is worth it--without this lining the cakes will stick to the pans. If you want a triple-layer cake, use three pans and split the batter evenly between them.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

In a medium bowl, add sugar to egg whites and beat into soft peaks. In a large bowl, whisk yolks and honey together until just mixed. Fold in carrots, almond flour, pecans, crystallized ginger, brandy-soaked raisins, and vanilla extract (by "fold" I mean stir gently until mixed by bringing the bottom up to the top and making sure to scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl). Fold in the egg whites until just mixed. The batter will by light and airy and have some faint white ribbons.

Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the head to 350 degrees and bake for another 30 minutes. Let it cool completely on a wire rack before frosting.

To make the cream cheese frosting, beat all the ingredients in a medium bowl until they're thick and creamy. Frost the cake immediately after, while the frosting is still lukewarm and pliable from beating.

If you're not sure how to frost a cake, watch this tutorial from Cook's Illustrated.

I think cream cheese frosting tastes best cold, so after frosting the cake I store it in the refrigerator for an hour or two. Make sure to cover it with a cake container or, lacking that, a cardboard box or anything large enough to cover the cake without touching it.

Store leftovers, if you have any, in the refrigerator.

A Team Effort

2010-11-07T11:08:00.000-08:00

Last night I realized that good pie becomes great pie when it converts the eater into a believer. Comments like "I never liked pumpkin pie, but I think I do now," the classic request of "Can I have the recipe?" and, my favorite, "I'm usually a cake person, but not tonight!" are all proof that deep inside where desserts are the currency of memory, an individual's tastes are turning.

I've been thinking about conversions in the physical sense, too. Not quite lead into gold, but turning one dish into another when the mood strikes, or, as in my case, when I forget the main ingredient at the store after scouring my list three times to make sure I didn't forget my main ingredient at the store. "Why am I such a space cadet?" I moaned when I discovered that I'd forgotten pecans for mocha pecan pie. "You can go back to the store, you know. It's right around the corner," said sensible Jason. But I didn't want to go back to the store. I wanted to start baking now.

It was noon. I had four pies to finish by six pm for Anne Germanacos's reading at Elliott Bay Bookstore. It takes me three to four hours to make one pie. Multiply that by four and divide that number in half to account for my wizard-like ability to multi-task (thanks to years of busting my hump for Hugo House) and you've got yourself about six hours. No time to go back to the store. No time to lose. On the menu: whiskey apple crumble, pear gruyere, pumpkin chiffon, and not-pecan pie. I started on the fruit pies, hoping inspiration would strike.

Note to self: don't plan on cooking with booze until checking to make sure you actually have booze. Whiskey-tooth should be a term because Jason certainly has one. Out with the nearly empty bottle went my plans for whiskey apple pie. I had already made the sour cream bottom crust that Bubbie's Homemade Pies called for. Next, I scoured my freezer for a suitable berry. Cherry? No, too bright for this blustery day. Peaches? No, I'm saving those for that day at the end of February when we'll need a pick-me-up from seasonal depression. Blueberries? Blueberries! My parents have an unending supply of fresh berries from the bushes that line their driveway. I was the lucky recipient of a five-pound vacuum-sealed bag of them this August. I've been eyeing the maple-blueberry pie with cornmeal crust from Ken Haedrich's Pie for a couple years. That's two years too long. Instead of a cornmeal crust, I'd use Bubbie's sour cream dough.

But what to do about a top crust? I didn't have time to make more pastry. That's when oats came to the rescue once again, just like they've been rescuing me all fall. I'd make an oat crumble top similar to the whiskey crumble top of that ill-fated apple pie. Flour, rolled oats, brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, and a stick of butter. Fifteen pulses in the food processor and presto! Instant top crust.

That's how an accident made the best blueberry pie I've ever eaten. It's a more modest specimen than other pies--about five inches shorter than my mile-high apple pie and immeasurably denser than my angel-light pumpkin chiffon pie--and the oat crust, while cute, isn't going to be the most photogenic offering at any party. What it lacks in showmanship, it makes up with taste: a very blueberry blueberry, intensified by maple, framed by tender galette-style dough and toasted oat crumble. My usual complaint about store-bought blueberries is that they taste like little sacs of blue flavored water. Not these blueberries. Not this pie. It's terribly out of season, I know, so I have no idea how you're going to find blueberries as good as mine. Maybe in the freezer section? Maybe you too have magnanimous relatives with freezers full of blueberries? Take advantage of them. After all, it takes a team effort to make pie this great.

Maple-Blueberry & Oat Crumble Pie with Sour Cream Crust

For the crust:

1 cup of all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon of sugar

pinch of salt

1 stick (1/2 cup) of cold unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch chunks

1/2 cup very cold sour cream

For the crumble:

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

3/4 cup rolled oats (not quick-cooking)

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 stick (1/2 cup) of cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch chunks

For the filling:

3 cups blueberries (fresh or partially thawed)

1/4 cup maple syrup

2 tablespoons sugar

1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

The crust: In a medium bowl, mix flour, salt, and sugar. Using your hands, toss the butter with the flour mixture. Then cut the butter into the flour by rubbing it between your thumbs and fingers, letting it fall back into the bowl, gathering more, rubbing more, until the mixture resembles course sand and no butter chunk is bigger than a pea. Make a well in the middle of the mixture and pour the sour cream into it. Toss the flour and fat with the sour cream until the dough is moist and sticks together in one large lump. Cover in plastic wrap, press into a thick disc, and refrigerate for at least an hour.

To mix dough in a food processor, pulse flour mixture and butter together in short bursts until the butter is about the size of a pea. Add the sour cream and pulse on short bursts until dough forms. Don't over mix! Remove the dough, form it into a ball, wrap it in plastic, press it into a thick disc, and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Before preparing the filling, roll the dough out on waxed paper to 1/4 inch thickness. This dough is quite wet, so you'll probably need to use more flour than usual to dust the waxed paper and rolling pin. If you have a pastry scraper, use it to lift the dough and turn it 180 degrees on the paper between the first three or four rolls of the rolling pin. That will help keep it from sticking to the paper when you pull it off.

Invert the rolled-out dough over a 9-inch pie plate and peel the wax paper off. Gently tuck the pastry into the pan, taking care not to stretch it. Trim the overhanging edge with scissors so that it hangs no longer than one inch over the lip of the plate and form an upstanding ridge by tucking it in with your fingers. Refrigerate for at least 15 minutes while you prepare the crumble crust and filling.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

The crumble: Measure the flour, oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt into a food processor and pulse to combine. Add the chunked butter to the mixture. Combine with ten to fifteen one-second pulses until the mixture resembles coarse sand. Refrigerate while preparing the filling.

The filling: In a medium bowl, combine the blueberries and maple syrup. In a small bowl, combine the sugar, cornstarch, and cinnamon, then stir the mixture into the blueberries along with the lemon juice. Turn the filling into the chilled pie shell, smoothing the fruit with a spoon. Bake in the center of the oven on 400 degrees for 25 minutes. Then remove the pie from the oven and spread the top with all of the oat crumble. It should cover the blueberries completely and be about 1/4 inch thick. Return the pie to the oven and bake on 350 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes until the crumble is toasted and brown and the blueberry juices bubble thickly at the edge.

Transfer the pie to a wire rack and let cool for at least one hour before serving. If there are any leftovers, cover them with a dishtowel and leave them on the kitchen counter.

November Pie & Poetry Events

2010-11-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

Here's the deal: if you come to Anne Germanacos's reading this Saturday, November 6 at Elliott Bay Book Company, you can have a piece of my homemade pie. Really! Anne hired me to make pies for the party that follows her reading. Further proof that pie fans are generous, stylish, and smart. More info about Anne, her debut collection of short stories, and her reading here.

The following Tuesday, November 9 at 8 pm, Poetry Northwest is celebrating the release of its new issue at the legendary Blue Moon Tavern. Contributors Ed Skoog, Rebecca Hoogs and yours truly will read poems from the issue and poems by Theodore Roethke, who used to hang out there. The place is a legend, especially among writers, but it's the sort of bar I don't usually go into alone. Read "Some Kind Words About the Blue Moon" to find out why. All the more reason you should join me.

On Friday, November 12, I will write you a poem for a paltry sum if you come to Make a Book Tonight, a party to benefit Seattle Center for Book Arts. Seriously. I will write you a poem for, like, ten bucks. That's a steal! That's cheaper than my pies! The party is in the printmaking studio at Pratt Fine Arts Center (1902 South Main Street, Seattle) from 5 to 10 pm. More info here.

Plain Goodness

2010-10-28T23:44:00.000-07:00

I know I just wrote about oatmeal. I also just wrote about Molly Wizenberg's blog, Orangette, which is the first food blog I ever read and remains the best written of my blogroll. I shouldn't repeat myself, but hell--her oatmeal pancakes deserve some special attention. Not just because they are what's truly been fueling my frenzied grad-school mornings (no matter what I said about those oatmeal cookies--they're delicious but too akin to dessert to be true brain food) but also because when I made a batch this Sunday with the intention of eating them all week, they disappeared immediately. Not in polite single-file, but in doubles down the gullets of my friends, who ate them with squash, chantrelles, and arugula from my garden. That proves these pancakes are versatile. What about those friends, the ones who have been texting and e-mailing and begging for the recipe ever since? They prove I'm not the only one who loves these pancakes. That's why I'm going to do it. I'm going to be a superfan and mention Orangette and oatmeal twice in one month.

Orangette's oatmeal pancakes. Who could have known that such a lowly breakfast treat could become the one thing that keeps me in complex carbohydrates? When they aren't being gobbled up by my friends, I've reheated them in the toaster, slathered them in apple butter, and scarfed them like a sandwich on the way to school. By the time I walk a block, they're down the hatch and happy.

"Hearty" is an adjective I like to throw around when oatmeal is on the menu, and that's what these pancakes are. They're also soft, cakey, slightly chewy, buttery sweet, a little salty. "Virtuous" is another oatmeal-worthy adjective, but not when it comes to these pancakes. A whole stick of butter binds the batter, so they can't pretend to be heath food. The fat is important. It's what makes breakfast stick to my bones until noon.

In her memoir A Homemade Life, Wizenberg says she got the recipe from her mother, who had the temerity to ask for it after eating them at a bed and breakfast somewhere-or-other, I can't remember where because I keep skipping the story to go straight for the recipe. I do know that the original recipe was a bit bland until Wizenberg doctored it into its present robust state. I've done a little doctoring myself, but only to make the recipe a bit more convenient. She calls for soaking rolled oats in buttermilk overnight. When I can't plan ahead (which is always), I immerse quick-cooking oats in milk while the frying pan heats. I like the texture even better. Those of you who eat gluten-free know you'll need to find oats that haven't been contaminated with wheat, which isn't so hard now that Bob's Red Mill products have their own quarter-aisle at practically every store in Seattle. Instead of wheat flour, I substitute gluten free flour mix or buckwheat flour depending on whatever I have in the pantry. Gluten-free or gluten-full: either makes a perfect pancake. For the past couple weeks, I've been so busy that that's all I want from food. Not perfection. Pancake.

Oatmeal Pancakes

adapted from Orangette

2 cups quick cooking oats

2 cups milk or buttermilk (water will do in a pinch)

1/2 cup all-purpose flour, buckwheat flour, or gluten free flour mix

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 large eggs, lightly beaten

1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted but not hot (halve this for a lower-fat version)

In a medium bowl, soak the oats in milk while you warm a nonstick or cast iron skillet over medium heat. Once hot, melt a small gob of butter in the pan and swirl it around to get an even coat. Scoop about a 1/4 cup of batter into the pan, taking care not to crowd each pancake. When the edges look set (they'll curl up slightly from the pan) and the underside is brown, flip the pancakes. Cook the second side until brown.

Re-butter the skillet and repeat with more batter. Serve with apple butter, jam, maple syrup, or plain old perfect butter. They make a great gluten-free alternative to dinner rolls, too. Makes about 12 pancakes.

A Bookmark

2010-10-21T08:49:00.000-07:00

Instead of "placeholder," I'll call this a bookmark. These pictures aren't a substitute for writing; they're a reminder that I want to pick up where I left off when I have more time.

Time. I wish I knew the recipe for how to make it. If they sold it at the grocery store, I'd pick up a jumbo pack. Use half of it now and freeze half of it for later, right next to the pork loin, chicken bones, and summer blueberries from my folks' house. Time! The essential ingredient.

Unboring Oatmeal: A Manifesto

2010-10-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

Besides my name, the only detail that hasn't changed about my Blogger profile since starting Good Egg in May of 2008 is the part were I say, "I don't like cooking magazines that turn food into a fetish, a status symbol or an accessory. Food shouldn't be a fetish. It should be what feeds you." I think it's interesting that those are as close to fightin' words as I get on this blog yet I've never directly addressed them, probably because food writing isn't usually the sort of genre where one expects to find argument. Quite the opposite. Food writing, at least in glossy magazines like Bon Appetit, Saveur, and the late Gourmet, might allude to conflict in order to lend the story some spice, but it usually assumes that you're already on the side of the righteous. That is, that you're one of those people with a taste for the organic, the exotic, the local, the high-quality grocery and the gourmet street fare. I value all these things, yes, but I don't like feeling as if I'm a member of the church of food and that Gourmet is our hymnbook.

I also dislike how food magazines make "good taste" seem like a commodity, as if you can buy it at the grocery store and serve it to your friends just like you can buy truffle oil or Kobe beef. Or how those of us who like food writing have probably read a lushly photographed story that follows one of these formulas:

Storyline A: the author goes to a foreign country, finds a savvy guide to show him/her all the best places to buy X, then experiences a homecooked, traditional meal where family and food warm the heart and feed the soul, proving once again that food is the ultimate universal language.
Storyline B: the author plunders his/her mother's/father's/grandparent's recipe box for an old favorite, one that reminds them of being happy and safe and well fed, updates it for a gourmet audience and adds a funny/tragic (tragicomic!) anecdote for good measure.
Storyline C: the author travels to an American locale that might as well be a foreign country, where the author experiences unpretentious downhome meals and discovers that all Americans are really pretty cool, even Republicans. Especially Republicans who like to cook.

I would go on, but I stopped reading food magazines a couple years ago and I can't confidently generalize any more. My point is that food writing, as a genre, has conventions. They're particularly obvious in food magazines.

For example, there's the inevitable happy ending to the food story. That's the part where the author learns about family or community or the earth (usually from the natives), or moralizes about them, or some combination of the two. "Happily ever after" is a convention of food writing because it feels good to read, which means it sells magazines.

I admit, I like seeing how general decency can be found around tables the world over. I like reading about amazing dishes with foraged or hunted or just-picked-from-the-garden/field ingredients. This fantasy feels so much more attainable than the fantasies of lifestyle magazines like Wallpaper, or women's magazines like Vogue. The thing that's so cool about food writing is that it comes with a recipe, and if the recipe is written well you can actually make what the author sampled in that terrific story about X.

Food writing is interactive in a way most other magazine writing isn't, but it's also limited by the need to appetize. I mean, who wants to make the blueberry pie recipe that accompanies a 15 page expose on abuses of migrant blueberry pickers, or a braised pork shoulder after the report from a slaughterhouse? Food writing must prepare the reader to be excited about the recipe. That's one reason it needs a happy ending. Another reason is to sell the reader on the latest food craze, fancy equipment, gustatorial tours of Italy, and other trappings of the so-called "good life." I find the predictability of this formula condescending. Worse, it's so boring.

That's why food blogs are more interesting than food magazines: they can be just about anything they damn well please. They have the potential to be genre-busting convention inventors. They specialize. They generalize. They internalize. They freak out. They photograph. They obsess. They summarize. They feature pictures and stories by people who don't have access to the gourmet kitchens of the world. People who love to cook. People like me!

Of course, a quick survey of food blogs will show that they have their own conventions and that those conventions can be used for good or ill depending on the ability of the author to write/cook. For example, many food blogs will post a personal (possibly boring) story with maybe a few fun food facts (or misleading assumptions) or a bit of rich (or cheesy) prose about what the food tastes like, and conclude with a recipe. Throw in a few pictures of the dish (bonus for a photo of you making the dish) and you've got yourself a decent blog entry. I tend to follow this formula because it works. Anything to get the words on the page when I've got a zillion hours of homework to do and dinner to make, right?

I just said the beauty of blogs is that they can be anything we damn well please, so isn't it interesting how food bloggers also tend to follow a formula? In the absence of rules, we make rules. That's why I love moments like the one Molly Wizenberg at Orangette had a couple years ago, when she wrote about books instead of about food. It was like her blog was interrupting her blog, and then the blog interrupted again and took us back to our regularly scheduled program, Céleri Rémoulade with a side of Judith Jones. I suppose I mean for this rant about food writing to interrupt my regularly scheduled here's-what-I-made-plus-photo update, and I suppose I need this interruption because grad school is totally kicking my butt and all my old routines that worked so well for writing poems and blogs and cooking are just, well, not working so well anymore. And I'm not sure what to do, except to write whatever is on my mind when I find the time to blog, which is, of course, what you're reading right now. Have I ever said thanks for reading? Thanks.

One of the essays I read for my pedagogy class (that's the art of teaching to us non-academics) told me that we tend to learn the most when we're in periods of transition. I find that periods of transition feel a lot less scary when there's a "happily ever after" moment waiting for me at the end of the transition, which in this case my conviction that by winter quarter 2011 the roles of teacher and student will feel second nature to me. I also find that periods of transition are best weathered with a point of predictability every day, even if it's as boring as a bowl of oatmeal. So that's what I chose: a bowl of oatmeal spiked with cranberries, crystallized ginger, pecans and coconut. Every day.

This weekend, I perfected my predictability by turning it into a cookie. Breakfast and dessert to go so when I'm rushing to catch the 44 bus to the U-District that will get me to east campus on time for class (must set a good example for my students, after all), it (and me) stays in one useful piece. As for this little piece of food writing, I'd like to skip the description of what the food tastes like and go straight to the full color, lushly photographed happy ending:

Salty Oatmeal Cookies

adapted from Art of Gluten-Free Baking

Jeanne (formerly of Four Chickens blog, now of Art of Gluten-Free Baking) is an incredible gluten-free baker and super nice lady. I recommend her blog to all bakers, gluten intolerant or not. This recipe is based on one of hers. My gluten free flour mix (below) is also closely based on hers. She calls for sweet rice flour (mochiko), but I use coconut flour because it's easier to find.

12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

1 1/2 cup dark brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 3/4 cup all-purpose gluten free flour mix*

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon salt

2 cups rolled oats (gluten free; not quick cooking)

1 cup chopped fresh cranberries

1/2 cup chopped crystallized ginger

1 cup chopped pecans

shredded coconut for sprinkling

salt for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

In a medium bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, oats, and pecans. Set aside.

In a medium bowl, beat the butter for a few minutes on medium-high until light and fluffy. I'm impatient, so I set a timer. Add the sugar and beat for two more minutes, scraping down the sides. Add the vanilla extract and beat to mix in. Add the eggs one at a time and beat after each addition.

Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture, then add the cranberries and ginger, and beat just to incorporate. Make sure to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl. Jeanne says "the resulting batter is thick enough that some of the dry ingredients don't get incorporated. Do a final mix by hand to incorporate any stray dry ingredients."

To make monster-sized breakfast cookies, scoop the dough with a half cup measure, roll it into a ball, and pat it into a disc on the cookie sheet. Place the cookies four inches apart. Generously sprinkle each cookie with salt, then coconut.

Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes. As Jeanne says, "don't overbake. The cookies should have a tender interior." Allow the cookies to cool on the sheet for five minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

*All-Purpose Gluten Free Flour Mix

1 1/4 C. brown rice flour

1 1/4 C. white rice flour

1 C. tapioca flour

1 C. coconut flour

2 scant tsp. xanthan gum

Mix ingredients and store in an air-tight container in the refrigerator.

Unphotogenic

2010-10-02T15:54:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I take pictures of food in hopes that the photo will inspire a story later. Often the story never comes, so instead of a constantly updated food blog, I have an embarrassingly large collection of food photos. Twenty years from now, I doubt these plates will be nearly as evocative as a picture of, say, Jason eating toast with apple butter, or my brother distracting my dad with political debate during the most crucial moments of cooking dinner.

Taking pictures of people is hard. Not in a technical way, I mean. In a personal way. When I'm behind the camera, I'm shy. In general, I don't like to put people on the spot or make them feel like they need to be photogenic, which is probably why my photo collection has a disproportionate number of people making faces at the camera to people smiling at it. Food doesn't talk back, move around, or get irritated when you zoom in for the fiftieth shot, so when a photogenic plate appears on my table, it sometimes gets cold waiting for the photoshoot to end.

Come to think of it, some food is camera shy too. Meat, for example. It's hard to get a decent photo of meat that doesn't look like a pile-up of body parts. Or this lima bean puree I've been making and re-making because Jason keeps eating it up. It has a gray-white baby food sort of texture that doesn't look the least bit appetizing on camera, but up close on a spoon or a chip or a slice of bread with sharp cheddar cheese, it's quite charming. When warm, lima bean puree resembles nothing so much as the best mashed potatoes I've ever made, and they need less doctoring. Instead of gobs of sour cream and butter and liberal splashes of whole milk to loosen the starches, lima bean puree only needs a half stick of butter, salt, and a little lemon do the trick. Sage smartens it up a bit. A little chicken stock doesn't hurt either. And the best part, as far as my photographic aspirations are concerned: even cold, it's delicious.

Lima Bean Puree with Sage Butter

adapted from Bon Appetit

15 ounces dried lima beans (or 30 ounces of frozen lima beans)

6 cups water or chicken stock

2 garlic cloves, minced

three large sprigs of sage

5 tablespoons sage butter (recipe below) or unsalted butter, room temperature

juice of 1/2 a lemon

salt and pepper

If using dried lima beans, cover them in two to three cups of water per cup of beans and boil for two minutes. Remove the pot from heat, cover it, and let sit for two hours. The lima beans will expand and soften.

Boil the frozen or reconstituted lima beans in 6 cups of chicken stock (water is fine in a pinch). Add garlic and sage to the pot and boil for 20 minutes. Strain, reserving the cooking liquid. Remove the sage sprigs.

Puree the lima beans, sage butter, and lemon juice in a food processor, adding tablespoons of the cooking liquid as needed to create consistency that's not as soft as hummus but not as firm as mashed potatoes. Salt and pepper to taste.

Before reheating in a microwave or on medium stove heat, stir in a couple tablespoons of water or chicken stock.

Sage Butter

a handful of sage leaves, roughly chopped

1 stick unsalted butter at room temperature

In a small bowl, combine sage and butter with a pastry cutter. When the sage is evenly mixed into the butter, gather the mixture up and roll it into a thick log with your hands. Use right away or store in the fridge (I'm not sure how long it will last, but let's guess a month). Sage butter can also be frozen for future use. Just wrap it in plastic and seal it in a Ziploc bag or freezer container.

A Placeholder

2010-09-30T18:15:00.000-07:00

This week will be blog free. Starting graduate school and teaching English 131 have taken all my attention. I hope you'll consider this photo an IOU...and a prediction of my fall quarter report card.

Apples to Apples

2010-09-21T23:17:00.000-07:00

It's 11:18 pm and I just watched High Noon with Jason instead of doing my homework. Yep, I have homework. Starting next week I'll be a teacher in a freshman composition course at the University of Washington, but right now I'm just a procrastinating student struggling to keep up. That's why this blog post will be criminally short.

If you live in the Seattle area, I hope you can join me for 72 Days of Summer on September 22. Yep, that's tomorrow. Everything you need to know about the event is here. When I wasn't writing Good Egg this summer, I was writing poems. I'll read those and a few others, and you (I hope) will come say hi!

If you don't live in the Seattle area but can get your hands on some Gravenstein or MacIntosh apples, try baking them with a little brandy. Baked apples traditionally pair well with pork tenderloin or vanilla ice cream. I can't recommend trying all three simultaneously, but if you're adventurous of heart, go for it.

For the first time I can thank television for turning me on to a great recipe. Jason discovered these baked apples while he was waiting for the Sunday football game to start, and he asked me to make them instead of the coffee cake I was contemplating. The Huskers trounced the Huskies, but no one in our house really cared. Sometimes it's just nice to have the game on. In fact, I think the only thing more soothing than football or butter or brandy or baked apples is falling asleep on the couch in the mid-afternoon with the cat snoring away on my stomach.

Baked Apples

adapted from the recipe Lynne Vea shared on Gardening with Ciscoe

4 Gravenstein or MacIntosh apples

1 lemon, cut in half

5 tablespoons butter, softened

2 tablespoons dried cranberries

2 tablespoons fresh cranberries, chopped

1 tablespoon candied ginger, chopped

3 tablespoons toasted hazelnuts or walnuts, chopped

1/4 cup brown sugar

apple cider

brandy

1 teaspoon cinnamon blended with 2 tablespoons granulated sugar for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

To prepare each apple, slice the bottom off (just enough so the apple will sit level and secure in the baking dish), remove 1/2 inch of the peel around the stem end of the apple, and remove the core with a melon baller or paring knife. Rub the exposed fruit with lemon juice.

In a bowl, combine the butter, dried and fresh cranberries, candied ginger, nuts, brown sugar, and the juice of half a lemon. With your hands or a spoon, combine the ingredients so they form a very chunky paste.

Fill the apples with the mixture and place them cut side down in a baking dish. Pour a little apple cider and brandy over each of them so that the juice just covers the bottom of the baking dish. Sprinkle the tops with the cinnamon sugar. Bake in the middle of the oven for 20-30 minutes or until the apples are tender.

Serves 4, warm or cold. I like to spoon the buttery, brandied juices over the apples before serving.

An Excerpt from Wildcraft

2010-09-09T17:14:00.000-07:00

Grilled Oysters with Olive Oil

1 dozen fresh Yaquina Bay oysters

1/2 cup olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

1 large clove garlic

squeeze lemon

fresh ground pepper

First, let’s admit that writing poems in a cabin secluded by tangled miles of woods, no matter how gorgeous/restful/awesome (in the old-fashioned awe-full sort of way) can drive a girl batty. Let’s say stir crazy, like there’s a spoon in your guts, or cabin fever, like staying in one place for too long can give you the flu. A bedsore of the mind.

Get in the car. Go west on Highway 20 and drive like hell at 60 miles an hour until the road ends in Newport. It’s a beach town, one your parents might have taken you to as a child to show you what it is fishermen do to crabs, to buy you something made out of plastic and shell-shaped, or made out of shell and bell-shaped. Maybe your folks took you to Newport to put your feet in the water, to take a picture, to feel that day’s peculiar hours expand and expel from their bodies like warm air. You go to Newport now to feel that vacancy, that space.

Amidst the souvenir shops you’ll see arrows that point the way to ships that sell their catches straight off the dock. If you’re looking for oysters, ignore the arrows. Head for the seafood seller on the corner, the one that smells like ice and scales from two blocks away. Buy one dozen large oysters and ask the vendor to put them on ice for you. It’s about an hour drive to the cabin; you’ll want to keep them as alive as you can. After that, don’t dally in Newport. For the rest of September the bars won’t serve oyster shooters because there’s a red tide, knowledge of which makes you ask the vendor at the seafood shop if it’s safe to eat the local ones you’re buying. “Oh sure,” he says, “just cook them.” You have a feeling he wouldn’t have said anything if you hadn’t asked.

Place the plastic bag of oysters on the floorboards of your car. Drive home. Don’t the trees look greener when oysters are on the menu? You’ve often said they’re the perfect food: more protein and zinc and less fat per ounce than any other naturally occurring food source. Because of that and because of the conquering stance you take when you eat them*, oysters are the fastest cure for malaise and self doubt you’ve ever encountered.

To grill oysters on a charcoal barbecue, wait until the coals are gray and feathery at the edges, then place the oysters cup up (so the shell will hold the liquor) and wait. They may not cook at the same time, or they may. Their ways are a mystery to you. Compensate by paying close attention. When a shell starts to spit (you’ll hear the hiss on the coals) take a sturdy but thin knife** and some gloves (the oyster may be too hot to handle) and run the knife around the edge of the shell. You’re looking for an open slit, a sign that the oyster is almost done cooking. It might be tiny. You might have to force it to open. Slip your knife into the slit and use that point of purchase to force the shell further. Even in death, the oyster is stubborn. If this is going to be your oyster, you must be more stubborn.

Once you’ve loosened the shell, you’ll be able to pry it completely off. If possible, do this without spilling the liquor. Spoon a dollop of olive oil on top of the oyster*** and let it cook a half minute or so longer. Retrieve it from the grill. When it's cool enough to touch, grab the shell with your bare hands and hoist the tender mollusk down your eager throat. You'll feel better already.

* Feet firmly ground-planted, with the halfshell held between forefinger and thumb so that no liquor escapes and wastes itself on the ground, then, with elbow pointed and head tilted back so you can see the north star (or is that a satellite?), bring the shell to your lips and tip the oyster into your mouth. You believe it is a crime to be polite with oysters, to let them slide down the gullet unchewed, so you chew. You chew and you chew.

** An oyster shucking knife if you have it, but since you don’t, Chicago Cutlery will do.

*** To make the olive oil mixture, smash the salt into one clove of garlic with a mortar and pestle, then add the olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, and ground pepper.

Settling Into Green

2010-09-04T16:22:00.000-07:00

Pictured: Shotpouch Cabin, bookcovers & thread, hiking trails, wood sorrel, blackberries, sword ferns, a giant black and white bug that tried to turn my rainboot into an insect condo, apples from the Shotpouch orchard, Jaime McGuigan's quinoa salad (with mint from the Shotpouch Cabin garden and nasturtiums from Newport), grapevines, ingredients for green curry with sorrel.

Not pictured: Mad Men marathons, basil-mint pesto, one coyote, eight garter snakes, countless bats and mosquitoes, no cougars, lots of stinging nettles, how much we miss the internet, a poem or two or three.

All is well in the semi-wilderness.

Wildcraft

2010-08-29T12:11:00.000-07:00

Finally, I bought a new camera. It has more bells and whistles than the last one, but so far my pictures look like the sort of pictures I usually take. I shouldn't be surprised; a fancy camera can't change the particular way I look through a viewfinder. Special thanks to Heather, who lent me her photos these past couple months.

Technically, summer isn't over until September 23, but around here we're already slinging coats into the backseat of the car whenever we leave the house. Nights are cool. So are some of the days. This morning I watered my garden even though it looks like it's going to rain.

An embarrassment of riches. I've always liked that phrase. I associate it with A Moveable Feast, my favorite Hemingway book. Can't you just see Hemingway and his pretty first wife enjoying a traveler's picnic of bread and wine and cheese on a sunny riverbank somewhere in France between the wars, and then going back to their apartment to write or have sex or drink more wine? Maybe because I knew the marriage wasn't going to last, that WWII was just around the corner, that Hemingway would get old and fat and suicidal, maybe that's why his memoir feels so incredibly alive and impossibly romantic. I love the phrase "a moveable feast" because it describes the sort of riches we can take with us wherever to go. Good company. A bottle of wine. A book. That calm feeling that accompanies the end of the season.

"An embarrassment of riches" comes to mind because Jennifer Borges Foster and I were awarded another writing residency. This one is on a nature preserve about 40 miles west of Corvallis, Oregon. It's a little more rustic than Soapstone was. It doesn't have an internet connection, so I probably won't blog for a couple weeks.

We leave tomorrow morning.

The plan seems simple: forage for edible plants in the woods that surround the cabin. Cook them. Write about them. Make a book. We're calling it "Wildcraft." Jessica Bonin drew a the cover. Check out the photo, below. Isn't it gorgeous? Jen printed 93 copies on her Gocco.

Yesterday I found out that poison hemlock grows pretty close to the cabin, so we need to be extremely careful. That's the stuff that killed Socrates. For that reason and because we're very amateur foragers, we plan to stick to the obvious foodstuffs: blackberries, mint, wild spinach. I hope we find fiddlehead ferns and nettles, but it's not springtime so I'm not holding my breath.

Cooking has been a nuisance this summer. When I'm writing, all I want is a beer and peanut butter toast. It isn't the healthiest diet, but it's efficient. Lucky for me, Jason's pretty strict about cooking a real meal for dinner. When he gets home from work I know writing time is over and foraging time has begun. Together, we make meals out of whatever's in the kitchen. Our kitchen, I should say. He moved in a couple months ago. So far, he's my favorite roommate. Jason likes poached chicken, barbecue salmon, roast beets and zucchini and potatoes with rosemary, and he doesn't mind having them week in and week out. When it comes to food, he isn't easy to feed (being gluten intolerant and all) but he's pretty easy to please. That's one thing I like about him. That, and he does the dishes. And loves my cat. And me.

Two poems inspired easy meals this week. The first was cold cucumber mint soup from Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing in Odessa. In his elegy for Osip Mandelstam, he includes the whole recipe. Confidential to Ilya: you forgot to tell me what to do with the 2 tablespoons of rice flour. It's okay. I left them out. The soup was still lovely.

The second was from "Wormhole Theory," a poem in Lucia Perillo's Inseminating the Elephant. On Thursday, I read this poem over and over, trying to figure out how it works. In it there's a passage that goes, "honeydew melon served the way I love it:/wrapped in the paper-thin slices of fat/that choked my father's heart." Though I still haven't figured out why the poem is so good, I was at least able to duplicate this simple recipe. It's not even a recipe, just an image; "wrapped" is direction enough. Honeydew, prosciutto, blue cheese. I think I like it better without the cheese, just like Lucia.

Making pie, however, hasn't been a problem. In honor of Lynn's birthday, I created a buckwheat pie crust for the peach-ginger pie I keep telling you about. Buckwheat has a toasty flavor and resilient texture that can be your friend or foe. Pancakes: friend. Waffles: foe. Buckwheat waffles are dry and stick in my throat. I don't know why. In this particular pie crust, buckwheat works. Again, I don't know why. The toastiness was tamed by the sweetness of peaches and honey. The texture was soft and crumbly, kind of like a whole wheat crust. Oh, I've left out the best part: it was gluten free.

This pie crust is a work in progress. As I perfect it, I'll update the recipe. If you make it and have any suggestions, I'd love to hear from you.

See you in mid-September!

Buckwheat Pie Crust (Gluten Free)

3 cups buckwheat (Pocono buckwheat is certified gluten free)

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

12 tablespoons cold, unsalted butter

1/2 cup Crisco

ice water

First fill a 2 cup liquid measure with about a cup of water, drop a few ice cubes in and put the whole thing in the freezer. It will chill while you prepare the rest of your crust.

Mix buckwheat, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Cut the butter and Crisco into tablespoon-sized chunks and drop them into the bowl with the flour. Use your fingers to rub the butter into the flour. I do this by scooping the mixture into my cupped hands and rubbing it firmly between my thumb and fingers, letting the mixture fall back into the bowl. Continue until the mixture resembles coarse sand and the butter is in smallish chunks. It's okay to have a few big chunks. Most should be about the size of a pea.

Pour ice water onto the dough in a thin stream. Use a circular motion so that the water hits different parts of the dough. I pour for three or four seconds, for probably 1/4 cup of liquid, but I don't measure anymore so it's hard to say. Try to go by feel--mix the dough with your hands, then press a handful of it together. If it sticks together easily and is slightly moist, you've added enough water. If it falls apart or feels dry, add more water.

NOTE: It might not matter if you handle the dough too much because, unlike a traditional flour crust, there is no gluten to gum up the works. I need to do more experiments with gluten free pie crusts to figure out how they should be handled. For now, I'm handling them as if they have gluten.

Gather the dough into two balls, wrap them in plastic, flatten them into thick discs and refrigerate for an hour. This will make the dough easier to roll out.

Roll the dough out on wax paper, using tapioca or rice flour to coat the paper and rolling pin. Buckwheat dough benefits from being rolled slowly. It cracks easily, but it also mends easily. Keep that in mind when you flip the dough over the pie plate and peel the wax paper off. The edges of the crust will probably fall off, but that's okay. Calmly tuck the dough into the plate, then reattach the edges of the crust and fold them over to form an upstanding ridge (assuming you're going to make a top rust out of cookie-cutter shapes, as I describe below; if you go the traditional top crust route, wait to form an upstanding ridge until the top crust is on the pie). Refrigerate the bottom crust while you assemble the pie filling and top crust.

After you've poured the filling into the bottom crust, add the top crust.

NOTE: The top crust could be placed on top of the pie the same way we placed the bottom crust in the pan, but I was worried that it would fall apart and look a little more rustic than I wanted it to. I opted for cutting smaller rosettes out of the rolled out dough with a medium-sized biscuit cutter. The smaller pieces held their shapes when I transferred them to the top of the pie, and they looked cute.

Bake the pie as you usually would. Most of my recipes call for 20 minutes on 425, then 30-35 minutes on 375. The buckwheat crust puffed up a bit and set just like a wheat flour crust. Buckwheat's bluish cast makes it harder to tell if the top crust is over-browning, so keep an eye on it for the last 20 minutes. If the crust starts to get too brown, cover those spots with foil.

Allow the pie to cool for at least two hours.

72 Days of Summer

2010-08-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm throwing a party at the Fremont Abbey Arts Center. You & yours are invited.

Thanks to a grant from 4Culture of King County, I had the good fortune to spend the summer writing poems. On September 22, the last day of the season, I'm hosting a reading to celebrate the completion of my first book-length manuscript. It's called Supper So Clean.

Kary Wayson and Martha Silano, two of my favorite poets, will also read. Jason Dodson (from the Maldives) and Tomo Nakayama (from Grand Hallway) will round out the evening with sets of new songs. If we're lucky, Molly Moon will show up with her fancy ice cream truck to sell us some tasty treats. It ain't summer if there ain't ice cream, you know?

Admission is pay-what-you-can. Doors open at 7 pm; the show starts at 7:30 pm. The Fremont Abbey Arts Center is located at 4272 Fremont Ave N. Seattle, WA. I hope you can come!

TV Dessert

2010-08-26T17:29:00.001-07:00

On Tuesday, pie & I were on TV.

Before the taping I asked my friends for advice about what to wear on camera. "Pin your hair up so we can see your face," said Jen. "Wear cowboy boots, not sandals," said (a different) Jen. "Don't wear floral and don't wear your bare arms. Michelle Obama does that all the time and I don't think it's attractive," said Grandma Lebo. "Wear your rust colored She-Bible dress and tell She-Bible. Maybe they'll give you a discount the next time you shop!" said (another, totally different) Jen.

To summarize:

1) When appearing on television, wear something bright and solid, cute but comfortable.

2) I have a lot of friends named Jen.

According to the host of Northwest New Day, ginger is "really coming into its own right now." That makes no sense. I'm pretty sure what she meant to say was this: everyone should go out and make a ginger peach pie before peaches go out of season.

On Finally Saying Goodbye, Finally

2010-08-18T17:15:00.000-07:00

How many ways should I say goodbye to Richard Hugo House? I can't decide. It's been a month since my last day at work, but every day since then my to-do list has included "write about RHH/GF pie," as if there's something more to say. Maybe it's the gluten free pie crust I served at my goodbye party that really wants to be written about, and blogging about saying "so long" to the House is just a vehicle for pie. Or maybe it's the other way around--the pie is my excuse to get your attention for twenty minutes so I can tell you about what it's like to quit a job I loved.

When people ask my why I write about food, I usually say "because it's a way to focus my writing on something other than myself. And because it's fun." Emily Dickinson said it better when she wrote "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---/Success in Circuit lies." She means (I think she means) that when visiting the house of writing, you should always enter through the side door. In other words, writing about food is a way to write about other, often personal, matters in a way that is palatable to complete strangers.

When people ask what my poems are about, I usually just say "me."

These are the kind of conversations I got to have with my co-workers for the four years I clocked in at Hugo House. I started my first RHH job (there were four) when I was 23 years old. It was the late summer of 2006, right before the first season of the re-vamped Hugo Literary Series, a little less than four months after founding artistic director Frances McCue handed the reins over to Lyall Bush, three years before Sue Joerger became executive director, two years before the Great Recession, one year after graduating from college and four before entering graduate school. I'd met Jason only a couple weeks before. That's a coincidence and not a coincidence--change comes in cycles, after all. If I said it came on a cycle, than I could say that love and work arrived on a tandem bike. You might even let me get away with that terrible pun. Anyway, before meeting the boy and landing the job, I had concocted a plan to travel to Chile and Argentina, then move to Chicago because it wasn't New York and it wasn't the Northwest. Instead, I fell in love and got a literary job, which is exactly what I had hoped to do in all those places that weren't Seattle. Instead, I'm still in Seattle.

On the occasion of my last day at the House, I made everyone pie. Transition is a time for experimentation, so I concocted my first gluten free pie crust from a mixture of almond flour, butter, sugar, baking powder, salt and an egg. It toasted perfectly, crumbled like a graham cracker crust and complimented the peaches and blueberries from that week's CSA delivery. Jason worked up the courage to take a bus from Ballard to Capitol Hill, no small feat when food still makes him sick at least once a day. Emily opened the bar and served "The Big Lebo-wski," a sprightly mix of Lillet, club soda and orange zest on ice. I put some Fleetwood Mac on the stereo and we all pretended like this wasn't goodbye. Brian McGuigan is a food snob (you would be too if you were married to Jaime McGuigan) so he's suspicious of anything that ends in a hyphen and the word "free." Still, he dug into my pie, if only so he could find another reason to tease me. Imagine my delight when he said it was "the bomb." A least, I think that's what he said. His mouth was pretty full. Jason enjoyed the pie until later that evening, when he found out that almonds give him tummy aches too.

I keep looking for a single image to sum up those four years, but of course I can't. What comes to mind isn't literary. It's wallpaper. I mean literally wallpaper. I saw it near the end of my first day of training as front desk and volunteer coordinator, way back in January 2007. Bruce, my predecessor, was tired of talking; I was tired of listening. There were still a million things to learn. The 999,999th thing: theater lights. He led me to the utility closet where three black boxes were bolted to the wall, blinking green LEDs and looking stoic and secretive. He was pointing to the switches I was supposed to throw in order to power the house lights when I saw it--the wallpaper. Light blue, embossed with gold in raised, square patterns, like designer braille. It was lovely. Just a square foot swatch was visible. Everywhere else had been painted black by some well-intentioned past employee.

As Bruce talked I pretended to listen, nodded when expected, etc, but was totally lost in the wallpaper. Who thought painting over such pretty paper was a good idea? Why was this closet wallpapered in the first place? Who was here before us and what did they use this room for? The building that houses Hugo House was an apartment building, then a mortuary, then a theater, and now a literary arts center, remodeled and updated whenever there was money or, in the absence of money, volunteers. Later, I noticed the same raised bumps under the whitewash of the stairwell. The wallpaper was all over the house, lurking just beneath a few layers of paint! Isn't it strange that Hugo House used to be someone's house? That it used to be new? That people used to actually live there?

That makes me think about how Sara, the woman we hired to take my place, will one day soon (if she hasn't already) look around my cubicle, my files, my little section of the server and think, "why did Kate do things that way? Why not this way? Was she nuts? Would this make sense if I knew the history?" To solve the mystery all she has to do is call me, but I think Sara is the sort who likes to figure things out for herself. I bet she's already developing her own systems and records and ways of doing things right on top of all the data I left behind, and I bet she's doing a great job. That's the thing about leaving an opportunity like Hugo House--it creates an opportunity for someone else. After four years of long days, learning, and loving almost every minute of it, that's as good a reason as any to say goodbye.

Almond Flour Pie Crust (Gluten Free)

3 cups almond flour

2 tablespoons sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter

one large, beaten egg

NOTE: Bob's Red Mill almond flour is available online and at grocery stores like Whole Foods. Finer almond flours are available for purchase online, but I haven't tried them with this recipe yet. Almond meal is not almond flour--it is coarser and mixed with almond skins--but it's cheaper and works okay in this recipe.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Combine almond flour, sugar, salt and baking soda in a medium bowl. Cut the butter into eight smallish chunks and toss them into the mixture. Use your fingers to rub the butter into the flour. I do this by scooping the mixture into my cupped hands and rubbing it firmly between my thumb and fingers, letting the mixture fall back into the bowl. Do this until the mixture resembles coarse sand and no butter chunk is larger than a pea. Then add the egg all at once and mix it in with your hands until all of the mixture is moist. Let the dough chill in the refrigerator for 15 minutes.

Pat the dough into a pie plate until it evenly coats the bottom and sides, and smooth the rim of the crust with your fingers. Chill the crust for another 10 minutes, then bake on 350 for 15 to 20 minutes. The crust is done when it is golden brown, slightly puffy, and fragrant. Set aside on a wire rack. When the crust is cool, use the following recipe to make the pie pictured at the top of this page.

Fresh Fruit and Marscarpone Pie with Almond Flour Crust

one recipe almond flour crust (above)

2/3 cup marscarpone cheese

1/2 cup sour cream

1/3 cup clover honey

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

large pinch of nutmeg

one or two cups of fresh fruit (try peach and blueberry, plum and pluot, blackberries, or any other high quality, in season fruit)

Combine marscarpone and sour cream with a hand mixer. Add honey and vanilla extract. Spoon it into the cooled pie shell, smooth the top with a cake spatula and sprinkle a little nutmeg over everything. Place fruit in concentric rings until the pie is completely covered. Serve chilled. Unlike most pies, leftovers can be stored in the refrigerator.

Best in Show

2010-08-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

Lesson #1: If you enter a pie in a pie contest, you should stay to see who wins.

On Monday I participated in the Cake vs. Pie smackdown at Cakespy and made the mistake of leaving early, overwhelmed by the friendly crowd and, after seeing the competition, convinced I wasn't going to win anything anyway. I mean, my peach ginger pie was up against a bacon cherry pie! And homemade ding dongs! And tiny pecan pies with crown-shaped top crusts! And gravity defying layer cakes! So I left. Not the dumbest thing I've ever done, but close.

That's how I came to find out through e-mail that my peach ginger pie took top honors. Best in show! It's been a day since I got the news and I'm still grinning. I wish I could have been there to congratulate all the winners and try a piece of my own pie. Instead, all I can offer is the pictures Valentina Vitols took of me baking the pie (wish her luck, she's entering them in the Cakespy contest too), plus the blue ribbon recipe.

Lesson #2: Pie always wins.

Ginger Peach Pie

1 recipe double pie crust recipe (Since writing this recipe two years ago, my technique has changed but the ingredients haven't. I'll update the recipe soon. In the meantime this one is still totally trustworthy, I promise)

5 large, ripe peaches or 7 medium

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 cup clover honey

2 tablespoons peeled and finely chopped fresh ginger

1/8 teaspoon plus one pinch cayenne pepper

big pinch of powdered ginger

pinch of nutmeg

pinch of salt

4 tablespoons tapioca flour

demerara sugar (for dusting)

Make pie dough and refrigerate for at least an hour. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Roll out the bottom crust on wax paper, place it in the pie pan, and remove the wax paper by peeling it off at a sharp angle (as opposed to a 90 degree angle, which might tear the dough). Tuck the dough into the plate and let the edges hang free over the pan. Refrigerate bottom crust while preparing the filling and top crust.

Combine honey and fresh chopped ginger in a small saucepan and heat on low for 20 minutes.

While you wait you can pit and slice (but don't peel) the peaches so they're about 1/4 inch thick. Put the slices in a large bowl and pour lemon juice over them. Add cayenne, powdered ginger, nutmeg, and salt. Pour the heated honey and fresh ginger over all. Mix gently until the honey and spices are almost evenly distributed, then add the tapioca flour. Sprinkle it over the peaches so that it doesn't clump. Mix gently again, then set the bowl aside.

Roll out the top crust on wax paper and refrigerate for five minutes.

Retrieve the bottom crust and pan from the refrigerator. If using a pie bird, place the bird in the center of the pan and pile the peaches around it. The peaches will have become a bit soupy by now. When I made my prize-winning pie, I was worried that the pie would be soupy if I added all the juices, so I used just over half of them and threw the rest away. When I make this pie again, I'll use all the juices just to see what happens.

Retrieve the top crust from the refrigerator. If using a pie bird, cut an X in the center of the top crust so that each slash of the X is about 3 inches long. Center the top crust by flipping it over (so the dough side is down) and aligning the X with the beak of the pie bird. Then quickly rest the top crust on top of the pie and pie bird and remove the wax paper. You'll have to finesse the dough over the bird's shoulders, but after you do this a couple times it'll be a piece of cake.

If you're not using a pie bird, center the top crust over the pie and peel off the wax paper.

Trim off any excess dough (any crust that hangs over the pan more than 2 inches or so) and form an upstanding ridge. If you're not using a pie bird, cut large steam vents. If you are, cut small steam vents near the outer crust. I like to twirl the point of a paring knife in the dough to make perfect little circles. Brush the crust with milk and sprinkle demerara sugar generously over all.

Bake on 425 degrees for 25-30 minutes until the crust is blistered and golden. Rotate the pie 180 degrees to assure even baking, then lower the temperature to 375 degrees and bake for another 25-30 minutes. If the crust starts to get too brown, use tin foil to shield it. When the juices bubble slowly, it's done. Cool the pie on a wire rack for at least an hour and a half.

Seattle, City of Psychics

2010-08-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

I pick up the 28 to downtown Seattle via Fremont at a bus stop three blocks from my house. I never take the bus, but today I'm meeting someone downtown and I hate parking garages more than I hate taking the bus, so here I am being thrown around an aisle seat as we lurch onto Leary Avenue.

Back when I was still with my ex-boyfriend, all he had to do to irritate me was stick his nose up at public transportation because he had a car, and "cars are better." We broke up; I got a Subaru and found out that he was right. In Seattle, cars are better. Cars don't take an hour and a half to drive the four miles from Ballard to Capitol Hill. Cars don't make you stand in the weather and wait. Cars also don't force you to be considerate of complete strangers, though they should. Since I got a car, I've been sheltered. I mean that literally (I don't wait for anything in the rain. Ever.) and socially (I have little reason to interact with strangers unless I want to). Until I boarded the 28 via Fremont, I forgot how much I enjoy the chance encounters, the little dramas, the entertaining inconveniences of the public bus.

At the Fremont Bridge stop, fifty people get on. They're wearing name tags and talking to each other, and clearly are in some sort of social justice group. I eye their clipboards and think, "They can sit by me but they better not ask for any money to save the children."

Street canvassers are a menace during the summer around here. On an August afternoon a couple years ago, I was walking to the grocery store on Broadway and a canvasser tried to get my attention the way canvassers do: by forcing eye contact, saying hi, smiling, asking "would you like to save the children today?" They'd been out in droves all summer, so by then I was inured to their cheer and annoyed by their persistence. I said "nope" and kept walking. The canvasser yelled "Thanks to people like you A CHILD DIES EVERY TWO MINUTES!" at me and threw her clipboard to sidewalk. I still did not give her money.

Once, on the same street corner, I almost gave the same curt answer to a canvasser with long brown hair and a big green eyes. Then I realized it was Christine from Denver, the long lost friend I hadn't seen since we parted ways in Glasgow. We hugged and exchanged phone numbers. She didn't ask me for money. See? Not all canvassers are assholes. Some might even be your friends.

Anyway, with the addition of these canvassers or campers or whatever they are, the bus is now packed. Standing room only. At the front, people pile on in a disorganized glut. At the middle, a guy is fiddling with his phone and holding up the line. Since I am a Seattleite and feel to my core that it's uncouth to actually say something that might in any way criticize a stranger's behavior, I try to communicate with him telepathically to move it! He stays put, clearly not a psychic.

This reminds me of something my friend Sam said about New Yorkers. They're nice, he said. Nicer than Northwesterners. They just want people to be awake. They'll tell you when you need to get with the program. If this bus was in New York, people would say "move it" or "make room" out loud. I like Sam's description because I admire directness, perhaps because I'm not very good at it. I could blame this deficiency on my folks, but I believe Julian Barnes when he wrote (I'm paraphrasing here), "After you turn 25, you don't get to blame your parents anymore." Having no one to blame but myself, I send the phone fiddler another psychic signal. He moves!

All is well in aisle-land until a young woman stops traffic by staring off into space. Again, I try to move her with my mind. The guy in front of her leans toward her to indicate through body language that she should get a move on. When she doesn't notice, he turns to face the back of the bus and makes a motion as if he's going to slip around her. This is a ruse to get her to look up without saying "look up." She looks up. "Oh! Sorry!' she says, and moves along.

Then the line stops again, this time at a woman who is wearing a tie-died purple t-shirt. She's absorbed in a conversation with her girlfriend and doesn't notice the crush of people stepping on each others' toes at the front of the bus. As we pass the Swedish Cultural Center on Dexter, the driver finally shouts, "Is there any room to move back?" Not a declarative "make room" or "move back," but a polite question that could possibly be answered "no" if anyone had the balls to shout back at him. No one does, of course, and everyone moves back.

We all get comfortable just in time to pick up another five people at the Aurora stop just east of the Seattle Center. I get off at Marion with a couple from Spain who are looking for Pioneer Square. They must not have heard my psychic directions because they're walking east instead of south. But hell, it's a beautiful day in downtown Seattle and no matter where they end up there will probably be a nice place to sit down, have a drink, and feed bread to the gulls.

The meeting is fun and fast and I beat Jason home in time to have a snack ready for him when he gets off work. It's an simple cabbage salad that he likes to scoop straight out of the bowl with a potato chip. The original recipe is from Molly Wizenberg's A Homemade Life. I adapt it to suit whatever I happen to have in the pantry.

In "Here is New York," E.B. White wrote, "No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky." I haven't yet figured out what people should be willing to do if they come to Seattle to live.

Not Coleslaw (with Lemon and Black Pepper)

adapted from A Homemade Life

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar (optional)

1 clove pressed garlic

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 and 1/2 pounds of green or red cabbage

1/4 cup crumbled feta or cotija cheese (when Jason grabs the cheese block and crumbles more into the salad while I have my back turned, it's just as good)

freshly ground black pepper

Make the dressing by combining the olive oil, lemon juice, vinegar, garlic, and salt in a small jar and shaking it to combine. You could also whisk the ingredients together in a small bowl.

Remove the outer leaves from the cabbage, trim the root and slice the head into quarters. Wizenberg suggests using a sharp serrated knife to cut the cabbage as thinly as you possibly can, "as though for coleslaw." Discard the white cores.

In a large serving bowl, toss the cabbage with a couple large spoonfuls of the dressing. Add the cheese and toss to distribute evenly. Taste, add more dressing if you like, and season generously with pepper. Serve alongside a big bag of salted potato chips. Makes four servings.

What I've Discovered About My Neighborhood Since I've Been Unemployed

2010-08-03T13:50:00.000-07:00

photo by Heather Malcolm

The Dray has a weekday happy hour from 3 to 6 pm, $1 off drafts, and lots of places to sit. Today the music has been better than tolerable. I say "better than tolerable" because sometimes it's bad. Massive Attack bad. But even when the music is bad, the bar is gorgeous and I'm half deaf, so I don't mind. They have fancy German, Belgian, and local beers on tap, plus decent espresso, nice bartenders, and well behaved patrons. I mention well behaved patrons because if you walk one block down to the Reading Gaol, you'll find yourself in the midst of a meat market. Once when the boys were on tour, I met Dena, Lindsey, Carolyn and Nick for a drink there. As we went outside to bum drags off Dena's cigarette, a tiny old Irishman held the door for us and said, "Four women! How do ye manage it lad?" The comment was directed at Nick, but he was looking at us girls in that up-and-down, lascivious way only old men with cute accents can get away with. The rest of the dudes at the bar were American and even less polite. That's why I'm at the Dray, where a girl can watch soccer and check her email, or, in my case, write a few poems undisturbed. A pint of Snoqualmie Hefewizen ($3.75) goes down like a stolen beer from my Dad's fridge and the poems come easy. After finishing the first one, I text Heather: This book better write itself because I'm on summer break!

The perfection of one beer often leads to one more than I actually want to drink. This time is no exception. When Jason beats me home, he calls and lets the cat meow into the phone. This is how he tells me he's hungry. I walk home with my beer belly and early evening buzz, daydreaming about chicken.

Poached Chicken

from Diner Journal

4 or 5 pound chicken, breasts and legs separated

chicken stock

12 sprigs thyme, sage, or oregano (whatever you have on hand)

12 sprigs parsley (optional)

1 tablespoon black peppercorns

4 bay leaves

white wine

salt

Buy the chicken already separated in a fryer pack or cut a whole roaster to pieces yourself. I am by no means an expert at dismembering chicken, but I find it helpful to have a chef's knife and a pair of scissors handy. Use the scissors to cut the skin at the joint--don't cut it off, just cut through so that you can see the joint more easily. Separate wings and legs from the body by finding the joint with your knife and cutting through the cartilage. Don't damage your knife and mangle the chicken by trying to hack through bone. I usually separate the leg from the thigh in the same manner, but you can leave them whole if you want to. Cut the breasts off the bone or, if you have heavy duty kitchen shears, cut the back of the chicken off, leaving the breast bone and meat intact.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Select a roasting pan big enough to hold all the pieces snugly. Season well with salt. Add enough white wine to cover the bottom of the pan, then add enough chicken stock to cover the chicken. Place herbs, parsley, black pepper and bay leaves in the pan with the chicken so they're sort of evenly distributed around the pan. Cover the roasting pan with a lid or aluminum foil and place in the center of the oven. Poach for 45 to 55 minutes. Use a meat thermometer to make sure the chicken is done.

Serve hot or cold, on the bone or not, with mayonnaise and mustard. Jason likes cheap yellow mustard. I like whole grain.

Pie Partied Out

2010-07-29T16:20:00.000-07:00

Plum Pluot and Marscapone Pie

Ten minutes before the Commonplace Book of Pie party was supposed to start, Joe asked me to consider cutting the pie party-ers off. Not from pie or booze, God no, but from just plain getting in. "We could cap it at 100 people. What do you think?"

Sweet Cherry and Rhubarb Pie

The Hugo House Cabaret is a big space, but once you fit more than 90 people in it starts to get muggy. "Muggy" is not a word you want associated with pie. "100 sounds like a nice even number to me," I said, and a minute later Joe put a sign out on the door that read, "Sorry folks, the pie party is SOLD OUT!"

Shaker Lemon Pie

We ate fifteen pies: Raspberry Pear, Sweet Cherry Rhubarb, Honey Bear Apple Pear, Shaker Lemon, Peach Blueberry with Marscapone, Pluot & Plum with Marscapone, Sour Cherry Almond Crumble,Peach Raspberry, Lemon Meringue, Blueberry Pie, Blackberry,

Brown Butter Sage Apple, Vegan Apple, and Key Lime.

We heard from five writers: Jennifer read a true story about being trapped in snowstorm with thirty 5-year-olds and no pie, Lauren's excerpt featured a bunch of pie-making (and baby-making) ladies in Montana, David's story about infidelity a la apple pie was accompanied by slides of original comics, and Brian told us a tale about shoplifting the vanilla puddin' power of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Pies. I read from A Commonplace Book of Pie and debuted six new poems.

To the one hundred people who were willing to give up a night of perfect Seattle sunshine to sit in the dark Cabaret and listen to stories about pie: I love you crazy people.

Nectarine Blueberry and Marscapone Pie

If you came, thanks. If you bought a book, thanks again. If you loved the pie, let the bakers know! You can thank Jaime Page-McGuigan, Tamara Sellman, Rebecca Brinson, Mare Odomo, Mari Osuna, Lauren Fink and me. Of all the pies, I think Jaime's Sour Cherry Almond Crumble was the biggest hit. We didn't get any pictures before it was devoured, so you'll have to satisfy your curiosity by making it yourself.

Blueberry Pie

Sour Cherry Pie with Almond Crumble 

Copied verbatim from Smitten Kitchen

1/2 recipe All Butter, Really Flaky Pie Dough

For the almond crumble

 2/3 cup whole oats, ground to a flour in a food processor (yielding 1/2 cup oat flour)

 1/2 cup all-purpose flour 

1/2 cup sugar

 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon 

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt (you might want to first read up on kosher salts) 

3/4 cup unsalted whole almonds, coarsely ground in a food processor or chopped medium fine by hand

 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

For the sour cherry filling

 3/4 cup sugar 

3 tablespoons cornstarch 

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

 2 1/4 pounds fresh sour cherries, pitted, or 2 pounds frozen sour cherries, partially thawed

Prepare the bottom crust: Roll out the chilled pie dough into a 12 inch round. Gently fit into a 9- or 9.5-inch pie plate. Fold the edges under and crimp decoratively. Either refrigerate until firm, about 30 minutes (if you don’t wish to blind-bake the crust first) or preheat oven to 425, line dough with foil and weigh it down with pie weights. Bake until crust is light golden brown, about 30 minutes (for a more stable, crisp bottom crust). Reduce temperature to 375°F.

Prepare the crumble: Grind oats to an oat flour in a food processor (you can also swap 1/2 cup oat flour, if you have it), then add the all-purpose flour, sugar, cinnamon, salt and whole almonds. Grind them together until the nuts are coarsely ground (if you don’t have a food processor, you can chop them medium-fine by hand). Stir together with melted butter in a bowl.

Make the cherry filling: In a large bowl, mix the cherries with the sugar, cornstarch and kosher salt. Taste the mixture to see if you want more sugar than is called for.

Assemble the pie: Pour the cherries into your unbaked or blind-baked pie shell. Sprinkle the almond crumble over the cherries. Place the pie plate on a foil-lined cookie sheet. Bake for about 1 hour and 10 minutes, or until the juices are bubbling and thick. Remove to a rack to cool to room temperature before serving.

Out of Frame

2010-07-23T16:44:00.000-07:00

photo by Heather Malcolm

All week I've been working for the Centrum Writing Conference in Port Townsend, Washington. I have a room in the old army barracks at Fort Worden, which is charming and chilly and, when the fog lifts around 1:30 pm, has a spectacular view of Puget Sound. What it doesn't have is wi-fi. So instead of a blog, here is a picture of a half-painted boat and links to two interviews I was honored to give this week.

The first will be on 94.9 KUOW, Seattle's NPR affiliate, at 12:45 pm this Saturday and forever archived on the internet here. Jeremy Richards and I talked about three of my favorite bits of food literature: The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon, "August" by Mary Oliver, and A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg. And over on Alle Hall's blog About Childhood I got to talk about why I like being rejected. Really! It'll all make sense once you read the interview.

I'll be back next week with a recipe. See you then!

Live Pie

2010-07-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

By "live" I mean Johnny Carson. I mean Saturday night. I mean at the Acropolis. No wait, I don't mean at the Acropolis because that means Yanni. I mean that those of us who love pie live our lives a little sweeter and a little fatter, and we tend to be pretty friendly folks who like to attend social things like picnics and poetry readings. I mean I'll be in person, live at Hugo House on July 28 at 7 pm because I'm throwing a party just for A Commonplace Book of Pie, and I hope you can come.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you've probably read a bit about the collaboration with Bryan Schoneman that inspired me to write a book of prose poems about pie. Since the cold February day we began that project, the book has taken on a life of its own. With the help of Jennifer Borges Foster, who designed and printed the covers, the second printing of 250 copies is available for sale at fine bookstores across Seattle and around the world via Esty. I've been writing new prose poems, perfecting more pie recipes, and plotting to expand the book into a full length, full color collection. I don't plan to make another run. By the time the last of the 250 is sold, I hope to have found a publisher.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, let's get back to the party. Since pie is best served in good company, I invited an impressive line-up of local writers to create new work inspired by pie and join me onstage for the reading. Brian McGuigan, competitive eater/champion writer, is promising a slide show and storytelling performance of borderline inappropriate, totally hilarious content. David Lasky, fellow pie obsessive/former bakery employee/famous cartoonist guy, has promised to share comics that will surprise and delight and make us hungry. Jennifer Borges Foster, poet and maker of exquisite books, is going to cross the genre lines and read us some non-fiction. And finally, Lauren Fink, the thoughtful friend and talented writer who sent me the pie postcard pictured above, is going to wow us with her gorgeous prose.

And the best part: you get to eat dessert first. Five-dollar entry comes with a free piece of homemade pie by yours truly and my volunteer crew of pastry wizards. Only while supplies last, so get to Hugo House early!

If you have any special pie requests, leave a comment. See you on July 28th!

Exactly What I Wanted

2010-07-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

photo by Heather Malcolm

This might sound crazy, but I considered not going to New York for vacation and Connecticut for the poetry reading because I had heard that both states can be unbearably hot in July. When Cindy Cormier from Hill-Stead e-mailed in February to tell me my manuscript had won second place in the Sunken Garden poetry contest and that the prize was a reading in said Sunken Garden, would I come? I ecstatically said yes. I then spent March and April anxiously imagining that I would shell out cash for the plane ticket, for food, for subway and train tickets only to arrive in the sticky sultry heat of New York City where I would be so overcome by the weather that I'd spend the whole week shackled to Jessica's air conditioner, bemoaning my rotten fate to have fair skin, superheated blood, and a conditioned fear of direct sunlight. Sunshine is no joke when all you have between yourself and evil annihilating UV rays is a smattering of freckles, especially when you've been known to burn through sunscreen. Some people blossom in the heat. I whine and wilt.

Apparently all I need to beat the heat is a best friend who will double as my tour manager. When Heather agreed to come with me, my worries melted away. She approaches life with a rare blend of competence, exuberance, focus and impulsiveness that makes her a great person to take anywhere, but especially to New York. Being able to navigate Penn Station through 4th of July crowds in wedge heels and 30 pounds of luggage without breaking a sweat or succumbing to claustrophobia is just one of her many talents.

On Sunday she took us to Freemans, a restaurant tucked into the end of Freeman Alley in the Lower East Side. They serve well-made American cuisine and cocktails in a dining room festooned with taxidermy. Linda Derschang, a Seattle restaurateur who has the Midas touch when it comes to the business of eating, probably (definitely?) ripped off Freemans' hipster-taxidermy-saloon style when she designed Smith, an equally lovely and furry bar on 15th Ave in Seattle. Heather wanted us to see the original article. We were happy to oblige her.

After a day of constant walking, the meal was a true comfort--pork chops with cherry compote, barbecue chicken, heirloom tomato salad dressed with really good olive oil and nothing else. We went for it. Bottles of wine, appetizers, cocktails, the works. By the time dessert menus appeared we were on a roll and ready to order one of everything. All I really wanted, though, was the first thing our handsome waiter offered: green grape sorbet. Perfect.

Five minutes later he sheepishly returned to our table. "We just ran out of the sorbet. Can I interest you in the blackberry ice cream?" I suppose he could. Jessica ordered Bananas Foster. Shanti got a glass of ice wine. We dug in. It was delicious, of course, but all the while I couldn't stop thinking about green grape sorbet. What would that taste like? Summer itself? We finished the meal without finishing our desserts, full and thankful to make our aching feet walk a New York mile while our stomachs settled. We slept well that night.

By the time I had good reason to succumb to my heat phobia it was Tuesday, the hottest day of a record breakingly hot week, and I was delirious for a break anyway. "I wonder what temperature it is," Heather said as we trudged from the cool wood interior of Radish to Jessica's apartment six blocks up Grand. "Don't tell me," I said. "It will only make me feel worse." That was midday, probably around the time the temperature peaked at 103 degrees. 103 degrees! We were like turkeys basting in our own juices! Heather dropped me off at Jess's and took the subway to meet her sister in Washington Heights. I retrieved The House of Mirth from my purse, parked myself on a couch cushion directly underneath the air conditioner, and read. At 7 pm, Jess and I ordered burritos from the Mexican place on the ground floor of her building. We ate them while watching Daryl Hannah seduce Tom Hanks in Splash. Then I read some more.

On Wednesday Heather and I were off to Farmington, Connecticut and the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival. Hill-Stead House is a mansion, not a house. From the grand entrance you can see a library, a dining room, a sitting room, and another sitting room where most of the Monets and Degas are hung. The original owner stipulated in her will that nothing, not the china, not the placement of the paintings, not even her stuffed parrot, could be changed. The house was constructed and decorated in the early 1900s. What you see now is pretty much how it looked in the 1940s.

What's amazing about Hill-Stead is that it doesn't feel like a museum. It feels like a home. I would have been perfectly comfortable curling up in one of the window seats with a good book, maybe Age of Innocence to honor Edith Wharton, who used to visit at Hill-Stead. I wanted to imagine that the country estates of Lily Bart's 1906 were inspired by that particular house. Clearly I was in a literary mood.

Which brings me to the reading. It was fun, hot, pastoral, inspiring. Jean Valentine and Ginny Lowe Connors were excellent. While listening to Jean, I wrote two lines in my notebook. The first was hers: "I sit at the table writing morning with a needle and thread." The second was a quote from Paul Eluard: "There is another world, but it is inside this one."

Afterward I met a woman named Maureen who had come to the reading just because she likes Good Egg, which is the first time anything like that has ever happened. As if a cross-country fan wasn't enough to make my cheeks burn, I sold out of all my books. Dear Connecticut poetry fans: I heart you.

When dark fell, the mosquitoes came looking for dinner. Heather scolded me into the house by saying, "You know you have sweet blood! Get in inside, silly!" That night at the hotel she talked long distance to a friend who is going to help her take care of her new house in Bow. I did cartwheels around the coffee table. She's a good tour manager.

Today I am back in Seattle and I haven't forgotten the one thing this trip lacked: green grape sorbet. I must have green grape sorbet! Yesterday I found a recipe online and discovered that it is easier to make than a naked tomato salad. Because I forgot to strain out the skins, my sorbet was a bit toothsome. A little dry, a little bitter in the midst of full throttle tart-sweet grape flavor. Without the skins this sorbet would be more sophisticated, but I think I prefer it with. The skins remind me that the main ingredient of this sunny sorbet could have just as easily been a grade school kid's midday snack. It could have been wrapped in plastic and bludgeoned by carrot sticks at the bottom of a brown bag, but it wasn't. My green grape sorbet is a little like Freemans this way: elegant but rough around the edges, nostalgic but utterly new, sweet relief for a hot night. Exactly what I wanted.

Green Grape Sorbet

adapted from Epicurious.com

4 cups chilled seedless green grapes (about 1 and 1/2 pounds)

1/2 cup superfine sugar

3 tablespoons lemon juice

Puree sorbet ingredients in a blender or food processor until the sugar has dissolved, about 3 minutes. If you're using a food processor, process the mixture in batches so it doesn't make a mess. Pour the mixture through a fine sieve if you choose and press on the solids to extract as much juice as possible. Discard solids (if you strained them out) and freeze sorbet in an ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions.

Transfer sorbet into an airtight container and keep in the freezer up to one week.

Serves 4-6.

In the Bag

2010-07-02T21:29:00.000-07:00

photo by Heather Malcolm

It is 71 degrees in Brooklyn right now. Did I mention that it's also midnight in New York? That I haven't seen the sun for two days in a row since April? That when Heather and I step off that plane it's going to 90 degrees and shiny? Tonight in Seattle I'm choosing which summer dresses (the red one comes, the blue one stays), sandals (Judy Jetson-style Noats that my East coast born co-worker calls "very Seattle"), and airplane books (Tinhouse and House of Mirth) to pack. I'm not sure what poems I want to read at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, so I'm bringing all of them. I'm pretty sure they'll fit in the overhead compartment.

What I'm not bringing to New York is my laptop, which means no Good Egg this week. Since my camera is still broken, this un-photographed recipe for Panzanella will have to do until I return. The original version calls for crusty artisan bread soaked in red wine vinaigrette, which is probably perfectly delicious. My version is Panzanella without the pan (yes, I'm trying to be clever) fit for gluten-free eaters and penny pinchers alike. Plus, without the bread there's no need for vinaigrette--the salt of anchovies and squeak of capers enhance the sweetness of roasted red peppers and tomatoes just fine. If you can't buy great tomatoes or grow your own, don't bother including them in this dish.

Zanella

adapted from Earth to Table by Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann

2 red bell peppers

2 yellow or orange bell peppers

2 pounds tomatoes cut into 1-inch pieces

7 anchovy fillets, rinsed and minced

1/2 a medium red onion, thinly sliced

1/4 cup drained capers

1 cup packed fresh arugula

olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

First, roast the peppers. Heat the oven to 500 degrees. Cut peppers in half, de-seed and slick them with a little olive oil, just enough to coat. Nestle the peppers cut side down in a cast iron pan (I needed two to fit all the peppers) or roasting dish so that they fit snugly, but not tightly. Roast for 10 minutes, flip with tongs, roast for another 10 minutes, flip and roast 5 to 10 more minutes until the peppers are soft but not falling-apart. Pack them into a Tupperware container or Ziploc bag while still hot and let them steam their skins off while you prepare the rest of the salad. When they've cooled down enough to handle, peel the skins off by hand. As Jeff Crump says, don't worry about the charred bits. They will add to the flavor of the dish. Chop peppers into 1-inch squares.

In a large bowl, combine tomatoes, anchovies, onion, capers, peppers and their juice. Add arugula and toss well. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve zanetta alone or over hot polenta. Serves six.

New York in July

2010-06-27T11:24:00.000-07:00

What with the terrible Juneary weather (and the even more terrible over-use of that phrase by anyone who could find an excuse to throw it into conversation) we aren't sure about the cherries this year. Plenty of them cling to the uppermost branches of the three trees in our backyard, but they're pale yellow, sometimes blushed with pale pink and pocked here and there with beakmarks from the gang of crows that use our trees as a clubhouse. I can see a little crimson through the leaves, but not enough to warrant retrieving the ladder from the garage.

Usually the 4th of July is the height of our neighborhood cherry season, which makes for some pretty idyllic holiday barbecues, the first a Seattleite might call a proper "summer barbecue." As of today they have only a week to redden up. I don't think they're going to make it in time. Secretly (and selfishly) I'm happy about it. I thought next week's trip to New England was going to make me miss out on all the cherry picking fun, but if my calculations are correct I'll get home just in time to steal my share from the crows.

New York City in July. I won't lie, this is only my second time in NYC and I'm totally intimidated. It's going to be hot. That's a fact. It's going to be big and crowded and I have no idea where anything is. That's another fact. Wait--I know that Brooklyn is south of Manhattan, that bodegas sell gigantic sandwiches for dirt cheap, and that MOMA will be mind-blowing. I know I'm going to see Shanti and Trey and Jessica, and maybe a celebrity or two. I know that I'm going to read poems at the Sunken Garden Poetry and Music Festival in Farmington, Connecticut and that I get to share the stage with Jean Valentine and Ginny Lowe Connors. Valentine won the National Book Award in 2005 and Connors won the Sunken Garden Poetry Contest this year, so I also know I'll be in distinguished company. And that's it! That's all I know. I could use your help. Where should I have dinner?

If you're reading this from the East Coast, I hope you'll consider coming out to Hill-Stead Museum on July 7th at 6:30 to say hello and hear me read poems. For directions, ticket info and all that practical stuff, click here.

A Perfect Blur

2010-06-20T16:09:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of a field. Not the field, not the one we read and knitted and drank Lillet spritzers in front of all weekend. That field was impossible to capture on camera because, like the weekend, it had no focal point, so those photos look flat as a golf course. What works about this field, the one in the picture above, is that it's unfocused. Isn't it easier on the eyes somehow? Prettier, certainly. The colors are myopic and soft like the print of a summer dress. Where a clear photo failed, this blurry photo fails better.

I've been thinking about photography because last weekend I went to the Methow Valley with Heather, who brought four cameras but forgot warm socks. I'm also thinking about photography because the Tuesday before we left I had drinks with my friend Brian, who said something about how the invention of the camera challenged painters to paint what the camera can't capture, and that's how we got modernist abstract painting. He said the realism of the camera is being challenged by new realist painters who call attention to how the camera is not the eye. That made me think of Jessica Bonin's paintings of intersections and buildings in Portland, Oregon. She paints the sort of places you pass on your way home, places that are landmarks only in the landscape of your own life. They could be as boring as my photo of the field, but they aren't. I don't know how, but even her traffic lights look expressive.

On the way home we stopped at the observation point near Ross Lake where the winds whipped my skirt up to my waist and I dropped my camera while trying to maintain my modesty. Now it literally can't focus--the shutter can't shut. Which means I didn't get a picture of the balsamic cantaloupe I would have made in the Methow Valley if I hadn't been so busy doing nothing. The cantaloupe traveled 378 miles, over the Highway 20 mountain pass twice and through Winthrop at least six times, stinking up my car the whole way. How such a sweet fruit can smell like rotting garbage when the car temperature climbs above 75 degrees is a secret only the cantaloupe knows.

In Seattle, Jason and Swiffer were waiting for me, Kory was coming over soon, Chris and Carolyn were home and we were all hungry. Balsamic cantaloupe is a quick, sophisticated treat that kept us busy while Jason grilled chicken and Kory made vegetables for dinner. It was first served to my by another Chris. This one cooks and caters up in Bellingham and, like Heather and Jessica, knows a thing or two about how to make the ordinary extraordinary.

Balsamic Cantaloupe

1 cantaloupe, seeded and sliced into wedges
balsamic vinegar
sea salt
four or five basil leaves

Arrange the cantaloupe on a plate. Drizzle lightly with balsamic vinegar (I pour straight from the bottle with my index finger over the mouth to control the flow) and sprinkle with sea salt to taste. Cut the basil into thin strips and sprinkle over the melon. Serve.

Not Too Late

2010-06-14T17:32:00.000-07:00

For those of you who live outside of Western Washington, summer has probably invited itself over for dinner by now. Not so for our rainy side of the state, but hey, that's nothing new. Once the weather crosses the Cascades, it tends to get taciturn and mysterious. It takes delight in the simple things: spoiling picnics, soaking weddings, giving wet duck Washingtonians a reprieve from going outside and enjoying ourselves. I know this will sound crazy to anyone who doesn't live in this climate, but to Jason and I (and many others I'm sure), sometimes sunshine is like a too-friendly neighbor who invites you over and won't take no for answer. Even if you clearly would rather read a book inside, even if he can see you on the couch, reading your book and ignoring his knock, he keeps knocking.

Then again, I have consider the sun an annoyance. If I liked it, I'd either go crazy or move somewhere else. Or both!

Western Washington residents, you may not be able to get a tan but you can do something no one else in the whole darn country can do: kick off summer by taking Book Arts for Creative Writers with me and Jennifer Borges Foster. Yes, this is a shameless plug for our class. It will be inspiring, fun, messy, and full of beauty. Sign up by June 19 to insure that the class will run (it's a bit low right now) by clicking here. Class runs June 26 and 27, 10 am to 4 pm at Richard Hugo House.

While I'm shamelessly plugging book arts by yours truly, I might as well tell you that you can now buy copies of A Commonplace Book of Pie in the zine and the food sections of Elliott Bay Book Company on Capitol Hill, and in the food section of Third Place Books in Ravenna. While you're shopping at either bookstore, check out Perfection Salad by Laura Shapiro and The Pedant in the Kitchen by Julian Barnes, two of the best books about food I've read this year. A Commonplace Book of Pie is also for sale at Pilot Books, a fantastic shop that sells small press and handmade books on Broadway on Capitol Hill. And of course, you can still buy the book through Etsy. Consider it summer reading (and baking) for people who like good books (and pie).

Weeds, Peas, and Risotto

2010-06-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

"I'll give mom and dad one thing," my brother likes to say, "they made sure we knew the difference between a plant and a weed." When you're twelve and hunchbacked over a plot of decaying bark dust and dandelion starts, pulling weeds feels about as far from learning a useful lesson as indentured servitude is from a Christmas bonus. But Nick is right. We do know the difference between a whole host of unnameable weeds and whatever is "supposed" to grow in a suburban yard, and for that we can thank Saturday mornings with mother and dad.

I hated to get up early on Saturday, especially to work, but I didn't hate weeding. In fact I loved that feeling of stubborn roots slowly, slowly, then suddenly releasing their grip on the ground. What was so odious about weeding was the head rush and joint ache of bending down, standing up, bending down again. This is also why I hate tennis. Nick says I would like tennis if I wasn't so bad at it. At least then I wouldn't have to constantly bend over and pick up the ball.

That's why choosing to spend Memorial Day weekend pulling the 135 square feet of grass, weeds, and over-overwintered carrots in my backyard was a crazy thing to do. I got a sunburn, sore hamstrings, a line of dirt under my thumbnails that refuses to wash out, and a garden plot that I will have to weed every Saturday. All I can offer by way of explanation is that I am in love...with tarragon. Specifically a tiny clipping from Jen's garden that I can still taste if I screw my eyes shut and think about licorice. As good as her herbs were, and as absurd as it is to spend three or four dollars on fresh cut herbs every time I roast a chicken, it suddenly felt like the most natural thing in the world for me to start a garden. I mean, I've had worse ideas. Like bleaching my hair, for example. That was a dumb.

Learning to garden feels like learning to cook. The same heady mixture of excitement, intimidation, and I-want-to-buy-everything-in-the-store greediness attends all my trips to the nursery. The same cautious ambition marks my choices in what to sow. When I decided to plant bush beans instead of peas because I don't own a trellis or tools to make one, I was taking a lesson from that time I attempted to make biscuits with a fork. It was a cute--but inedible--idea, easily remedied by the purchase of a proper pastry cutter and a little more patience. Patience "in spades"--I'm starting to understand the cliche.

Gardening is also like cooking in how learning one thing makes me hungry to learn another. And another. And another! I won't rest until I have a garden worthy of Vita Sackville-West! Okay, that's an overstatement, but it is true that after the rosemary, thyme, Greek oregano and sage were neatly tucked into the ground, I had just a week's satisfaction before I had to tear up the rest of our mangy garden plot and fill it with vegetables. Tomatoes, radishes, mesclun, pickling cucumbers, slicing cucumbers, and sunflowers just for fun. Maybe the side yard would make a good squash bed! Maybe the porch would be a sunny spot to grow basil!

I'm already in love with next year's garden, when I'll have a little more experience and a little more courage to try out those peas. Until then, frozen peas will do quite nicely. They’re one of the few frozen vegetables that don’t taste like the bag, and they're perfect in risotto, our go-to comfort food since Jason went gluten free.

I'll give mom and dad another thing. They made sure we knew how to sneak vegetables into every single meal.

Pea and Prosciutto Risotto

2 cups Arborio rice

6 cups chicken broth

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

2/3 cup dry white wine or sherry

1 cup frozen or fresh peas

1/2 cup shredded Pecorino Romano cheese

1/4 pound prosciutto, sliced thin and cut into 1 or 2 inch square chunks

2 cloves minced garlic

salt and pepper to taste

2 or 3 leaves chopped basil (optional)

In a medium saucepan, heat the chicken broth on medium-high or until barely simmering.

In a large, heavy-bottomed pan (I used my enameled cast iron dutch oven), heat 2 tablespoons of butter until foaming subsides. Add chopped garlic and cook until fragrant and a little soft, two or three minutes. Add the risotto and stir to coat for one minute. Then add white wine and stir constantly until the liquid has been absorbed.

Thereafter add a cup of broth at a time, stirring constantly until the liquid is absorbed before adding another cup of broth. When the rice no longer has a chalky center and tastes al dente, add the last two tablespoons of butter and the cup of peas. Continue to stir until the peas are cooked through and the butter has melted, about two or three minutes.

Remove from heat. Stir in the Pecorino Romano, prosciutto, salt and pepper. You can also stir in more broth if the risotto needs to be thinned a bit. Serve hot with a sprinkling of basil.

All Good Things

2010-06-04T09:13:00.000-07:00

The nerd in me would like to point out that the last episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation was titled "All Good Things Must Come to an End." That's not why I'm thinking of all good things. The good things I'm thinking about have just begun.

I'll start with Heather. After years of being in a long distance love affair with Bow-Edison, an arts and agricultural haven one hour north and a bit west of Seattle, she decided to bet the farm--she's moving up there, art collection, camera collection, martini glasses and dresses, all of it. But to bet the farm, you have to buy the farm. So she did! That's her barn up there behind the grass bloom. Those cows, above, are her neighbors. When we parked in her gravel driveway last Saturday, they gathered by the electric fence that divides her property from theirs and stared and stared and stared. I don't know much about cows, but I do know this: they aren't camera shy. Which is a good thing, considering how their new neighbor likes to spend her time.

Now I'm to the part where I tell you my big news. Ready? Every time I think about this, I have to take a deep breath. I can't quite believe it's real. Okay, ready:

I quit Hugo House. My last day is six weeks from now. Thanks to a generous grant from 4Culture, I can fulfill two dreams at once this summer: I'll write full time while living in Bow-Edison. Heather is calling it a "Mudcrutch Residency" after Tom Petty's pre-Heartbreakers, pre-LA band. She wants her house to be a place her friends will go to gather strength, get away from the hubbub of the city and make things. Poems, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and dinner. Most of August, I plan to live in her "residency room" and play in Edison while I write my chapbook manuscript into a book.

Wait, I haven't told you everything yet. In September I'll start the two-year MFA program in poetry at the University of Washington. Thanks to a stroke of good fortune I did not see coming, not at all, I'll be a TA. That means I get a full ride, a stipend, health benefits, and best of all, a teaching job. I'm told the first year will be freshman composition, the second will be Intro to Creative Writing. If you could see me through your computer monitor, you'd see me grinning and relieved, light-hearted despite the crummy June rain. Grad school loans are no joke. I'll probably still have to take some out for living expenses, but they won't be nearly as hefty as I had worried they'd be.

Do changes in your life come cyclically too? I've noticed that every four or five years, life makes me leap and hope a net will appear. Though I've talked about good fortune, I think having help, lots of help, has more to do with it. To my friends, family, teachers, co-workers, to Jason, to my roommates Carolyn and Lindsey who cheered me on as I sifted through the avalanche of MFA paperwork that took over our dining room, to everyone who reads this blog and comments or e-mails or leaves their ISP address in my Sitemeter so I know you were here, that you are reading, thank you for your advice, guidance, free beers, cheerleading, and love. Thank you.

All good things must come to a beginning. Here goes two years of I don't know what. Something good.

A Turkey Sandwich Sort of Day

2010-05-26T20:31:00.000-07:00

When I ran into Suzanne at the Ballard Market, we couldn't say two sentences without mentioning the weather. "The energy this week is kind of weird," she said. "All this rain makes you want to hunker down." And what? I wondered. What do we do when we hunker down? I suppose Jason does it by watching movies, which he's probably doing right now as I type. He's probably wearing his pajama bottoms even though at this time of year, 7:00 p.m. still has light left to it, and tonight there's a goodbye party for our friend Marna that we really should attend, and besides that it would be nice to go to $5 burger night at the Park Pub, but the only thing that sounds like any fun at all is the prospect of finishing one movie and starting another. I'll join him in a little bit, I think.

When I got home from the grocery store I found Carolyn, my roommate, out on the back deck with a cigarette, thinking thoughts that must have been louder than my voice because it took two tries until she finally heard me call her name through the screen door. Then the cat was inconsolable, wanting what I gave him only as long as I was giving it to him before he was back at my feet again, yowling. Swiffer knows a lot about weird energy.

When I hunker down, I make a turkey sandwich. Not because I particularly like turkey sandwiches--I mean, they're fine, I enjoy they the way my dad makes them with lots of mayo and a side of potato chips--but because turkey cold cuts are cheap, Franz bread stays good forever (which is creepy but convenient), and I can add a slice of almost any cheese, smear one slice of bread with mayo, one with mustard (any kind will do), insert greenery if available, cut in half and presto--dinner.

In Seattle it's a turkey sandwich sort of day. What's your favorite way to make one?

Lemon Happy

2010-05-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

Today I'm not-yet-halfway through one of those sixty hour weeks at work where I think about blogging all day but lose that lovin' feeling by closing time. So instead of driving myself nuts with the long blog entry I'm not writing, I'm going to share a quick recipe for Lemon Shaker Pie and go to bed. It's my favorite pie right now because it lets me use the word "macerate" in a sentence.

I'm not sure whether Lemon Shaker Pie is "Shaker" because Shakers used to make it or because its simplicity is reminiscent of the Shaker way of life. I have a hard time believing that a religious sect known for its vows of celibacy would make a pie this bad for you, this damn sexy. The filling is like lemon marmalade--so tart it makes the gutters of your mouth sing and so sweet the roof of your mouth goes a little numb by the last bite. I've made Lemon Shaker Pie twice this month, once to celebrate Lindsey M's birthday and once to celebrate Good Egg's. One is twenty-eight, the other is two. Thanks to this pie they both have a bit of a toothache.

Lemon Shaker Pie

from The New York Times Dessert Cookbook

1 double crust pie recipe

2 large lemons (the thinner-skinned the better)

2 cups sugar

4 large eggs

Wash lemons and slice in half lengthwise, keeping the peel on. Rest the flat surface on a cutting board and cut the lemon as thin as you can into half-moon slices. Remove seeds as you go.

In a medium bowl, pour two cups of sugar over the lemons and let sit for four hours or overnight. I've had better results with letting the lemons sit overnight. After the first hour, stir them once. After that, stir very little.

Heat the oven to 450 degrees. Roll out the bottom crust, place it in the pie pan, and refrigerate it while you mix the filling.

In a small bowl, beat four eggs well. Add them to the lemon and sugar and mix gently until combined.

Roll out the top crust. Pour the filling into the bottom crust, then cover with the top crust, crimp an upstanding edge and cut vents. Bake on 450 for 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 375 degrees and bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Rotate the pie front to back halfway through baking for even browning. Cool on a wire rack and serve warm or room temperature.

What the Mailman Brings

2010-05-14T13:25:00.000-07:00

Right before 46th Street curves north into Northwest Market Street, I start wondering about the mail. Did we get any today? Will there be a bill or a check, a magazine folded in half, or just junk coupons from Safeway? Will there be a white envelope addressed to me in my own handwriting, indicating an acceptance from a literary magazine or--more likely--a rejection, since for some reason all my good news comes by e-mail?

When I park the car against the curb in front of my house, I pull the emergency brake and inspect the front porch to see if any telltale paper pokes out of my too-short mailbox. As I lock up the car and walk toward the front door, I hope for good news and prepare to accept bad news, or, more likely, none at all.

This is what the mailman brought me on Wednesday: two credit card offers, a survey from Group Health, a letter from my senator and, wrapped in a coupon for Baker's Fine Dry Cleaning, a manila envelope and a white envelope, both inscribed with my handwriting. I opened white envelope first, predicting bad news. I was right--a rejection from a local press I'd sent my chapbook manuscript to. I managed my disappointment by having high hopes for the manila envelope. This time, I lucked out. It was my contributor's copy of the new Crab Creek Review, which in addition to publishing two of my poems also features the work of Jordan Hartt and Rachel Mehl, both of whom I met at Centrum in Port Townsend. I know it isn't very descriptive to say something is "neat," but it's neat to share space in a literary magazine with people I know. Just like it's neat to be accepted, and not so neat to be rejected. This is obvious, but it bears repeating: to be accepted, you have to risk rejection. Some days the mailman delivers both.

The Making Mess

2010-05-09T17:42:00.000-07:00

Jennifer lives across the street from Volunteer Park in the only apartment building on her block. The rest of the buildings are mansions. Most of them are the immaculately maintained, antique sort that look like two or three people live there. When I drive to Jen's apartment, I usually watch the mansions instead of the road because I want, just once, to catch a glimpse of their tenants. I imagine that they spend their days rattling around all that tasteful space and rich furniture like pennies in a dryer.

Jen thinks I might be right about the mansion on the corner, the white one with Doric columns that takes up almost half the block. She thinks the owners have an adult son who is little younger than me, and that the three of them are the only people who call that big old house home. Can you imagine growing up in a house that looks like a president once lived there? Can you imagine being from a place as beautiful and expensive as Capitol Hill is now?

Heather grew up five or six blocks from Jen's apartment building. When her parents bought their house in 1969, they called the local police station to get crime statistics for the area. "Can you get your down payment back?" the operator asked them. They couldn't. Nor did they want to. A week later a policeman was shot to death in Volunteer Park. A couple years later Heather was born. Heather knows a Capitol Hill that I don't--one where the big houses on 15th weren't so well taken care of, and were filled with children (they didn't call it "Catholic Hill" for nothing), and the Dick's on Broadway was an okay place to hang out. Heather was a punk, though, so I can't take her willingness to loiter in the legendary burger joint's parking lot as evidence that it was ever a family friendly sort of place to pass time.

Driving around Seattle with Heather reminds me of something a former boss said once: true wisdom comes with time and repetition. I'm not sure what he thought he meant by that, but I've taken it to mean that when you drive the same roads for years, you come to know them in a way that can't be taught.

Jen and I made 250 more covers of A Commonplace of Pie, except now I'm calling it A Commonplace Book of Pie, and they're currently drying on clotheslines in her living room. I love the inside of her apartment. It's small, but every surface hangs or supports or makes room for the mess that art creates when you're making it. Since she's a poet and bookmaker, her mess is made of paper, thread, and ink. I wish she could have a house as big as her neighbors' and fill it with art instead of adult children. Maybe someday she will.

Things to Read

2010-05-04T19:29:00.001-07:00

This inspiring comic by Summer Pierre. It's a must-read for artistic working stiffs everywhere. I have it tacked to the inside of my cubicle.

And this interview with yours truly for Brian McGuigan's "Get To Know A Local Poet" series on the Hugo blog. Not a must-read, but a pleasant one. I promise!

My New Love

2010-05-02T13:54:00.000-07:00

I never thought I'd have a crush on a pancake, but here I am. Twenty-seven years old and in love for the first time with Pocono brand buckwheat. It's funny, Jason isn't jealous. I think he has a little crush too.

First off, I should explain what makes this buckwheat so special, so different from all the rest. Its darling orange package with retro graphics makes my vintage-loving heart thump. Look at that stack of pancakes! Worthy of Paul Bunyan, or at least a full page IHOP ad in the May 2, 1965 edition of the Sunday Oregonian. The color scheme is loud and homey as a Copco teakettle, and the top of the package was sewn shut with thick, cream-colored thread as if real human hands had carefully prepared this sack of flour just for us.

But this buckwheat is more than its pretty package. Deep down inside, this buckwheat is like none other. Just check out the upper left hand corner. You'll see what I mean.

That's right! It's gluten free! Processed on machinery that does not also process wheat! So my hunky, gluten-intolerant boyfriend can chow down!

Remember how I mentioned in my last gluten-free post that our friend Lynn has volunteered (more or less) to be our guide to gluten-free eating? I have it on Lynn's authority that Pocono is the only commercially sold buckwheat flour that isn't cross contaminated with wheat. She witnessed (via text message) my fit over Bob's Red Mill buckwheat last week and came to our rescue by ordering two bags of this lovely stuff--one for my house and one for Jason's. That's just the kind of considerate way Lynn thinks. Now we can have home-cooked breakfasts--no tough Puffin cereal, no gluey Arrowhead Mills flakes--whenever we have time to heat a griddle, and Lynn has officially ascended from mortal woman to hero in my personal pantheon of girlfriends.

Buckwheat is "wheat" only in name. It's actually a seed that's used like wheat, hence its misleading moniker. According to Doc Andrew Weil, who can count my mother and Jason among his many fans, buckwheat offers "vitamins B1 and B2, the minerals potassium, magnesium, phosphate and iron (buckwheat contains more iron than cereal grains), and it has nearly twice the amount of the amino acid lysine found in rice." And you can stuff a pillow with it!

I have a crush on buckwheat because, like the Chana Masala I posted last week, it has always been a gluten free food. With a bag of buckwheat in my cupboard I can throw out the gritty gluten-free pancake mixes and make my own from scratch. Being unable to bake from scratch for the past month as showed me how important that little word is. It has moral significance to me. I felt like a failure, like someone who couldn't cook, because I had baking mixes in my grocery cart. Isn't that silly?

Buckwheat pancake batter is light eggshell blue with dark brown flecks of hull. It has a nutty taste, almost like almond flour. Love has blinded me to the slightly tougher texture of buckwheat pancakes. They aren't light and fluffy. Rather, they're light and sturdy. If I eat them too fast, they get stuck in my throat and I have to race for a glass of milk to wash them down. Let's just call them "hardy" and say that's a good thing.

The Pocono company suggests adding blueberries, chopped apples, diced ham or a 1/2 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice to the batter. I can attest to the deliciousness of adding blueberries and raspberries. I haven't tried adding ham, but that strikes me as an idea I'd like to snuggle up to next Saturday morning. I wouldn't kick it out of bed for eating pancakes, that's for sure.

You can order your own bag of gluten free buckwheat flour by visiting Pocono's online store.

Buckwheat Pancakes (gluten free)

courtesy of the Pocono "Heart of Buckwheat" Flour package (with a few edits and baking directions by yours truly)

1 cup buckwheat flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup milk

1 egg

1 tablespoon maple syrup, molasses, honey, or sugar

1/4 teaspoon vanilla (optional)

Heat a cast iron skillet or frying pan on medium.

Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a medium microwave safe bowl, microwave honey (if using) on high for 10 to 15 seconds until it flows freely. Add a little milk and stir to combine. This will help the honey dissolve. Then add the rest of the wet ingredients and beat well.

Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and stir until smooth. Adjust liquid or flour to make a smooth, flowing batter.

Add a pat of butter to the skillet (about half a tablespoon) and swirl it in the pan so that the bottom is evenly coated. Pour a small amount of batter into the fat. When the edge is dry, flip the pancake and bake until cooked through.

You can add pats of butter between each pancake if you want to--that will make the edges of your pancakes extra crispy--but adding butter only when the skillet is dry is fine too.

If adding berries, pour the batter into the skillet first, then add the berries.

Yield: 6-8 pancakes, depending on size

Things to Do and Read

2010-04-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

The last copy of A Commonplace of Pie sold to Abby in Seattle today at 2:22 pm. But fear not, procrastinators! Jennifer and I are printing another hundred this Friday. They'll be bound and ready to go by the first week of May. If you've been meaning to get a copy for your very own self or your pie-loving friends and family (Mother's Day is coming up, hint hint), you can pre-order on Etsy right now. I'll ship them to you hot off the press.

Leslie over at Fresh-Picked Seattle posted a super nice write-up of A Commonplace of Pie last week. Apparently I am not the only pie-making Kate in Seattle--in fact, I'm only the most recent pie-making Kate in Seattle! Read all about it by clicking here. I recommend checking out the whole site when you get a chance. It's a great resource for the food-obsessed Northwest.

And finally, this June 26 & 27, Jennifer and I are teaming up to teach Book Arts for Creative Writers through SCBA (the Seattle Center for Book Arts). Taking cues from the books we make in class, we'll write, erase, and explore the relationship between writing and the book. Suitable for writers of all experience levels who want to learn book arts and book artists who want to incorporate words into their art.

All the pictures featured in this post are Jen's handmade creations--just a taste of what we have in store for you. To find out more and to register, click here. Or just e-mail me at kate.lebo (at) gmail dot com.

Our New Arc

2010-04-21T18:28:00.000-07:00

A plot arc is a device used by writers to organize the action of a narrative into a coherent story. It's something we all recognize, though perhaps not consciously unless you're a writer studying how other writers do their thing. When a soap opera diva slips into a coma and her family rushes to the hospital to wait and worry, that's a plot arc. When her estranged husband shows up in the ER to pay his respects and worm his way into the will, that's a plot arc too.

Good Egg is nonfiction, but it has characters and plots and even some dramatic tension every now and then, particularly when I try to make pastry in my un-air-conditioned kitchen in July. I'm a character. So is Lindsey, my roommate. So is Swiffer, my cross-eyed cat. My family members get speaking parts sometimes, and sometimes the food does all the talking. A well crafted blog is not that much different from a well crafted novel. Since the story is told in episodes (posts), a blog is more like A Tale of Two Cities than, say, Grapes of Wrath.

Today I have a new plot arc to introduce: Jason has been diagnosed gluten intolerant.

At first I thought, "no big deal, he just has to stay away from bread." On hearing the news, some of our friends remarked, "doesn't it seem like everybody is gluten intolerant these days? It's just a fad." I wish both those sentiments were the truth, but they couldn't be further from it. Gluten, the protein in wheat, isn't just in bread. It's in pasta, pizza, canned soups, sauces of all shades--hell, it's on the back of stamps. Gluten free food might be faddish, but gluten intolerance is real and can cause debilitating illness. The most serious related conditions that I'm aware of are Celiac disease, an auto-immune disorder, and Crohn's disease, which has IBS-like symptoms. I don't really understand the details, to tell you the truth. I have a lot to learn.

Jason isn't a Celiac and he doesn't have Crohn's, but treating his symptoms by eliminating gluten from his diet has become an ongoing challenge. Last week I almost threw down in the Bob's Red Mill aisle at the Ballard Market because of gluten contamination. What's that, you ask? I didn't know (or care) either until I tried to make gluten free pancakes from scratch and couldn't, and then had myself a little temper tantrum.

Gluten contamination happens when food shares factory equipment with wheat. Oats, while gluten free, are off limits because most oats are processed on equipment that's coated in wheat dust. Buckwheat, which is what I was trying to buy for the pancakes, shares the same sad story. A product might not naturally have any gluten in it, but without the "gluten free" label, Jason can't eat it.

Which creates an interesting dilemma. I mean, I love to make pie. Jason can't eat pie. I love to bake from scratch. I have no idea how to bake gluten free from scratch. Rice cakes and peanut butter got real old real fast, so we're going to have to learn new ways to cook.

We've been lucky to have the support and advice of our friend Lynn Shelton, who was diagnosed with Celiac disease over 15 years ago and has lots of practice navigating the gluten contaminated shoals of your average grocery store. A week after Jason's diagnosis, she sent me an e-mail with the subject line "GF." I thought she meant girlfriend. Nope, she meant gluten free. Not only do I get to add new flours to my pantry, I get to add new acronyms to my dictionary.

She kindly offered to let me borrow her stack of GF cookbooks and gave me loads of advice that set my head spinning, particularly this line: "It’s really hard to get used to this one, but if you start to think about bread and flour and everything else that contains gluten as poison, or something as toxic as raw chicken juice for instance, I find it really does help!"

Poison? Pie crust is poison? My heart sank. There would be no compromising with gluten intolerance. When I sampled a gluten free chocolate muffin from the Flying Apron Bakery, it sank further. Gluten free baked goods taste like chalk. I feel like I shouldn't say that--I know the folks at Flying Apron (a local gluten free, vegan bakery) are totally radical, and maybe GF muffins taste better once you're used to them. But my first experience was dismaying. I tried to keep my reaction off my face, but Jason saw it. "Hey, I have to eat that stuff you know. It's not that bad," he said.

Jason is taking this much more gracefully than I am. When he got sick before, he would list the foods he'd eaten that day and ask me "Do you think it was the chicken? Do you think it was the potatoes? Or the mayonnaise? The cheese? Maybe it was the beer. Yeah, it was probably the beer." Now he knows it was definitely the beer, which is chock full of gluten. Sometimes his questions would drive me nuts because I didn't know. I just didn't know what was hurting him so bad, and the questions (and their lack of answers) made me (and him, I think) feel out of control. He was trying to tell a story about why he didn't feel good: I ate this thing and it made me sick. But the story just wouldn't come to a logical conclusion, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to its development. This is another way plot arcs are important. We use them to tell stories about why things are the way they are because when something makes sense, you can understand it, and when you can understand it, you gain (or at least feel as if you gain) control over it. A story without an arc is like having symptoms but no diagnosable disease, and therefore no cure.

Finally a test at the doctor's office gave Jason his surprise ending. Where one story ends, another begins.

The first GF dish I made for Jason was Molly Wizenberg's truly fantastic Chana Masala, a spiced chickpea and tomato dish that's a staple of Indian restaurants. It didn't come with the GF label, which is why I was attracted to it. I'm stubborn, I guess. I want to make food that I would make anyway; food that just happens to be gluten free. That it was inexpensive (the trick is to buy the spices in the bulk aisle) and even better when reheated the next day was a double bonus.

Jason is sensitive to onions and garlic, so I halved their quantities. To my surprise, the flavor was just as satisfying. Here is Molly's recipe with my slight changes.

Chana Masala
from Orangette

Good-quality olive oil
1/2 a medium onion, coarsely chopped
1 medium clove garlic, minced
1 tsp cumin seeds
½ tsp ground coriander
¼ tsp ground ginger
1 tsp garam masala
3 cardamom pods, lightly crushed
1 28-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes
1 tsp kosher salt, or to taste
1 Tbs cilantro leaves, roughly torn, plus more for garnish
A pinch of cayenne, or to taste
2 15-ounce cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed
6-8 Tbs plain whole-milk yogurt, optional
A few lemon wedges, optional

Film the bottom of a large saucepan or Dutch oven—preferably not nonstick—with olive oil, and place the pan over medium heat. Add the onion, and cook, stirring frequently, until it is deeply caramelized and even charred in some spots. Be patient. The more color, the more full-flavored the final dish will be.

Reduce the heat to low. Add the garlic, stirring, and add a bit more oil if the pan seems dry. Add the cumin seeds, coriander, ginger, garam masala, and cardamom pods, and fry them, stirring constantly, until fragrant and toasty, about 30 seconds. Add ¼ cup water, and stir to scrape up any brown bits from the bottom of the pan. Cook until the water has evaporated away completely. Pour in the juice from can of tomatoes, followed by the tomatoes themselves, using your hands to break them apart as you add them; alternatively, add them whole and crush them in the pot with a potato masher. Add the salt.

Raise the heat to medium, and bring the pot to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, add the cilantro and cayenne, and simmer the sauce gently, stirring occasionally, until it reduces a bit and begins to thicken. Taste, and adjust the seasoning as necessary. Add the chickpeas, stirring well, and cook over low heat for about five minutes. Add 2 Tbs water, and cook for another five minutes. Add another 2 Tbs water, and cook until the water is absorbed, a few minutes more. This process of adding and cooking off water helps to concentrate the sauce’s flavor and makes the chickpeas more tender and toothsome. Taste, and adjust the seasoning as necessary.

Stir in the yogurt, if you like, or garnish with lemon wedges and cilantro. Serve.