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If I had an out of office reply, it would say this: “Mandy cannot grade papers today because it is sunny, her bike needs riding, and doughnuts are back in season.”
Instead, however, I am obliged to put up an out of blog reply. See those papers up there? Not the ones with the sticky notes on them, to the left…further left…just out of the sun…ah yes, there. Those big stacks. Yep, those are student research papers.
Mandy cannot blog today because she’s got seventy student research papers to read–oh and forty British lit papers, sixty one-page Google Groups posts, and an incomplete final exam to prepare.
But I’m not one to turn down a seasonal treat…
It all started in London. In London, there were no biscuits. I’d eaten biscuits all my life and always enjoyed them, but I had never before constructed elaborate daydream scenarios about cornering one in a dark alley and mercilessly chomping my teeth through its soft, fluffy heart. And Londoners always talked about biscuits—they ate them with tea and after dinner, they sold them at every corner store. But their so-called biscuits were sweetish wafer-like cookies (this was incidentally, before I came to love the digestive, to keep a roll of chocolate McVities in my sock drawer) which would’ve gone pathetically limp under a heap of sausage gravy.
(Tangentially, [I’m careening more closely toward excessive DFW-style parenthetical notes—have you noticed?] this reminds me of a café, near my dorm, that served “American Style” chocolate chip cookies. Only, instead of being mixed into the batter, the chocolate chips were placed on top, all their tips pointing neatly skyward. It always made me laugh, but at least with the cookie they’d given it a shot. The poor biscuit never had a chance.)
The problem for the American style biscuit, the fluffy round of light, buttery, floury, warm breakfast goodness, is that the British English language has no capacity for it. It isn’t a traditional biscuit (as in tea cookie) and, while it is scone-like–it is more intentionally shaped, less crisp at the edges–it isn’t a scone. Or a roll. Or a bun. It’s a biscuit, a Southern biscuit. And when I was suddenly forced to live without it, I began to understand that my food pyramid was missing its point. In a flash of genius, it occurred to me that a local Kentucky Fried Chicken was the obvious solution. Their biscuits weren’t amazing, but they specialized in fried chicken—they couldn’t not serve biscuits. Oh how naïve I was. When I told my mom my biscuit sob story, she didn’t believe me. ”Don’t they serve breakfast at McDonald’s, Mandy?” Yes, of course they do. ”So get a biscuit there.” They don’t have them. ”I mean at breakfast.” Mom, they don’t have them. ”But…how do they serve breakfast?”
Canada, with its Commonwealth allegiance, is no friendlier to the biscuit. So, like any resourceful young lady, I’ve pulled myself up by my Appalachian bootstraps embarked on a journey toward the day when I pull the perfect Southern biscuit from my oven.
Biscuits are the slippery fish of the quick breads and, as my mother warned me, making a good biscuit (go ahead and forget about a great biscuit) isn\’t as easy as following the directions. It wasn’t that the biscuits weren’t edible (they were) or that they weren’t buttery and flaky and white, but that they needed a little lightness, a little lift.
And what I’ve learned is that the qualifier “Southern” is an important one. Southern-style biscuits are made in the South because that’s where the best biscuit wheat grows. White Lily flour just isn’t sold at the Vancouver Safeway.
A perfect biscuit is a paradox: a white summer cloud and a warm winter blanket. At once dense and feather-light, it is equally at home in sweet (note apple butter jar) and savory (note gravy) settings. It’s friendly with the egg and the chicken.
Even though I haven’t reached biscuit nirvana, at least I’ve narrowed it down. At this point, it’s either the lack of sifting, the amount of baking powder, the kind of milk, the protein content of the flour, the temperature of the butter, or the recipe itself.
If you were a biscuit doctor, I’d offer mine up for prescription. But, unfortunately, we ate the evidence. Start keeping an eye out, though, for your invitation. Because when I get this right, you’d better bring your bib.
When I was little, my mom read me a book every Christmas Eve about gingerbread bears who popped up off the cookie pan after the lights were turned off and started walking around. They did lots of sneaky but handy things, including helping to build the dollhouse the father was making his daughter for Christmas, and cleaning up the messy kitchen after a big night of baking (never mind that they were destined for the oven’s fiery jaws). The whole family thinks the others are doing sweet and secretly helpful things–they don’t know the bears are wandering industriously about the house–and they’re all so happy and loving and filled with the Christmas spirit.
Later, the bears meet Santa, who gives them all little hearts (red candies stuck to their chests), which makes them become immortal 3D bears who never have to worry about a trip to the oven again.
We’d hoped this might happen with our dogs last night, but unfortunately it did not.
So we ate them.
yum.
Here’s hoping your cookies help with your chores this year. Or, if not, that they taste really, really good.
I have eaten the plums
that were in
the cardboard box
Well, I have eaten them. The box is empty.
They were delicious/ so sweet.
But the eating of the plums has revealed in me not an urge for culinary larceny but an inexactitude. I am oh so unlike William Carlos Williams (with his crafty, quiet, intentionally-snarky plum eating). For starters, this was a ten pound box. Ten pounds of purple-y, sugary, fiber-y, plumness. So I shared. Secondly, the plums now serve as a textbook example of what, for the sake of clarity, I’ve termed “my not-that-neat-ness.”
This past weekend was what I like to call Thanksgiving v.1.0. Or, Thanksgiving minus the pilgrims. Canadian Thanksgiving is refreshingly free of archaic and falsely optimistic myths of camaraderie amongst the natives and the colonial imperialists. You just sit down to dinner with a bunch of great friends and eat turkey. And you get a day off of work!
So with our long weekend, Justin and I went east, to what British Columbians call “the interior,” or, more specifically, the Okanagan. I like to think of it as a kind of Canadian Tuscany. Imagine the rolling hills and vineyards without the pre-Christian ruins:
As far as British Columbia is concerned, the Okanagan Valley is truly the hallowed home of the pitted fruit. And after a weekend of climbing, camping and admiring the flickering yellow aspens, we stopped by the Mariposa produce market for what would be our contribution to that evening’s holiday dinner.
(oh the seasonal bounty!)
Hence, the plum. But not just any plum, the delicious, nutritious, tiny, sweet and (yes, Mr. Williams) almost sinful Italian prune plum.
When we arrived (albeit late after hours in traffic) for T-Giving v1.0 to discover there were already three desserts available for community consumption, we decided to toss our bounty into the heap. Resulting in the first plum product: the crisp.
Oh the gustatory delight that is the prune plum crisp!
In a four-hundred degree oven their dusky indigo skins wrinkle and shrivel. They redden and they shine, hiking up their skirts to reveal a golden fleshy center. My that sounds provocative– but they are so sweet, so rich! After gorging ourselves on potatoes fixed three ways, sampling the four desserts (pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin pie, plum crisp, and chocolate brownie with nectarines), and pushing paper lunch bags heavy with plums into the hands of most of my friends, I left with a full belly and a half-full box of plums. What to do?
Though we returned home to a mostly empty kitchen, we did have oats and we did have plums. Which is how I got the idea of making oatmeal with baked plum topping for my lunch. I got up Tuesday morning, shoved a bowl of plums in the toaster oven, waited ’til the whole apartment smelled like jam, and packed the gooey, juicy, mauve-y treat in an old yogurt container and headed to work.
It was on the bus, when I went digging for some chapstick, that I first realized the tupperware might not be as water-tight (or in our case plum juice-tight) as I’d perhaps naively hoped. So you see, after that circumlocutious meditation on the plum, we’re back where we began: my inexactitude. It was when I arrived at the library on a special trip to return Justin’s overdue copy of Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, that I discovered that a full blown plum bomb had quietly exploded in my backpack. All of it–without exception–had been plummed.
Behold, poor Mrs. Dalloway:
I believe the e-mail from the librarian said something along the lines of, “A book checked out under your name was returned today covered in a sticky, purple liquid.” Needless to say, I am now the proud new owner of Mr. Pinker’s thoughtful exploration of the capabilities of the nascent brain.
What I can say about my family lunch is this: they are not as excited about my new camera as I am. But, I think they got used to the photo-taking in the end. Especially my grandmother, who has never been the least bit shy.
Here are some of my favorite shots:
Pauline: unwieldy matriarch, award-winning Lee County flower grower, wearing the tinkerbell earrings she bought on our trip to Disneyworld when I was fourteen.
Rita: (mom) Does not like having her photo made with wavy hair. But isn’t she so pretty?
Uncle Dan: spoils me, even now.
Bo: (dad) He’s laughing here.
What I can say about my family is that the older I get, the less concerned I am about the ways in which we are different and the more excited I am about the ways in which we’re alike.
Here, because I mentioned it on my flickr page, is Mamaw’s Betsey Johnson handbag:
and, though I didn’t get a good shot of her, a cameo from my Aunt Cindy’s hand.
Tomorrow marks the one-week anniversary of our pizza stone, so I thought some commemoration was called for. All week I’ve been rather shamelessly bragging to my friends of the culinary delights emanating from my small kitchen. As they say, though, the proof is in the pudding, or in our case, the pie. ta da:
The greatest strengths of the pizza are two-fold. One, an excellent Italian dough recipe. Two, home-grown basil and tomatoes:
Thanks are also due for pollination to our friendly neighborhood bee:
Also to the dough-rolling and rosemary-chopping skills of my co-chef, seen below enjoying a rosemary, roasted garlic and onion pie. (note for sticklers: the mushrooms were on his half)
I’m unfailingly delighted when something that requires a little technical expertise works out properly for me, like growing tomatoes or making dough that actually rises. So, as you can imagine, pizza-making is a series of rewarding moments all piled on one slightly-crispy, slightly-crunchy crust. Ah, the good life. That’s amore.
When it comes to sweets, I’ve got the tooth. You know, the one that whispers in your ear (why else would it be situated all the way back by your molars?) at the pastry shop: “Go ahead, take another sample of the flourless hazelnut brownie. No one’s really looking, and, after all, they wouldn’t bother setting out a plate of samples if they didn’t want you to eat them.” But I’m not a candy girl; taffy and fudge and gummi worms are fine, but I crave butter with my sugar, some good old fashioned lipids shagging with all that sucrose. Specifically, I love cookies. Oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip, sugar, ginger, Joe-Joe (not familiar with the Joe-Joe? a topic for another post). I like cookies that are hearty and a little bit soft and crisp at the edges. I particularly like cookies that go well with milk. And did I mention I prefer them warm, with a still-palpating, not-quite-solid, oozey, gooey heart?
But divorce yourself from these oven-hot fantasies; we’re not here to talk about cookies today. Today we’re here to talk about something a little less snackable and a bit more indulgent. Something meant to be eaten with a fork because it is at once too delicate and too robust for the sloppy work of our greedy phalanges. Today we’re here to talk about pie.
I grew up in a universe of two and only two pies: chocolate and pecan. My mom made hordes of both each year at Christmas and Thanksgiving. And, like most working moms of the 1980s, she bought frozen pie crusts at the grocery store. The chocolate filling came from a box of Jell-o instant pudding, all topped off, of course, with Cool Whip. And it was all so good, an especially delightful treat when she made mini-pies, leaving my sister and I each with a small and beautiful scaled-down version of the original we so loved. But, for reasons I can only speculate upon today, I never ate a proper berry pie until very recently. By recently I mean the past two or three years. I know, I know. Go ahead, cringe, gasp, pity my sheltered and empty life. I’ll give you a moment.
The truth is, I was a very finicky eater for the first two decades of my life–I ate my first salad when I was eighteen. And so, while berry pies were probably around–or perhaps it was cobbler, I am from the South–I suspect I just conveniently overlooked them. But somehow, perhaps against all odds, I grew into the berry-loving semi-vegetarian I am today. My eyes have been opened to a wide world beyond Pilsbury boxed and frozen crusts. I now know, with equal parts conviction and delight, that a beautiful universe was awaiting me beyond the chocolate pie.
This glimpse into my gastronomic history has brought us here: The Pie. (notice definite article)
Oh, the pie! The summer blackberry pie. The truest testament to this confection is that the same restaurant also bakes the best cookie my wonky jaw has had the pleasure of masticating. But, days later, it’s the pie that I still reflect upon with great fondness and a sense of both deep content and intense longing.
Under the following conditions, I would argue with some certainty that you, too, could experience the Platonic Ideal of the berry pie:
Spend the morning under a gray August sky in a 5mm wetsuit with a surfboard in hand. Get cold. Let the waves toss you around. Fight with yourself, your board, the undertow, the raging Pacific, all in an attempt to get far enough beyond the breakers to pretend you think you might catch a wave. Nose your eight foot board into the sandy floor and let the surf roll over you, tossing you like last week’s dirty socks at the laundromat. Let a trusted friend surf into you, leaving you both bruised and weary of your anonymous silhouette companions. Back on land, will the blood back into your purple-gray fingers. Attempt to remove your wetsuit with hands whose numbness has rendered them blunt flesh-colored flippers. Take a deep breath. Peel the last of the neoprene over your ankles. Wrap up in yesterday’s still wet towel and drive twenty minutes to Sobo.
You’ll find there are several pies in the case, but this one, the blackberry (warmed, of course, with homemade vanilla bean ice cream) is, frankly, magical.
Last night I attended a potluck. Though to be honest, it was less pot and more luck…or maybe that’s what you get for being the only vegetarian among a sausage-philic crowd of omnivores. Alas, sometimes a girl just has to fill up on beer.
The fun thing about last night’s potluck–apart from the guacamole, fresh corn on the cob, the American beers, the chatter of my favorite people–was bringing my new camera. Did I mention my sausage-philic friends are also shutterphiles? My new lensbaby was a real crowd-pleaser and the result was a bunch of sticky (and mildly intoxicated) fingers on my new Nikon–picture me saying, “okay, Andrew? Andrew. Strap around the neck,” over and over again. And a series of unexpectedly lovely portraits of my friends, taken by my friends, which I discovered this morning.
alistair
john and thara
Nate
claire
justin
nathan
andrew
and me.
ah summer:
.
As I type this, I can smell on my fingertips the delicate green perfume of the tomato plant. For years I assumed I couldn’t reasonably be accountable for the life of a plant. Life is fragile and I tend to move indelicately through the world.
But nothing speaks of summer like a ripe, hot tomato, from vine to mouth, the seedy pulp bursting on your tongue. When we moved into a house with a backyard, I vowed to grow tomatoes. Yesterday, to my sheer delight, the first tiny fruits appeared:
I love their fuzzy whiskers, the way the branch holds them as if by a spindly green hand:
We woke up this morning, eager to go climb Snake at Squamish, but after a couple of quick e-mails that turned into long phone calls, Justin found himself saddled with a morning’s worth of spreadsheeting. In the spirit of flexiblity (not always my strong suit) I got comfortable out on the side porch (I feel deceptive just calling that, it is so very small) with a stack of research proposals. But no trip outside is complete without visiting the tomatoes, counting their tiny fruits (14 today!), and fighting off the morning glory/bamboo/other mysterious and threatening jungle life. Sure my students’ research topics are fascinating–really they are–but what if I just spend the day listening to Led Zeppelin and admiring the tomatoes? Ah, summer.
oh, ‘mates, we’ve come a long way:
(just after planting, late may)
if there’s a bustle in your hedgerow don’t be alarmed now, it’s just a spring clean for the May Queen
