The Treeless Forest

Missed Expectations

I never intended to be away from this blog for this long.  I am sorry that I have been -- not just sorry to readers who may have wanted something to while away a moment or three, but sorry that I stopped writing, and let the headspace that this blog represents to me begin slipping away.

It's so easy to do...  Little things start to creep in, and you let go of a few hours.  Bigger things follow on their coattails, and a day or two slips by.  Distractions work their wormy way in, and all of a sudden you look up and those distractions now make up your life.  As Gretchen Rubin says, over at the Happiness Project, "what you do every day matters more than what you do every once in a while."

I've found myself reassessing a little, once again.  It's sort of like sailing a ship, only the captain's easily distracted, and accident prone to boot.  You set a course, the captain gets washed overboard, and once you get everyone back on board you realize just how far off course you are.  So you get re-oriented, and the captain gets locked in the head.  Once she's free again, you correct course again, and then...  Over and over.  It's easy to get to a point where you just hunker down below decks and let the ship go wherever it will.

But this is not how I want things to be.  So I keep rescuing my inner captain, and re-orienting.  I think I'm getting better at reaction time between captain-loss and redirecting, but that may just be interior perception.  I've been going back and reading the blogs that inspired me in the first place, and taking a few 'taking stock' moments.  So, I promise to be back now.  Every day, a little something.  Because every day matters more than now-and-again.

Temporarily AWOL

Will return shortly.  I'm not entirely sure whether there will be a TWD this week.  We shall see.  All is well, just a bit distracted :)

In the meantime, the Flickr mosaic meme that been going around.  I've seen it in a number of places, but most recently at Under a Blue Moon.  You answer the questions below and then search for your answer on Flickr.  Pick one photo from the first page of results and add it to your favorites.  Create a mosiac that depicts your answers.

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1. Your first name: Alix
2. Your favorite food: Cookies
3. The name of your High School: Divine Child
4. What is your favorite color: Blue (okay, technically 'cerulean', 'cause 'blue' is sort of generic)
5. Celebrity crush: Clancy Brown. Don't ask.
6. Favorite beverage: Tea
7. Dream vacation: Barcelona
8. Favorite dessert: Peppermint Ice Cream
9. What do you want to be when you grow up: Magical
10. What do you love most in this life: Dreaming
11. One word that describes you: Flaky
12. Name of your blog: Treeless Forest

TWD 3!

Amy over at South in Your Mouth (how great is that blog title, btw?) picked this weeks TWD Recipe: Double-Crusted Blueberry Pie, and I cannot stress how happy I am she did.  You see, a few weeks back, I volunteered to make pie for the Fourth of July Get-together.  So when I saw the recipe, I knew it was serendipitous.  Then, as I was talking to the co-hostess the day before the get-together, she mentioned in passing that her mother, the other co-hostess, had hinted hopefully towards blueberry pie.  So, extra-kismet.

So Friday morning I dragged my carcass out of bed and headed over to my mom's.  While I remembered to bring my blueberries (though I had to pick up more along the way) I did not remember to bring the cookbook with me.  Given the price of gas, and the 40 minute drive one way?  Thank god for Google Books (about which I don't feel the least bit guilty because, com on, I own the book.)  Nor did I remember to return her pastry cutter to her.  The one and only thing I have in my kitchen that she does not is a food processor (though I do believe mine may be too small to handle the recipe.) 

So, I had to do the pie crust by hand, since my brain refuses to process the two knives method.  So my hands are that much stronger today than they were before.  All in all I didn't do too badly, I think.  The crust was a bit streaky, and a tad ornery to   handle, but once it chilled it was pretty amenable to handling.  Especially since I used wax paper to roll it out.  I've decided I really like this method, as it effectively eliminates the mess.

As you can probably see , if you look at the picture close enough, the crust did require some patching once I got it into the plate.  I am totally okay with this, since Alton Brown once told me that patching is totally normal.  If AB has to patch his own dough on television, who am I to complain about it?  Just be sure that the thickness is relatively uniform -- press the patch into the dough and even it all out.

Sone how in all the 47 pictures I took, I did not take an in process picture of the berries.  Which I'm not terribly sorry about, since it basically looked exactly like what it was: a great big bowl of blueberries with sugar.  I did use lemon zest and juice this time, since I love the flavor of blueberries and lemon together -- my friend?  Makes this Jam?  Yeah...  It's not peach-ginger jam, but it almost as good.  Almost.

Anyway, tossed the blueberries into the crust.  Probably should have tried to even out the excess sugar, but I was running a bit behind at this point.  I then slid on the top crust, and edged it.  Looking at the picture now, I guess the edge was a little sloppy, but there was a couple places where I patched the edge to get it a uniform thickness, so look at the lovely colored sugar!  Mom had seen it a few weeks back while she was at Gordon Food Service, and couldn't resist buying it to make sugar cookies.  Which she was making in the dining room while I was making pie.  Poor planning, you say?  Meh, I blame it all on the power outage.

Anyway, I got it all into the oven.  When I turned down the heat halfway through, as instructed, I noticed the edges were a tad browner than I would like.  I was going to tent the whole thing, but mom dug out a pie-crust protector ring she had picked up somewhere, and had never used.  Apparently?  It works, because it turned out beautifully.  The crust was perfectly done, and settled nicely over the filling.  I really like the way the sugar turned out, as well.  The crust tasted incredible, too.  Dorie isn't kidding when she calls it the "Good for Almost Anything Pie-Crust."  Must make quiche with this sometime soon.

The pie itself was excellent.  This is the kind of pie that I could eat a piece of every day.  The next time I make it, I'll probably cut back a tad on the sugar -- there were places where it was still a little crystallized at the bottom, but it wasn't noticeable if you weren't inspecting the pie like I was.  The filling was nicely oozy*, still slightly warm, and the berries had just enough texture.   As I said, Excellent.

* I like my pie filling slightly oozy, and I'm not a stickler about the pie holding together perfectly once it's been cut.  I'm not a huge fan of pie with jellified insides, so this was exactly perfect.

What To Do With The Other Half Pint

We did get power back, around 6 on Thursday.  Which meant we didn't lose nearly as much food as we could have, but all in all, my nerves were more than a little shot.  My apologies if I have not yet responded to your comments -- that's next on the To-do list, promise.

Friday morning I spent in the kitchen, making the blueberry pie that you'll see tomorrow, but also making other desserts.  In addition to the fact that my father in law is diabetic, I have a few friends who are allergic to wheat.  Not celiac disease level allergy, just every-day run of the mill allergy.  So, because I had a half pint of blueberries leftover from the pie, and a mess of strawberries, I made jam-jar parfaits.

Before I get into the pretty picture portion of this post, I must issue the disclaimer that using jam jars is an idea I picked up here, here and here.  This was totally not my idea to begin with, so don't go thinking I'm *that* cool.

Onwards!

I ended up making two batches of these, and learned two very important things.  Number one, Sugar  Free Jello makes 3 cups of pudding, and regular sugar pudding mix makes 2 cups of pudding.  Number 2: four jam jars use about 2.5 cups of pudding.  I also had a half pint of blueberries, and used a 1 quart container plus about 8 extra strawberries.

Begin by washing all the fruit, by which I mean give it a good, thorough rinse.  If there are any patently bad berries, toss them, but don't worry about small spots or blemishes.

Set the blueberries aside, and start cutting up the strawberries.  If you want to actually hull them, go ahead.  Alton Brown has a great tip about using a pastry bag star tip to do so, but I can't find a good illustration of it.  Anyway.  I, however, am lazy, and truly enjoy turning my fingernails a horrifying shade of cerise.  So, just lop the top off the strawberry, like so.  (Bonus: If you have a backyard that is frequented by rabbits or squirrels, just toss the tops into a corner of the yard that they wander through.  They seem to love them at mom's house.) 

Cut the berry in half, then  in quarters.  If you want, you can further trim the pieces down by cutting them in half again, parallel to the top of the berry.  What you want are pieces that are somewhat smaller than bite size.  I also feel I should mention that I?  Am not left handed.

Next, make vanilla pudding by whatever method your heart desires.  I, obviously, used package pudding here, one sugar free instant for the diabetic, and one regular French Vanilla insant for the wheat free, because I couldn't quite pass up the poetic justice of using French Vanilla pudding on the Fourth of July.  That's just how I am -- all ironic and subversive in ways almost no one ever knows, or understands.  ::sigh::  It's hard, being me. < / sarcasm >

While the pudding sets a little, wash your jam jars.  Since you're not actually making, you know, jam, there is no reason to boil them.  Just a quick wash and dry will do.  Set up a small assembly line with your pudding and fruit.  Then:

Two or three spoonfuls of pudding.

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A small handful of strawberries

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About 2 spoonfuls of pudding, and a scattering of blueberries.

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Another two spoons of pudding, a small handful of strawberry bits, and pudding to top off.

Sadly, I am brilliant, and did not take a picture of the final product with its lid on.  However, the point here is that when you use jam jars, you can put the lids on, and then take them wherever it is you are going, and not worry about them all that much.  Especially if you have the box the jars came in to transport them. :)

Thwarted

So, last night, I had just put little cupfuls of this in the refrigerator, and was squeezing the cooled lemons for this, when our power went out.  Out out.  Around 7:30 p.m.

Sometime between Midnight and 1:30 a.m., the power for the library across the side street, the dentist's office in front of our complex, and the adult care facility nextdoor came back on.

When I called the power company this morning, at 7:30 a.m., the automated message said there were no outage reports for my area.  Meaning someone there didn't do as thorough a job of investigating the report that returned power to the library, et al, as they should have.

Eh-hem.  GRRRRRRRRRRR.

So I'm not really feeling the love this Thursday, sadly.  In theory, we should have power back by 4 p.m. today.  Which means since the refrigerator hasn't been opened, all it's contents should not be lost.  I hope.

::sigh::

Seriously, power company people, get with it.  Do you not understand that I have a pie to bake?

::double sigh::

Tuesdays With Dorie, Number Two

Karina, over at The Floured Apron, chose this week's Tuesdays With Dorie recipe:  Apple Cheddar Scones  This was exciting, because I love scones, and have always wanted to make them.

The dough was assembled quite quickly.  The ingredients are pretty simple, and in fact the only things I had to go out and get were dried apples, buttermilk and apple juice.  Oh, and unsalted butter, since we tend not to use the unsalted variety for daily stuff, and I'd used up all of last week's making cookies.  Pay no attention to the snickerdoodles and sugar wafers on the left, they are entirely extraneous to the process.  I was making a double batch, because I intended to freeze half of them.  Somehow in the planning process, I neglected to factor in the 40 minute drive home in a car with no air conditioning.  So I ended up baking the entire mess of them, except for two that I left in the freezer for my mother to try baking from frozen.  Presumably, I will get the report on how that turned out later in the week.

I have no in process picture.  This is due to the fact that, while Dorie does note that the dough will be very sticky, this does not even begin to cover what the actual consistency of the dough was.  When I make these again, I am going to entirely forgo attempting to pat out the dough, because I think I added about half again the called for amount of flour by the second batch just to make it touchable.  Cutting was next to impossible.  The first batch I just made as drop biscuits, while the second I added enough flour to actually cut them, and make rectangles (the texture came out alright, if a tad rough.) They are definitely worth making the dough, but seriously?  Just make drop biscuits of them.  Much frustration and usage of bad words will be skipped, this way.

[Also, as a purely personal substitution, I will probably try to make these with cream, rather than buttermilk, because the smell of buttermilk makes me gag, something fierce.  I have distinct memories of my host-mother trying to get me to drink the stuff, saying that it was good for the complexion.  I distinguished myself by not throwing it right back up.  Barely.]

These were wonderful.  They taste divine, were tender and fluffy and the cheese tasted delightful with the tiny hint of flavor that the dried apple and apple juice provided.  They tasted wonderful right out of the oven, and to me, just as good the next day with butter.  I plan to have them for breakfast all week.  They're not terribly sweet, and as I mentioned, the apple flavor is not at all strong, and not something to be afraid of.  They would be equally good as breakfast food as they would along side a corn or potato chowder, warmed and topped with a slice of honey ham.

However.  These are not what I would call scones.  The scones from the Scottish Bakery in my mother's neighborhood are dense, creamy, and crumbly -- a distinctly different texture that simply wasn't present here.   These are biscuits.  There is a growing tendency to refer to sweet quick-bread variations as scones, and savory variations as biscuits, which I simply don't understand.  It may be that "scone" sounds fancier and more exotic, and more worth the $3.50 that Starbucks likes to charge, than does 'biscuit,' something that nobody would pay for because they come free with your KFC.  Which is all nonsense, because no self-respecting baker would call what KFC serves a biscuit, anyway.  But I seem to be ranting, now, and I should stop.

All this said, I definitely intend to make these biscuits again.  As drop biscuits*.

*Another reason that these are biscuits and not scones -- drop scones are pan fried, like pancakes.

Taking the Scenic Route

So, last night, after a lovely dinner with Lila and sprout, which was unfortunately short due to the fact that I didn't so much sleep the previous night as bodily rearrange the sheets and blankets, I was on my way home.  It's a fairly long drive, not too bad if you speed pretty heavily, but what with gas prices being what they are, I've been really trying to slow down (hard for a speed demon like myself.)  Unfortunately, everybody else on the freeway last night seemed to have not gotten the memo that fuel efficiency drops the faster you go over 55.

Humid as it was, last night was a beautiful evening, it was still light out, and I just plain didn't feel like speeding, for a change.  One of the truly pretty things about Michigan is that, outside of the major cities, there are a number of very pretty country roads that are in good shape where the speed limit is an efficiency-lovers 50 mph (if there is one at all,) with very few stops and starts.  I pulled off the freeway, and took the scenic route, all tree-covered roads and open fields.  It was mostly empty on the backroads, which was a good thing, given the number of times I veered ever so slightly into the other lane, craning my neck to see some other pretty or intriguing thing.

Everything, everywhere, was just so ridiculously alive.  I realize this sounds like a strange thing to say.  Even though it's technically summer, many things in Michigan are still the spring phase of growth, flagrant,  exuberant and obscene.  Green things taking over every space that wasn't coated in blacktop or gravel, and in a few places that were.  It's a beautiful time, but it also makes me feel a strange combination of being incredibly long-lived and yet utterly ephemeral at one and the same time.  I feel pale, wraithlike in my simultaneous comparitive longevity and comparitive brevity.  A flower, a leaf, last only a summer, but flowers return, and trees endure.

Coasting along with my melancholic wonder, I noticed a particularly nice grain silo along the road*.  One of the glazed tile variety, it was largely intact, but looked to be out of use.  I wondered if it would be possible to live in one, wihtout making it bigger, or adding anything to the outside  I debated where the staircase would go, then decided that one could make do with an interior ladder between levels, with some other method for the cats.  The ground floor for cooking and eating, a second floor for a sitting room and a small bath, and a bed up under the dome of the roof.   Tiny and cozy, and totally impractical.  That's me. 

* For whatever reason, having a grain silo out in the middle of a field away from the main buildings of the farm, is a totally normal thing.  This may be a local thing, I don't know.  I'm from the city, these things are mysterious to me.

*Pictures stolen shamelessly from other people.

Love Endures Absences

My best friend, whom we shall call Lila, and I have known each other for...  Well, let's just say our friendship would be out of college by now, shall we?  We met at school when we were 10 years old.  We've remained friends ever since, despite disagreements, absences, and the occasional continental or inter-continental separations.

She was my Mistress of Honor in my wedding, about which there was never any question as to whether she would be.  She said some of the most amazingly sweet things about me during the toasts, things that brought me just as close to tears as some of our wedding vows did.  She spoke of being honored to be my friend, and I couldn't help but think that I was really the lucky one.

She has a daughter now, who is adorable, and for a long time was reasonably fond of me, which I chalked up to having been the second person in her life to feed her.  Nowadays, though, I think she doesn't like me much, because I'm not fooled easily, and I don't seem to listen very well when she says 'No!' to things like jackets in winter.  I think she's just like her momma: she's got strong opinons, but a quiet way of going about living them.  I just happen to notice more than they think I do.

We don't see each other very often, anymore, which I regret.  But we're a good hour's drive away from each other, and the demands of motherhood and family pull just as tightly at her as the reins of family and platonic duty do me, so we chat occasionally online, and see each other when we can get the time.  Tonight is one of those opportunities.  Good food, a very good friend, good conversation.  Who could ask for a better evening?

Happy Love Thursday, all.

*Sorry for the unexpected hiatus.  I broke a tooth Tuesday night, and while I'm not in any pain, it's kinda crampin' my style.

Tuesdays With Dorie, Number One (For Me)

I am really glad that I started Tuesdays with Dorie with such a wonderfully simple recipe.  The Mixed Berry Cobbler was very straightforward, and turned out beautifully.  Just what my out of shape baking muscles needed to start with.  Doubly exciting because it's something that I've never made, and don't remember ever having had before.

The TWD rules/standard paractice is that the recipe is only posted on the 'hosting' blog, that is, the blog that picked the recipe (from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours) in the first place.  This time around, that would be Beth over at Our Sweet Life.

In this recipe, Greenspan uses one large plain biscuit for the top.  So, after sending Crane out on an emergency run for flour (it never occurred to me that that might be the one thing Mom would be out of... ) I greased up the pan, and pulled out all of the biscuit ingredients.  Biscuits may well be the simplest thing in the world, but I'm always a little wary of biscuit type doughs.  I don't always have the best luck with them, which is one of the reasons why I usually let Pilsbury do the hard work (also because their flacky biscuits are a comfort food of the gods.)  But, pass or fail, I wanted to make the recipe as the recipe told me to, so I did.  Wonder of wonders, it turned out beautifully.  I didn't have any problem getting it to come together, or getting it into the shape that I wanted.   

In this rather blurry image, I have the filling ingredients.  If you read the recipe, it calls for lemon or lime zest.  I spaced on this completely, so I ended up using orange zest, which worked excellently with the dark cherries and blackberries I used.  I also opted to use the suggested black pepper, which I have no doubt did something wonderful, but which  I couldn't taste it as black pepper, as such.

The filling was barely any work at all.  When I make this again, I will probably use only cherries, and thaw them first, to release some of the extra liquid.  Or try using a little more cornstarch, or other thickener, since the juice from the finished product was very thin.  I don't know that this was specifically because they were frozen (which Dorie says is fine) or because they were cherries.  Perhaps a variation on Alton Brown's Apple Pie procedure, where he drains liquid from the apples, then boils it down into a syrup and adds part of it back in to the filling would work, too.  For all I know, it could even have been because I made the vents too big.

In my one moment of voluntary deviation from the recipe as written, I also sprinkled a little sugar on  top of the biscuit, to give it a little extra crunch and sparkle.  As you can see, it turned out beautifully, even if I calculated my timing a little off, so the last ten minutes of baking interfered with the garlic bread.  I am a little afraid that mom's deep dish apple pie plate may have permanent pink tinge, though.  Ah well, it adds character, right?

I didn't have enough heavy cream left over to make whipped cream, so I just dribbled a little of the cream over the top.  The verdict?  Very, very good.  I personally could have done with a bit more sugar both in the biscuit and in the filling, but that may have had to do with the fruit I used, or the fact that I have a significant sweet tooth.  I've also already mentioned that the filling liquid came out very thin.  This may be a cobbler thing, I don't know.  In any case, it still tasted wonderful, and looked lovely.  I would very much like to try this sometime soon with fresh fruit, rather than frozen.  Just as soon as the local farmer's market has something other than strawberries.  Not that I'm knockin' strawberries, mind you.  I'm just ready for variety, is all.

Oh, and I'm seriously psyched for next week's pick, courtesy of Karina at The Floured Apron: Apple Cheddar Scones!

Housekeeping

So, I actually finished reading this a few days ago.  I've been sort of pondering it in the back of my head ever since, because the book took me rather by surprise.  I decided to read it because it was mentioned on (where else?) Posy Gets Cozy, way back in the archives.  Alicia spoke of it so engagingly that I thought I'd try reading it.  It was out of my normal bailiwick (scifi, fantasy, alternative history, speculative fiction;) and I wanted to try something as completely apart from the Tombstone books as I could get.

Boy, was it ever.

Crane is the lit-lover of the two of us.  Sure, I've read scads of books, everything from Terry Pratchett and Gene Wolf to George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and Octavia Butler to Dostoyevsky, Dumas and Hugo.  But more often than not, reading is as far as I go.  I like stories, and even though the philosopher in me gets quite a lot of mental meat from some very unexpected places,  Crane is the one who really digs down into the mechanics of books and tries to understand them apart from the stories they tell.  He calls it his inner English major.  He recently read Valis by Philip K. Dick and said to me that "This, more than any other book, explains me."  I thought that a little odd at the time, that a single book could somehow explain a person, highlight them in some complete and understandable way.  Especially since Philip K. Dick wasn't exactly the most...  hinged of persons.

But now I know what he meant.  While reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, the sense of recognition mixed with utter nakedness was almost overwhelming.  This was made even more strange by the fact that I felt as if both sisters were, in fact, me.  I still have Lucille's internal conversations with imaginary passers-of-judgment, and sublimating my feelings of inferiority in plans to fix them is one of my hallmarks.  At the same time, I feel Ruthie's dream-like sense of perpetual expectation just below the surface of me, and most of my legion of regrets are a direct result of waiting in expectation for things I should have gone out and taken care of on my own.  What are written as two disparate sisters, reacting differently to an otherwise identical life, feel as if they are two halves of the whole of me.

In her post about Housekeeping,  Alicia writes:

Housekeeping was the first book I'd read that gave a strange kind of substance to my own strange, melancholy childhood, though its plot was nothing like my own -- but its essence, the unraveling and re-knitting of its ideas and images, rang so familiar and clear that I finished it with huge relief, and quietly started making plans to do other things.

I probably won't give up on the idea of writing, since what I believe I would write, if I did so, would be more scifi/fantasy, but I feel as if a weight has been lifted, the onus of talking about my own life, in ways that make it sound the way it felt, the way it feels from day to day.  I can move on and think and write about other things now.

I think at base, the book is about memory.  How memory creates lives, and people, and gets bound up in their lives as both cause and effect.  Where Gene Wolfe captures the feeling of the loss of living memory in Latro in the Mist, I think Robinson captures the essential nature of memory, and its ephemeral qualities better than any other writer I've come across.

The book probably isn't for everyone.  The pacing and voice are very dreamlike, and oddly detached.  This is entirely suitable to the story.  The story itself, the plot, is sort of... small.  What I mean is, it's not a grand retelling of momentous events.  It's not the great American novel.  It's not terribly comforting, if you identify too closely with it.  But it captures a feeling so aptly, that it's hard to write it off as simple.

I've begun to read Robinson's second novel, Gilead.  I may go back and re-read Over the Moon, first, since I have it via Inter-Library Loan, and will need to send it back soon, but also because I have a feeling that Gilead with branch out a littlre more than Over the Moon and Housekeeping did.  More adventures, in the making.