Light and Momentary

28

This is the day of NaBloPoMo on which I say, "Huh, I might be temporarily out of ideas for new blog posts."

Can't have Thanksgiving without pecan pie

"You need to write all these recipes down," Pete told me after Thanksgiving dinner, and then the next day a guest requested the pecan pie recipe. So here's a pecan pie post.

I make a pecan pie that is fussier than the ones I grew up with. I think it looks so pretty and festive that I don't mind the once-a-year hassle. You do have to hunch over a hot partially set pie to arrange pecan halves in concentric circles, so keep on scrolling if that's not your cup of tea. (Pecan pie is at approximately 1:00 in this picture of our consolatory 2020 dessert extravaganza. We had no company; we had so much pie.)

Roll out shortcrust pastry to line a 9-inch tart pan with a removable base. Let it rest in the fridge for about an hour so it doesn't shrink in the oven. Preheat your oven to 400, and blind-bake the crust, anchored by pie weights or dried beans, for 20 minutes.

While it's in the oven, cream together 6 T. softened butter and 125g brown sugar. (I will never again pack brown sugar into a measuring cup with a spoon, but we can still be friends if you hate baking by weight: that's about 1/2 c., packed.) When the mixture is light and fluffy, beat in 3 eggs, followed by 100 ml maple syrup and 150 ml corn syrup. Add a pinch of salt and a spoonful of liquor -- bourbon or dark rum, as you prefer.

Put a tablespoon of flour into a baggie, and add 150 g chopped pecans. (My cookbook estimates this as 1.25 cups; pinpoint accuracy is not essential here.) Shake them around to coat them with flour, so they are less likely to sink to the bottom of the pie. Fold them into the filling mixture.

Do not neglect this next step, even if you are feeling lucky: set the tart pan with its parbaked crust in a rimmed baking sheet, on which you have set a foil square that will cup the sides of the pan and contain any oozing pie filling. You are now going to pour most of a pound of sugar into that crust, and if you have even a small crack in the crust you will make a disastrous mess in your oven floor as the filling seeps through the removable bottom of your tart pan. If you are baking the pie while you eat your Thanksgiving dinner, the dining room will be filled with acrid smoke and the shrill voices of angry smoke detectors. (Why, yes, this is the voice of bitter experience! Learn from my mistakes, friends!) Don't overfill the crust, or you'll get overflowing baked-on goo gluing the pie to the pan. If you have extra filling, bake it until it's set in a separate little dish, like the white ramekin in these pie pictures. Turn the oven temperature down to 350 and give it 15 minutes.

Here is the fiddly part: scoot your oven rack out and place pecan halves in concentric circles atop the lightly set filling. Slide it back in and bake until it's completely set. Check it after 30 more minutes; if it's still jiggly in the middle you might need as much as ten more minutes. Cool it on a wire rack until you can slide it out of its pan and onto a pretty plate. Cut it in small slices so you will have leftovers.

This is a recipe from Barbara Maher's Ultimate Cake, the book behind many of our celebratory desserts over the years.

Alas

I was going to make a nice cozy pot of turkey-barley soup tonight. Just the thing for a cold night, I thought to myself, with the added benefit of getting rid of some of the stock taking up space in the fridge. A few days before Thanksgiving I like to serve roast chicken for dinner and make stock with the carcass, so there's plenty on hand for moistening stuffing and making gravy. But I often make more than I need, which means the extra stock is competing with the Thanksgiving leftovers for fridge space.

I minced an onion and a stalk of celery and set them to browning in a mix of olive oil and butter. I cubed up a few small carrots and added them too, and once everything was turning golden I added some slivered garlic and sprinkled the veggies with salt. I poured in stock and added a couple of handfuls of chopped leftover turkey, and then I grabbed the quick barley. We had an open box in the pantry, left over from last soup season, and I tipped it all in. It seemed a little clumpy, but I told myself it looked fine. If you are reading this post in hopes of finding an actual recipe for turkey-barley soup, you're almost done: simmer until the barley is tender and check the seasoning. Easy, cozy, golden, frugal -- who could ask for anything more? But this is not primarily a recipe post, because the story takes a sad turn:

Fifteen minutes later I peeked in and discovered an armada of little cream-colored crescent-shaped items afloat in my soup. 

For a moment I thought optimistically that all the broken bits of barley must have been crescent-shaped. And then my heart sank, and I pulled up the magnifier app on my phone to survey a few ships from the fleet, kind of like Gulliver in Lilliput if Gulliver had been an iPhone user preparing to eat the Lilliputians.

It turns out that boiling one's specimens in chicken stock does not assist in the process of accurate entomological identification, but the miniature navy in my soup pot looked an awful lot like these little guys. (Don't click that link if you're an easy-queasy person.)

"Hm," said Elwood, when I asked him for a second opinion, "that doesn't look right." 

He was less grossed out by the weevil picture than I was, pronouncing our visitors "free protein." "We didn't even have to pay for it," he added cheerfully. "Joe's always trying to eat more protein. And you! You want gains too, don't you?"

I don't want gains enough to eat larva soup, I assured him.

I need to find out who the patron saint of pantry infestations is, so I can pray earnestly: deliver us from weevils.

Succinctly

Kids' return from Germany: safe and timely

Belated Thanksgiving dinner: tasty and abundant

Number of dinner guests: 14

Dirty dishes: plentiful

Ability to form complete sentences: temporarily fractured

Eighth time is the charm, maybe

I am determined to finish The Game of Kings. I keep hearing that it's amazing. Just give it time, people say. It's worth it, they tell me.

I am almost 200 pages in, feeling impatient.

There are spots where I can tell it's supposed to be funny, but I am not invested enough in the characters to be amused. It seems willfully esoteric in a way I find irritating.

I keep telling myself that it's probably like Master and Commander, which I also found a little irritating. I didn't even pick up the second book until a few years later. But then I galloped through the whole series, cheering and chortling.

Let's hope I'm enjoying it more a hundred pages from now.

Just getting started

This has been the quietest Thanksgiving day I've ever had.

Pete and Joe have been in Germany this week, and so we've planned for months to have our Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday. We'll have about a dozen people here to eat turkey, but right now the turkey is still hanging out in the fridge, uncooked. 

Today I made the cranberry sauce and the stock and the pastry. We had Indian food for dinner, which felt pretty weird.

There will be lots of cooking and cleaning to do tomorrow. Here's to uneventful travel for all the travelers, and smooth easy cooking and cleaning for those of us at home.

For the curly-haired people

I've been using Shea Moisture hair products for years now, and I'm usually a coconut-hibiscus person. Last month I was at CVS looking for a replacement tub of my old standby, and they didn't have quite what I was looking for. I tried a new-to-me product line, the Jamaican black castor oil.

It's not a fabulous name, to my ear -- I associate castor oil with sad children's literature characters from the 1950s and earthy-crunchy moms trying to kick-start labor. But it is a fabulous cool-weather hair product. This is today's zero-effort hair, curl definition courtesy of the smoothie cream. 

With any product for curls, there are tradeoffs: crisper curl definition usually means more residue. That's true of this one, too, but I like it anyway. And this is probably a niche issue, since I don't know how many people with fading red hair read this blog and also buy curl products, but I find that thick and opaque curl products like this one mute the color of my hair. I'm a fan, though. I'll definitely buy it again.

Easy, happy, fresh, local

I always forget how much I like potato-leek soup until I am actually eating potato-leek soup. We get CSA leeks regularly in the late fall, and tonight I made a pot of soup that we all enjoyed. You can make this soup with any quantity of leeks or potatoes, really, but I had four medium leeks and two medium potatoes.

Chop up the white and pale green parts of your leeks into bite-sized pieces, and soak them briefly in cold water to get rid of any lingering dirt. Toss them into a heavy pot in which you have melted a half-stick of butter. Season them with salt and pepper and let them stew on medium-low heat for about 15 minutes.

Sprinkle a quarter-cup of flour over your softened leeks and stir it around for a few minutes. Once it's nice and hot, whisk in about 3 cups of stock, starting slowly to avoid sad lumpy soup. Chuck in your peeled and cubed potatoes at this point, and about a cup of milk or cream or a combination thereof. You are the only person who knows where you like your soups to fall on the soup-stew spectrum, and the only person who knows how much butterfat is the right amount of butterfat for your palate, so do what works for you. You'll probably need more salt. Tonight I chopped up some leftover sausage that was lurking in the fridge and added it to the pot, but it also makes a nice meatless meal.

When your potatoes are tender, taste again for salt and serve it forth. 

I love the squeak of a leek between my teeth-- don't you?

cp

Somewhere on the Gladlyville U servers I have a folder filled with hundreds of quiz questions. Somewhere else on those servers I have a folder filled with gigs and gigs of video lectures. One of my tasks this week is to move them to different folders on those same servers.

We are changing over from one LMS to another this semester, and the painful level has been fairly high. Compounding the pain is a deadline: everything on the old LMS will go away at the end of the month. I have eleven years' worth of stuff stored in that old LMS, and moving it over is a big job.

There are some elements of the task that are straightforward. It's only mildly frustrating to copy over the folders where course readings and lecture materials are stored. (The process derails when it encounters links, but I can mostly work around that.) Unfortunately, the assignments and quizzes have to be copied one by one. And according to the instructions for saving my videos, I ought to download them all and then re-upload them to a new site.

Somewhere behind the curtain there are directories from which all of my quiz questions and all of my videos are accessible, and SOMEONE on campus has write permission for those directories. SOMEONE on campus could type a line of code that looked something like this--

> cp /old_lms/dr_gladly/quizzes/* /new_lms/dr_gladly/quizzes

-- and save me hours of work.

But for whatever reason, that option is not on offer. 

I am trying not to be too whiny about it. I have 15 courses with materials stored in the old LMS. I've finished transferring five of them. I have big chunks of three other classes done. I have to get it done, so I'll get it done.

It would be much nicer if there were a more efficient option available, though.

That was weird timing

Yesterday morning, twelve hours after my happy dog-walking post, something unexpected happened: Sandy and I were three-tenths of a mile from home when she slipped her collar and ran away from me like she was possessed. She's fine, but it was a little scary.

We adopted Sandy on August 12, and she's been such a good little dog. She almost always comes the first time I call her name, she responds to "sit" with reasonable consistency, she never chews anything she shouldn't or gets into the garbage or begs at the table. One day earlier in the fall her leash got disconnected when we were walking, and as soon as I called her name she turned around and came right back to me so I could clip it again. Another time Stella and I were going on a Non-Dog Outing and Sandy slipped out the back door with us, hoping for a Dog Outing. She came obediently back to the door and went in immediately, disappointed but cooperative.

So when she first slipped away yesterday I wasn't worried. Right after she poops she prances around as if to say, "ah, I feel so much lighter now," and she always wants to run as soon as possible after I get things cleaned up. I thought she'd come right back as soon as she realized I wasn't with her.

But she didn't.

I abandoned the mess temporarily and sprinted after her, calling her name again. She didn't slow down; she didn't look over her shoulder. She just ran, hell bent for leather. "At least," I thought to myself, "the students are mostly gone for Thanksgiving break, so there will be fewer distracted drivers speeding through the neighborhood." Just then, a car turned a corner, driving right up the route she needed to follow to get home.

"SANDY, WATCH FOR THE CAR!" I bellowed. I don't know whether the driver heard the bellow or saw the dog or both, but it stopped before they could collide. After Sandy ran in front of the stopped car and up our street, the passenger hopped out and tried to catch up with her while the car followed them slowly.

At this point I'd covered about three-quarters of the distance and I was out of steam. Later I understood why: my watch told me after the fact that I was running at a 7:15 pace, and I am not a 7:15 kind of runner. But it felt urgent to catch the dog before she encountered another car, so off I ran again. 

When Sandy got to our driveway she wasn't quite sure what to do. The guy on foot didn't know it was her house, obviously, and was still trying to contain her. She ran back down the sidewalk to me, and I quickly leashed her and thanked the guy on the sidewalk. I wobbled inside, gasping and adrenaline-raddled.

The whole thing only took a few minutes, but it shook me up. Why had my sweet cooperative dog lost her mind like that? 

I wondered if she wanted more running time than she'd been getting, but she hasn't wanted to run any more than usual today. I wondered if she was unexpectedly hungry after a long walk (she usually beelines for her bowl right after our morning walk), but she went straight to the couch and curled up with Stella; she didn't eat anything for a while afterward. I wondered if I'd totally misread my dog and actually she had needed me to teach her to heel and generally discipline her with a firmer hand. I was feeling pretty bummed about the whole thing.

Today, though, I am wondering if I might have scared her.

We don't know much about Sandy's background, but she seems to have had some experiences that left her cautious about people and particularly fearful of men. For weeks and weeks she wasn't sure what to make of Elwood. She'd approach him to be petted and then flinch away for no reason. It was like she was saying, "I want to trust you, but is this the day when you kick me in the belly?" Since she's been here we've had one day with some brief kid drama, and she ran as far away from the yelling as she could possibly go, all the way to the opposite corner of the house.

Yesterday might have been the first time she'd ever heard me raise my voice. Is that why she kept running, maybe?

I tightened her collar, which had loosened itself up. I kept her closer to me during the post-poop prancing today. I gave her some extra opportunities to go fast, in case she needed to burn off some energy. But I'm still confused about why she did that, and a little worried about what might happen next time.