Just a quick suggestion for the eleven other pie-makers who are readying their ovens for Jenise Silva’s Cake vs. Pie contest.

Tomorrow, when you arrive at Vermillion and confidently deposit your pie on the judging table, after you take a quick look around the room and begin to apprehend that you’ve just entered your humble sweet into a race with professionals and dessert obsessives, after you start to worry that no pie will ever be as drop dead gorgeous as those five cakes over there, the ones that look like they’ve been spun from gold-plated sugar by fairies whose teeny tiny hands do nothing so well as shape fondant, remember that fondant tastes like styrofoam, that pie is a rustic dessert, beautiful in its particular lumpy, golden way–and take heart. You can win this contest. Above all, do not under any circumstances freak out and leave. Or you’d be, like me, the dork who missed her big Best in Show moment at last year’s Cake vs. Pie.

Seriously, don’t leave. If only because I’m dying to meet y’all.

And now a quick suggestion for folks who haven’t entered the Cake vs. Pie contest: come! It’s a blast, there’s booze, and we get to chow down on the entries after judging is over. The details:

Crust or Crumb? A Cake vs. Pie Rematch

Call to Bakers for October 10 Faceoff

SEATTLE – September 6, 2011 – Bakers from both sides of the fence will have a chance to put an end to that age old debate in households across America…cake or pie?

Last year pie reigned victorious. But the crown, once again, is up for grabs.

On October 10, bakers will “bring it” with their favorite cake or pie creations. Bakers, both amateurs and professionals alike, will be competing for prizes and the ultimate bragging rights to the best baked goodness in Seattle.

If you have stories to share about cake or pie, then consider this event your soapbox.

Prizes will be awarded based on overall appearance, taste and texture (crust or crumb) by judges who rock the Seattle culinary scene.

Cake vs Pie is presented in conjunction with media partner Seattlest.

WHAT:         Jenise Silva’s Cake vs. Pie

WHEN:         Monday, October 10, 6 pm

WHERE:      Vermillion, 1508 11th Ave Seattle, Wa 98122

WHY:            To compete for great prizes and settle the age old debate…Cake or Pie?

Apple pie invented itself on the outskirts of what would become Hoboken, New Jersey on the afternoon of August 5, 1717. The apple orchards, too, were accidental, carried afar in the bellies of birds and bears and other four-legged fruit-eating animals, the seeds polished and shined by the intestines of their hosts and planted in spoor on new ground. When apple trees began to blossom among the inedible deciduous woods, settlers raced to cut the alders and underbrush away so the apples could have the full portion of sunlight they hoped their God owed them.

Back then, apple trees did not fruit every year. The settlers blamed themselves for this: in their greed, they had picked the first apple trees to near death. That the trees chose to hibernate every other year seemed an act of self preservation, and the settlers resolved to be patient. 1717 was an off year, so a farm wife named Nancy Cottonwood retrieved a cache of apples stored in her cellar from the previous harvest. In the cool darkness the apples had kept remarkably well, but were no longer attractive. To appease their vanity, she cut them up. To honor their barren parents, she removed the tough core and seeds. And because it was the day before Sunday, her day of rest, she made pastry instead of slow-rising brown bread, wrapped the apples so they would not get cold, and baked them in her wood-burning oven. When William Cottonwood retuned from the fields, he smelled his dinner on the windowsill and said, “Wife, give me a kiss. Food without hospitality is medicine.” It was a proverb he had heard in the tavern in town, where apple cider ran cleaner than water from any well in this would-be virgin world his people had claimed by calling it new.

More for you literary Seattleite types: The Ecstasy of Influence. Programming genius Jennifer Borges Foster has created a multidisciplinary evening for City Arts Fest that’s all about what happens when a brilliant poet (Heather McHugh), who–if you don’t already know–possesses oceans of talent and a heart the size of Texas, uses her joie de vivre and sharp intellect to inspire and instruct students of poetry (that’s Kary Wayson, Erika Wilder, and me) to write great poems and be great people. I’m proud to be a part of this reading. I think you’ll have a great time if you come. The details:

Heather McHugh is one of the most distinct and important voices in American poetry. Her words sing off the page and tickle the brain. This remarkable pairing of wit and hymn has transfixed audiences for decades, and in this reading we will celebrate the cerebral song of McHugh while taking a closer look at her influence on NW poetics. Heather will be joined by 3 of her most talented former and current students, Kary Wayson, Kate Lebo and Erika Wilder. We’ll hear short readings from each of these young luminaries punctuated by songs based on McHugh’s poems by spunky bluegrass trio The Half Brothers, followed by a reading from Heather McHugh herself. The event will be hosted by Jennifer Borges Foster. Chrom-A-Matic, a visual arts collective and on-the-spot painting troupe will be creating new paintings based on the poems and songs presented throughout the evening. These paintings will be autctioned off after the readings to benefit Heather McHugh’s favorite charity, the World Society for the Protection of Animals.

Thursday, October 20 at Town Hall. Doors at 7pm. For tickets and more info, click here.

Pie Life (Sat Oct 22 at 1p.m. at Fred Wildlife Refuge) asks a local writer
(David Schmader), food critic (Sara Dickerman), blogger (Shauna James Ahern) and musician (Tilson from the Saturday Knights) to tell us their favorite pie stories. Once storytime is over, we’ll fill our pie holes with fresh-baked treats from the best pie-makers in Seattle–you! Pie banquet and ambient twang from the band Tall Boys to follow. Hosted by yours truly (City Arts just called me an “extreme pie enthusiast,” which might be the best appositive ever appended to my name) and KUOW’s Jeannie Yandel.

Will you do it? If you enter the pie contest, you get into the event for
free. Otherwise it’s just $5, and I hope you’ll at least come and cheer on
other pie bakers and dance your pants off.  (You can read more about the
event, get directions, and buy tickets here).

*To enter the pie contest, send your full name and e-mail
to pie@cityartsfest.com and bring your made-from-scratch pie to Fred
Wildlife Refuge between noon and 1 pm on October 22. We’ll award prizes
based on taste, appearance, nostalgia, and overall awesomeness.

*IN ADDITION TO FAME AND GLORY, HERE ARE SOME OF THE FABULOUS PRIZES YOU
COULD WIN:*

• Pastry Print from Cakespy.com‘s Jessie Oleson
• Tallboys CDs
• Gift certificates for 2 tubs each of lard from Dietrich’s Meats in Krumsville, PA (best lard EVER)
• A pie class and pastry cloth from Four and 20 Blackbirds
• Coffee and conversation with Art of the Pie‘s Kate McDermott
• High Five Pie gift pack
• a subscription to Edible Seattle
• a Hugo House membership

Says deathless Emerson: The eye can’t satisfy unless it has a horizon. In the place you grew up, where was yours? How far could you see? Was there a road by your house? Where did it lead? To eradicate blackberry brambles, one must believe in rhizomes. What was your first encounter with a wild animal? How far were you allowed to roam?  You’ll know a plant is non-native if it’s called invasive. In what sort of landscape do you feel safest? Where do you belong?

Weather psychics have promised a balmy 74 degrees for mid-day Saturday, September 24, the last Pie Stand of summer 2011. As always, I’m going to make a slew of seasonal pies, which means I’ll be using the last of the peaches and plums, the first of the Gravensteins (the perfect pie apple), whatever’s left of the marionberries, raspberries, and blackberries, and that seasonless fruit (at least around Seattle, where we’d have better luck growing avocados) the lemon. Slices ($3-$5), mini pies ($10-12), and full pies ($30-35) will all be for sale. The coffee and conversation will be free. Kids and dogs welcome!

Before I start on imaginary blackberry pie, I need to say something that isn’t easy to say. The new apartment? The new blog? They’re mine–I made them–because last month I left my boyfriend of five years. We lived together, which is what prompted my father to say “this is like a divorce” when he was trying to help me plan the logistics of the move. As Sugar from the Rumpus would say, “I broke my own heart,” not to mention his, and in respect for what we’re both going through, I won’t get into details here. What I want to talk about is what I needed most after this trauma, even more than food, which doesn’t taste so good when you’re really really sad.

Space.

Not necessarily new space, but more. And how the only way to get more space was for me to move into new ones. This one-bedroom apartment with its good light and built-in bookshelves. Pie-scream, a fresh blog where I can obsess about my favorite subject. I’ve started to say “no” to perfectly wonderful opportunities because being too busy doesn’t allow for the emotional space I need right now. And what I’m least familiar with and most curious about: space within my writing. I’m not talking about a bigger desk. I mean I wonder how this hunger for spaciousness will show up in my poems. Here’s how it shows up in the blog: imaginary blackberry pie.

It’s made from blackberries you find at your new house. Renegade blackberries–the kind that grow in any ignored patch of dirt in Seattle–are in your back patch of dirt, crouching around the weed choked garden and shading the lawn. You wonder if, like fleas, blackberries can sense the presence of humans through vibrations in the ground, but instead of hatching at the sound of footsteps, blackberries wait for all the footsteps to recede before they sneak out and start taking over their little forgotten acre.

You see these blackberries and you hatch a plan: on the day you get your keys to the new apartment, you’ll pick a pie’s worth as a sort of private housewarming, Mary Oliver-style, letting your body “love what it loves.” You’ll use a little of the champagne the previous tenants left you (the discovery of that kindness made you tear up; you tear up a lot lately) and of course sugar and lemon, a little nutmeg, and wrap it all in galette or pie dough, whatever you’re feeling like that day. And when you make the crust, you’ll make a mess, get flour everywhere, throw it around on purpose because no one is going to walk in and say “You’re trying to kill me!” or actually get horribly ill from the grains afloat in the air. Your ex has celiac disease. Blackberry pie is a treat you couldn’t make for him without fifteen different flours, one of which you were always out of. You’d substitute and experiment because you loved him, and you wanted him to be able to eat dessert. Now you need only one flour. Wheat flour. A flour so common that we all know we mean “wheat” when we say “flour.” You’ve heard he’s not feeling well today, something he ate, and you suppress the urge to call and help him suss out the culprit. That’s no business of yours anymore. He’s a grown man. He’ll find his desserts and poisons himself.

The day you move in, you notice the rosebush out front has been pruned drastically back. The dandelions have all lost their heads. Fallen plums have disappeared too fast to blame the birds. And, yes, the blackberries are gone. The last four inches of their canes stick out of the ground like the top branches of drowned trees. The garden service was here. Hey, it’s great that you have a garden service. You thought you’d have to mow the lawn yourself. But you’re sad that the blackberries were cut down in their prime. Without blackberries, you have to invent a new housewarming pie. That’s when imaginary blackberry pie becomes the perfect plan.

Perfect because, if you’re being honest, you have no time to make pie this week. You still have a three bedroom house to clean, an attic to muck out, and a garden to abandon at the old place. At the new place, your kitchen is in order, but every time you unpack a box, two boxes arrive to fill its place. And if you’re still being honest with yourself, your blackberry pie recipe isn’t as great as it could be. Tapioca flour, your usual thickener, can’t quite keep the blackberries in check, so your pie is soupy. Because you usually use frozen berries, they bake in whole shapes. This seems like a good idea when you think about how blackberry pie filling can be as gummy as old jam, but in practice it’s pretty disconcerting when the berries fall out of the crust whole and you have to chase them around the plate with a fork. But these blackberries are imaginary. You can make them do anything you want. Even better, you can ask other people for help–you’ve gotten good practice at that lately. Maybe they’ll know the secret you’ve been searching for. Maybe they’ll share it.

Imaginary Blackberry Pie

To write this recipe, I need your help. What are your secrets to the perfect blackberry pie? What’s your favorite recipe? How do you make it? When do you make it? Who do you make it for? You can answer any or all of these questions by commenting on this post. If you’ve got a full recipe text to share (bigger than a link), send it to kate@pie-scream.com. I’ll pick my favorite and post it in the coming weeks.

People who love chocolate cream pie move through this world in a swarm of music. Their cars leak baselines like oil; their exhaust sings from the dark of the pipe. Periodically they experiment with the softness of their genders and find them lacking every time, wear skirts to feel the hair on their thighs and pants to bind their bodies into the clean lines of a park bench. They invite you to sit down. The chocolate pie lover would like to convince you that she is three inches taller than the crown of her head. She’ll use words like chrysanthemum, tercet, cheekbone and freckle to woo your belief. She isn’t lying, exactly. She’s creating the truth believer by believer, just as you would if you too had a voice as big as a church.

Galettes are a fast and sophisticated route to dinner or dessert. Fast because you can forget the precision of crimping and fluting edges; sophisticated for no other reason than it’s French. The crust bakes up tender instead of flaky, which can make a rich filling less overwhelming, and you can fill it with anything–roasted vegetables, peaches, apples, frangipane and plums. If it sounds like a good idea, it probably is. The dough is wetter, more pliable, easier to handle, and harder to mess up than American-style pie dough, so it’s great for handpies and new pie-makers. If you’re short on time and patience, give a galette a try.

Galettes can be baked in a regular pie dish, freeform on a cookie sheet (just make sure not to go overboard on the filling or the juices will certainly overflow), or in a cast iron skillet. There’s no secret to how to use a skillet here–the iron conducts heat better than glass or ceramic, so your pie might bake faster, that’s all.

I prefer to use my cast iron pan because it looks cool. When I bring it to the table, people expect to see roast chicken or cornbread or something equally Americana, and instead they get a lazy french tart. This is, in a nutshell, my main recipe-creation strategy: start with something familiar, make something essential about it unfamiliar, and bam, you’ve got everyone’s attention. You can do that with ingredients. You can do that with booze. You can even do it with dishes.

Because I’m accustomed to making mile-high American-style pies, I tend to overfill my galettes. The only consequence of this habit worth considering is that the juice inevitably bubbles out and caramelizes around the edge of the pan. This is annoying if you’re not actually using a pan to bake your galette. But if you are, like me, using a cast iron skillet, and if you, like me, sprinkle the top of your galette with crunchy sugar, than you are, like me, creating the sweet equivalent of the toasted cheese on the edge of the nacho pan. Otherwise known as “the best part.”

Galette Dough 

1 and 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons butter cut into 1/2 inch chunks
1/4 cup sour cream
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1/4 cup ice water
demerara sugar (for sprinkling)

Whisk the sour cream, lemon juice, and ice water in a two-cup liquid measuring cup and chill it in the freezer while preparing the flour and fat.

In a medium bowl, combine flour and salt. Toss in the butter and rub it into the flour between your fingers and thumbs, letting the chunks drop back into the bowl. Keep breaking up big butter pieces until you have a few walnut-sized pieces, a handful of almond-sizes pieces, and a lot of pea-sized pieces.

In a thin stream, pour half the chilled liquid over the flour and fat mixture. Toss everything lightly a couple times, then pour almost all of the rest of the liquid in a thin stream over the dough. Toss again. The dough should hold together (no puffs of dry flour) and feel tacky. Expect it to feel much wetter than American pie dough, but not so wet that it’s like batter. The dough should hold together easily in a ball. Add the rest of the liquid, if needed.

Gather the dough into a ball and firmly, with your palms and thumbs, press the dough into a thick disc. Wrap it in plastic and refrigerate it for a half hour or so.

Prepare your filling, whatever it may be. I’ll have lots of recipes for this on Pie-Scream soon.

When rolling it out, use lots of flour on your rolling surface and pin. I roll it out directly on the counter, lifting and turning the dough with a pastry scraper periodically so it doesn’t stick. You can also roll it out on wax or parchment paper.

Once the dough is about 1/4-inch thick and in a large round, transfer it to your pie plate. I do this by rolling it over my rolling pin or folding the dough in half, then in quarters, and lifting it into the pan. You can also just transfer the dough on its parchment paper to a cookie sheet.

Layer the filling in the dough. Grab the edge of the dough and pull it toward the center of the galette. Grab another spot about three or four inches down and pull it toward the center, creating a sweet little mess of pleats. You might have a big open window in the center of your galette where you can see the filling, or you might have just a crack between the edges of the dough where the filling peaks out. It depends on how big your pan is, and it’s all good as long as there is a still a hole for steam to vent through. Brush with milk, dust with sugar or salt, and bake according to the instructions in your recipe.

The Swedish have a word for hunger that sounds like ice before it’s scraped off a windshield and, when held in the mouth, glints like a metal tooth. The lingonberry pie lover is like this word, so he collects antique orthodontia and cultivates peculiar hungers. The scent of gasoline evaporating from asphalt, the sneer of grass on a good dress. Being told no or slow down when in proximity of food makes the lingonberry pie lover capable of aggravated misdemeanors. I don’t suggest testing this assertion.