On the Move

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.

 

 

Pie making will resume soon. In the meantime, I hope you’ll tune in to 94.9 KUOW on September 7. Sometime between 2 and 3 pm they’re going to air a poem and interview I recorded with Elizabeth Austen (whose book I still haven’t packed). Tomorrow I’m reading with my old friend Elizabeth J Colen, who hates pie but writes phenomenal poems and fiction anyway. We’ll celebrate the publication of her first novella at Elliott Bay Bookstore, 7 pm.

Keep everything. Get more boxes. Box. By. Box.

Tags: poetry, readings

A Commonplace of Mincemeat Pie

Only one woman alive today would say her favorite pie is mincemeat. She makes hers with green tomatoes and mixed assorted meat-stuffs from the icebox. Her grandchildren hide her slices in their mouths and spit them into milk glasses when she gets up to answer the telephone. No thank you. Now is not a good time. She wanted to be a writer. She took photographs and painted, wore Isadora colored scarves that coiled around her shoulders and covered her hair like hair, was the most beautiful woman in town and justifiably vain. She likes to imagine her movements as gusts of wind blowing her children around the world, her little boats.

Tags: grandmas, mincemeat pie, pie, poetry, savory pie

Going Dutch in Pella, Iowa

When Jessie Oleson of Cakespy heard I was going to the Iowa State Fair to judge pie, she gave me a special assignment: find a Dutch Letter, figure out what the heck it is and why it’s an Iowan specialty. You can read my report on Cakespy today.

Tags: Cakespy, dutch letters, Iowa, Pella

The Perfect Pie Crust

The first pie I ever made was a disaster. I knew something was wrong when my friends started telling me how much they liked the key lime filling, while the crust I’d slaved and worried over slumped limply on rims of their plates. I took a bite and discovered the problem: the Crisco I’d precisely spooned into the flour bowl had gone rancid. Who knew it was possible for Crisco to go bad? But there I was, eating a homemade pie–my homemade pie–and washing the taste of petroleum out of my mouth with wine.

The second pie I ever made was the best double-crust peach pie I’d ever tasted. My friends couldn’t believe it. You made this? they asked. Turns out that rancid Crisco really was the only problem with that previous pie and I seemed to have a knack for crust-making. So I started to wonder: Why do people say things are “easy as pie” when many are too intimidated by pastry to give pie-making a shot? I had to find out.

Every good fairy tale is structured around the number three, but this isn’t that sort of story. I didn’t stop at a third magic pie. I made a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and a seventh, until I knew so many recipes and crust-making techniques that I lost count. Most of my crusts were flaky, but some were tough. If all this practice has taught me one thing, it’s that there is no such thing as the perfect pie crust recipe. An old-school boiling water pat-in-the-pan crust can be as flaky as a Saveur-approved pastry–the differences are mainly aesthetic and practical (and for some, spiritual). Some techniques make dough easy to roll out, but risk being tough. Some assure flakiness every single time and sacrifice malleability. Some mess with vodka or orange juice, or ask you to freeze everything every step of the way. Mostly, I think good crust comes down to how well the baker can listen to his or her hands. That, and knowing when to quit.

From Kate McDermott I’ve learned to go by feel when adding water to the dough. From Beth Howard I’ve learned to trust that more water is better than less water–the real danger is overworking it with your hands. From my mother, I learned that if a rolled-out pie crust is too delicate to come off the wax paper, whip the sucker upside down over your pie plate and peel the paper off. From all of them and others I’ve learned that pie is not about perfection. It’s not like cake, though it can be a piece of cake  (“dessert” must equal “easy” in cliche-land). If the crust falls apart, patch it up. The oven will set everything right. And don’t mess with vodka or orange juice, or freeze everything every step of the way. As Beth would say, keep it simple. As Kate McD would say, put an intention in the bowl. As my mother would say, it won’t be any worse than your grandmother’s.

This is the pie crust recipe that has worked best for me over the years. As this recipe evolves over the course of Pie-Scream I’ll write new versions of it. All of them will result in flaky pie crust. Just use the one that sounds like the most fun and the least hassle to you.

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. Make sure to have lots of different sizes of butter chunks, but each should be no larger than a walnut. 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 1/3 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.

Tags: pie, pie crust, recipes

A Commonplace of Pumpkin Pie

When it comes to choosing a favorite kind of pie, many people think pumpkin is a safe pick, by which they mean boring. Contrary to popular opinion, pumpkin pie lovers are adventurous, quizzical, good in bed and voluminously communicative. No need to ask a pumpkin pie lover if he’ll call ahead for reservations. He’ll arrive at the restaurant early, order a drink and have the waitstaff in his fan club before you get off work. By the time you arrive he might even have the hostess’s number. Do not trust him to say the right thing to your parents; do trust him to charm your friends. Consider for a moment a can of Libby’s pumpkin puree, how a pumpkin does not have a choice, but if it did, it could become a porchlight or a smear on the street. It could be hollowed and hallowed and filled with soup and served in a bistro to people who do not smash pumpkins. It could rot, unsold, in the field, or become this can of future pie. Do you see now why pumpkin pie is not boring? If it was, more people would know how to talk to bartenders.

Tags: pie, poetry, pumpkin pie

A Good Place to Start

If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan wrote that in Cosmos at least two years before I was born. Last year, this quote traveled across three decades of time and space and Google to inspire A Commonplace Book of Pie. Sagan’s book was a history of the last 15 billion years. My book is a collection of facts, both real and imagined, about pie. Much of the book is prose poems, but you could call them horoscopes, half-facts, truish stories, bad advice and good intentions. I’ve been writing them for about a year and selling a letterpressed, hand-bound edition of the first 10 poems (with recipes) on my Etsy site. I’m currently crossing my fingers and editing my pitch letters in hopes that a publisher will release this little-book-that-could into the big wide world.

Though the zine has been a surprising hit with friends and strangers–it’s now in its fourth printing–for the past year I have had little success publishing the individual poems in literary magazines because

a) The poems don’t make a whole lot of sense without the context the book (and Carl Sagan quote) provides.

b) They don’t emulate the expected salmon/cicadas/sunsets/self-consciousness that fits well between the soft-covers of a lit mag.

Not to slam lit mags–I edit one, I publish in them, I admire the labor of love they represent against the prevailing winds of modern publishing. It’s just that these poems mean more and have more fun in the company of less than literary ephemera: recipes, pie secrets and tips, oral history, those sorts of things. My secret wish with A Commonplace Book of Pie is to make it a poetry booby trap: you’ll page through it to try my peach ginger pie recipe and end up reading poetry on accident-on-purpose.

By publishing them on the web I know they’ll never be eligible for publication in prestigious magazines. By publishing them on the web, I hope to make them accessible to a larger audience. An audience who’ll get a kick out of them. In this way, giving pie poems a home is the main reason I’m starting Pie-Scream. That, and I have so much to tell you about my new favorite rhubarb pie recipe.

So what does all this pie talk have to do with the cosmos? I interpret Sagan’s quote as an invitation like the one Gene Wilder’s Willie Wonka extends to Charlie, Violet, Mike TV, Veruca and Augustus when he sings “If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it. Anything you want to, do it. Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it.”

Pure imagination.

I’ll start at the beginning with that pie of pies, pumpkin.

Announcing!

Pie-Scream is my new all-pie-all-the time blog. In my posts I’ll treat you to pie poems, recipes, tips, interviews, and a bit of natural history. Good Egg, my blog of three years, has retired. Welcome your new best friend in pie obsession, Pie-Scream!