Gothic Granola

Ice cream cake is simple: cookie crumbles, ice cream, and syrup and/or preserves. Remember when cookie used to be spelled "cooky?"  I wasn't alive then, but I read my mom's copy of Ginny's Baby-sitting Business (Catherine Woolley, 1969) in 2001, and there it was, "cooky" instead of cookie.

Every vegan and their mom has a recipe for a berry tart. Because vegan desserts have to be fruit and plant-based, right? Nope. By the way, I learned about this crust recipe from my mother, so there. She made it in December 2012 for a holiday desserts presentation I did for Lawrence Library . My mom made the same crust again as berry mini-pies in for Fourth of July in 2013. These are my fresh berry tarts.  

I spent a good part of 2013 and early 2014 proofreading a novella for a former co-worker, and he self-published it a few months ago. Read it! White Plastic Butterfly Barette  by Erin Willis.   There's some part of WPBB on the ground in this photo, amongst all my other books (mostly religion books) from August 2013.

This post has two geneses: as Fall rolls around to Northern Colorado (37 degrees yesterday, what?!), TC requested an apple pie, after I made Key Lime Pie a few weeks ago. One of the two things I didn't do before I left DC was to make VGF pie with my friend Andi. This is for you, Andi, since it's unlikely I'll be back in DC to bake pie with you anytime soon.  

I am rubber, you are glue. Whatever you say to me bounces off and sticks to you. How. I. Wish. Resilience...

The snow has me grounded at my grandparents' house after our Army-Navy game party, and I made breakfast/dessert in my cupcake pan which I left here. Since my grandmother bakes frequently, her pans aren't "safe" for me (years of baked-on grease and wheat flour). Her dessert for our "tailgate" party was the conventional version of cinnamon coffee bars .  Funny story, the last time I wrote about  cheesecake , I had just made  Chocolate-Covered Katie's Deep-Dish Cinnamon Roll Pie . The 2012 pie turned out tough because I was angry and tight. Tonight I made the pie again in cupcake format. The cupcakes baked up properly puddingy because I am happy and chill. There is substance to  Como agua para chocolate !  

I am very American in the fact that I like my car. Today my car was the instrument through which I received another wakeup call.

They don't pay me to think anymore, so I tend to think hard anyway. When I'm speeding home from closing shift, downing 800 mL to 1 L of water in order to rehydrate while blasting Rage Against the Machine, my mind runs in high gear. It's time to write. It's difficult to be consistent in other areas of life when one's job is inconsistent. Let us begin with this premise. Being a cashier and having a standing sedentary job is no more healthy than being a desk jockey with a sitting sedentary job. The inconsistent hours, workload, and cast of characters is beginning to wear on me. When a job begins to impact my health negatively, in preventable ways, then it's time to go. This is a job, not my career.

What else is circular? Syncrhonicity. Synchronicity, as explained by Carl Jung, is “the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner."( Wikipedia ). In simpler terms, stuff happens and it seems to be related to previous stuff.

I am my mother's child; when she was in her teens, she reportedly made many a baked supper. According to Uncle Jimmy, it was usually something in a crust.

Clearly, I like cheezecake.

What do you do with a big zucchini What do you do with a big zucchini What do you do with a big zucchini Fresh from grandma’s garden? Bake it in a pie until it’s tender Bake it in a cake for sweet-tooth splendor Whirl it into mush in a high-speed blender Holy cats, I’m starving! Plentiful, prodigious zucchini, meet pie, cake, and pasta sauce or soup base. Zucchini Pie Modified from my grandmother’s recipe Makes one 9-inch pie Note: Crust and filling can both be assembled separately the night before baking. Crust: 1 1/2 cup walnuts 1/4 cup brown rice flour or sticky rice flour 1/2 cup cornmeal 2 tablespoons coconut oil, solid Filling: 1 teaspoon olive oil 1 large onion 1 medium zucchini 1 medium summer squash 12.3 ounces silken tofu (firm) 1 small clove garlic 7 leaves fresh basil (or 2 tablespoons of vegan pesto) 1 ½ teaspoons dry or wet mustard 1 ½ teaspoons apple cider or white wine vinegar Preheat oven to 375 degre...

Last week, my mom made chocolate cream cheeze frosting for chocolate cupcakes for my super-sweet sixteen (graduation) party, and the frosting never set.  She used blue-label Tofutti Better than Cream Cheese, which contains partially hydrogenated oils, tastes chalky, and weeps in the fridge.  

With one baked sweet potato, I made sweet potato pie for a party on Sunday.  I made the pie a day in advance because the filling is unbaked. I made this pie for a potluck birthday party given in honour of the Buddhist nun who leads the meditation group I attend near school.  She’s originally from West Virginia, so I baked the pie in my purple Fiestaware pie plate (Fiestaware’s still  made in America, folks ).  When I brought her a slice, she said “This is pretty good!”

…Not to the tune of “Spring” by Rammstein.  That song is slow, whereas cleaning needs must be quick and efficient.   I have senioritis!  Not having to spend my Fridays…and Saturdays…and Sunday evenings on my critical paper is most freeing.  Two things I will miss about college are not having class on Fridays and having break during my birthday.

Pie.  I got nothin’ for ya.  I tried a new crust, which gave me some problems.  It’s the same crust recipe as for my pecan pie and pumpkin pie, but I tried messing with the flours.  Bad idea.  The crust, when I worked with it, felt dry, crumbled in my hands, and was generally weak.

Most of the food featured below was made (and probably stored) in circular equipment.  Much like my logic. Last Sunday, when I returned to New Jersey, I made a pecan-oatmeal pie in a raisin-oat-almond crust.  I modified the usual pecan pie filling recipe that I’ve been using for the traditional pecan pie and chocolate pecan brownie pie, adding oats, according to this Cooking Light recipe.  My mom has made this pie a fair few times as post-Thanksgiving pie, and I wanted it, deglutinised, four months later.  You could make it with the traditional flour-based crust, but I made a nut-oat-raisin one just ’cause.

Greetings from the National Archives in Washington, D.C.!  I’m attending the Wikipedia GLAMcamp D.C. in order to learn more about how I, as a student worker at my school’s archives, can facilitate GLAM-Wikipedia collaboration.  You can learn more about GLAMs and Wikipedia here: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM .

Have you ever stood in the shower, fiddling with the knob for the water and discovered there’s a point above which the water’s obnoxiously hot?  A mere millimetre below that spot, the water’s glacial.  Then if you spend about five minutes, undressed, messing with the dial, you can have a perfect blend of lava and ice floe.  Of course, having two knobs—one for hot and one for cold—simplifies this matter.  As you may suspect, I just took a shower.  Mind you, taking a shower is not a big production for me; I don’t mention showering because it’s unusual for me to do so.  Freshman year, my roommates noted that I take short showers.  Taking a less than ten-minute shower was called taking a “Q-rate shower” amongst residents of Buyers 12.  When I was younger and had less surface area, I took really short showers (OK, so, my brother and I would time each other…bragging rights for the one who took the quickest showers and managed to scrub everywhere despit...

The title of this post is not intentionally misleading.  The pie itself is time-consuming, as is all pie, but I managed to have time to bake it and read forty or so pages of American literature for class tomorrow.  Now I’m writing this and listening to the strange turn my Rammstein channel on Pandora has taken, featuring classical arrangements of alternative songs.  I may eat this pie for breakfast since I have yet to make lunch and breakfast for tomorrow.