Gothic Granola

It's only seventy-four days until Halloween/my birthday, and it's not too early for pumpkin muffins.  Snow is appearing on the mountains and it snowed (briefly, no accumulation) at 11,500 feet last weekend.  

Fluffy Bunny, Curse Reversed "For what has been, thanks! For what shall be--yes!"  --Dag Hammerskjold What doors are you going to keep open, once opened? Premise: I don't like marshmallows.

This year, I am grateful for learning the following lesson, and all the people, places, events, and things that taught me it. If I don't enjoy certain things with certain people under certain circumstances, I oughtn't write it off. Being open to try it again under different circumstances with different people can reverse the curse.  Thanksgiving is one of those things.

Ask a gluten-free person what they miss most and it's most likely bread and beer. When I brought this bread to my gluten-free friend, with shaking hands I presented it--"It's...it's bread. "

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.

Nostalgia...comes in many flavours.  Nostalgia also features ellipses, and sometimes tissues, and, for the VGF among us, carbs. While tackling the rolls my grandmother makes for Thanksgiving to make them vegan and gluten-free will probably never yield a perfectly white piece of bread, I can make a bread that’s pretty darn close to the rolls served at the now-defunct chain restaurant Steak and Ale .  (By the way, you should donate to Wikipedia.  It’s worth your while to support the free sharing of knowledge.)  The molasses and buckwheat flour colour these rolls a pumpernickel brown, while I’m sure it was caramel colour and a heck of a lot more sweetener that gave the Steak and Ale bread its dark sweetness.

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.

Skulls and tombstones.   Would you really expect anything else from a taphophile? Thanks to my aunt and uncle, I now bake in true undead style with the Lilli Vanilli in ‘A Zombie Ate my Cupcake!’ book and cake decorating kit.

Remember that old New Jersey tourism slogan, “New Jersey and You: Perfect Together”?  Can you be a tourist this holiday, observing but not being of them?  Granted, there’s also the tourist philosophy of, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”  My family’s not from Rome (Naples and Sicily, thank you very much).

Hey y’all.  When I first saw this recipe, I ran to my aunt and said, “I can make that.”  So I made it for Thanksgiving.

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.

Chococat says, "All this pumpkin cheezecake for me?!"

Hello from Alexandria!   I have been having a wonder-filled fall break back in the D.C. metro area.  After making excellent time from NJ (3.5 hours!) last Thursday, I made a pumpkin pie as soon as I arrived at my aunt and uncle’s house.

I’m back at school.  My room is double the square footage of last year’s 87-square-foot closet.   The kitchen is in the same building, which is convenient.  The oven in this kitchen does not have a timer.  Tell me that’s not a safety hazard in a dorm of absent-minded undergraduates.  Go on, tell me people are responsible.