Wineberry pie

aving the recipe is only half the battle. It took several pies for me to get the pie crust to behave in such a way that I could roll it out, instead of trying to piece something together out of the fragments that never became a whole. Your only hope in this matter is to start with a good recipe and figure it out for yourself. The very best book ever is "The Pie and Pastry Bible" by Rose Levy Beranbaum. I've gotten so many recipes out of this book, if you know me, you've probably had one. In my mind, the best kind of cookbook isn't just recipes but philosophy and information, so that you actually have some clue why things need to be just so. Absolutely essential for the baker. Go get it. shoo.

This past weekend I had the good fortune to spend a night atop a mountain in the Shenandoah region, and came back (thanks to Wortklauberlein) with a pound of fresh berries from the bazillions of vines lining the roads. The local population informed us that they are wineberries, a particularly sweet variety of raspberry. There's nothing so satisfying as baking or cooking with food you've picked yourself. er, or that someone has thoughtfully picked for you.


Ingredients
"Deluxe flaky pie crust" 21 oz
    14 tbl unsalted butter, cold.
    2.25 cups flour (pref. pastry)
    1/4 tsp salt
    1/4 tsp baking powder
    7.5 tbl ice water
    1 tbl cider vinegar
0.5 cup sugar (I only had brown)
2.5 tbl cornstarch
pinch salt
1 lb berries, washed and picked over for passengers.

1. Pick a pound of wineberries and a few blackberries from Flattop Mountain. Or your backyard. Or somebody else's backyard. I don't think you can buy wineberries in the store, but this recipe will likely work with whatever berries you have handy.
2. Make pie crust:
• cut butter into small cubes, freeze for 30 min +
• put flour, salt, baking powder in gallon size ziplock bag, shake to mix thoroughly.
• add frozen butter, expel air and use rolling pin to (patiently) roll butter into flat flakes. Shake bag to redistribute when mix gets bunched up at one end. Freeze for 10 min.
• sprinkle water and vinegar into bag, toss to mix.
• keeping the bag open, knead from the outside of the bag until dough forms a single lump. To do this, you'll need to use the bag to fold the dough onto itself (don't touch it directly). About halfway through you'll get frustrated because it's not holding together yet. Put it in the fridge for a few minutes and come back to it. Once it's a lump, divide into two pieces, one for the top and one for the bottom crust. 
• Refrigerate for at least an hour, preferably overnight. 
3. Roll out bottom crust on lightly floured surface to 1/8 inch thickness. Lay in pie pan, cover and refrigerate at least 30 min, no more than 3 hours.
4. Combine sugar, cornstarch and salt, whisk together. Toss berries gently in this mixture and let sit for 15 minutes. 
5. Toss gently again and pour into bottom crust.

6. Roll out top crust to 1/8 inch. I used a lattice pattern, but you could do a full top crust and cut a hole in the middle for steam to escape. Lay top crust over berries, use water to glue and fold edges under (or over) and crimp using a fork or your fingers.
7. Refrigerate pie, covered loosely in plastic wrap, for about an hour.
8. Preheat oven to 425 at least 20 minutes before baking. Use a baking stone if you have one and put it on the lower rack. Bake pie for 30 minutes or until juices are bubbling and crust is browned. Put a baking sheet or foil underneath the pie plate to catch drips.
9. Let cool for at least 2 hours before serving, probably more like 4 if you have the patience.

Mini reviews: Etiquette and conversation, or, "An echo is sufficient"

any of the books I looked through in search of advice on how to be a good conversationalist made the same points: remember that you are conversing with someone, not interrogating or soliloquizing.  What I'm looking for is how to ask good questions, what topics to bring up and just what to say in general. Many sources point out the usual topics: weather, travel, news, even the forbidden politics and religion, and strongly recommend against talking about yourself. The easiest way to remember this is to avoid using "I" and "Me" as much as possible. It can be tricky at first and often leads to getting even more tongue tied, but making conversation or writing without the dreaded personal pronouns is an entertaining challenge.

Emily Post's Etiquette- Etiquette focuses on how to be polite and interact appropriately in any situation. The seminal work on traditional etiquette is perhaps my favourite reference out of all that I read through because it takes a more conservative view of manners and proper conduct. Sadly, the young men whom I ran some of Post's points past were more of the opinion that the "liberated woman" doesn't need the door held, her dinner paid for, or any sort of special consideration. She is equal, therefore she is one of of the guys! Mais non, the liberated woman just doesn't want to do all the damn dishes herself. Again.

Grace Under Pressure- This is the book of tactics for those situations you'd never admit to being in. Pulling your reputation back together after a mishap at the company party, getting by at an ex's wedding, and generally how to be gracious and sensitive no matter what. On conversation: a good section on how to start conversations, balancing questions and responses, listening (which makes all the difference when it comes time to reply), getting out of bad small talk, insults, and introducing yourself to strangers. Comes with entertaining anecdotes and scandal (clearly the selling point: this would never be me!).

21st Century Etiquette- Frankly, don't bother with this one. Outdated references to electronic mail and chatrooms, "teens" as children, slightly condescending "quizzes" at the ends of chapters and generally a bit simplistic.  And there wasn't much on conversation.

What do you say when...- More quizzes. I suppose this is a style, as if it were a workbook, but I don't love it. Also a more traditional viewpoint with some good thoughts, and short, so a quick read. There's a good section on romantic meetings that also applies to platonic interactions and meeting new people. Worth it because the book is dedicated to conversation.

The Art of Mingling- Finally, we get past some of the more clichéd approaches (Haven't I seen you somewhere before?) to ideas on how to continue the conversation. Some of the ideas will sound pretty awkward ("This party is a virtual utopia" comes from the a-z list of words to build from when at a loss), but there are plenty such as watching from afar with another wall flower, asking a group a random question to poll responses and start a debate and so on. Kind of dorky to be seen with, but essentially quite useful.

Conversation: A History of a Declining Art- Certainly this is the most expansive and in-depth of all those I checked out... which unfortunately means I did not have time to read it in its entirety. However, I can say that having skimmed a bit, it looks to be perhaps more useful than any of the aforementioned because not only does it include methods from historical conversationalists (hello, Socrates?), but it's actually worth talking about the subject matter when you're done. Will take this one out later to read in full.

Then we come to The Art of Conversation and The Art of Civilized Conversation. Different authors and publishers, but you can just see the expression on the face of the former when she discovered the latter. These are both dense, full of lists, do's and dont's and bullets. The first, however, has the following passage:

"In the 1960s... computer pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum created Doctor, a software program that adapted a psychotherapy technique for bouncing back patients' statements as questions:

User: I have been rather depressed lately.
Computer: Are you depressed often?
User: Yes, almost all the time.
Computer: Why do you say yes almost all the time?
User: Right now I feel like I could cry.
Computer: Is it because right now you feel like you could cry that you came to me?

One morning he was appalled to discover his transfixed secretary at a computer, unspooling her sorrows into Doctor's clunky, copycat code. ...So the thought that an echo is sufficient to convince us we're being listened to, that the bogus Doctor could seduce the secretary, carries the degrading suggestion that much of human complexity—those worries and wonders we store up and long to share—may also be illusory, empty, and that we are mere bundles of reactions, mysterious and meaningful only to us."

Thanks to the Arlington VA public library for having all these books and putting them on hold for me.

Social butterfly

s far as I can tell, the best thing about living in DC is that there are more events than one can ever hope to attend. Better yet, a good portion of them are entirely free to the public, funded by donation or (cough) your tax dollars. After discovering this last summer when attending the outdoor movie series on the National Mall and in Crystal City, I thought, hey, I should put together a calendar of some of the events I'm interested in and share it with people. Presumably, a fair chunk of my [iiiitty-bitty] reader-base is located in the DC metro area, so hopefully someone will find this useful.

The events contained within were discovered via the following:

• The Crystal City/Crystal Screen outdoor movie series. This year's theme is "by the numbers."
• Screen on the Green, brought to you by HBO and a lot of loyal fans. This screen shows more classic movies this year.
• The Freer and Sackler Galleries. Yet more movies, and other events. Remember that I'm selecting things that I'm personally interested in attending. Please check behind the links for more! (Also, stop in the see one of my favorite works by Whistler: the Peacock Room.)
• Kennedy Center Millenium Stage. There's a free performance/concert/show every night all year. 
• The Torpedo Factory. Always has studios and galleries open to the public. 
• Smithsonian Institution, including the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Obviously I haven't included the (20) museums that are free and awesome on a daily basis, but some special events are on the calendar. 
• Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. Many DC-ites have raved about both the Aquatic Gardens and the National Arboretum as head-clearing refuges. Check out the water lily festival in July.
• The Library of Congress. The Center for the Book has some interesting book talks, and of course there's the National Book Festival in September (for a whole two days!). 
• Jazz in the Garden, National Gallery of Art. Every Friday evening in the Nat'l Gallery Sculpture Garden. Tends to be a bit crowded, but if you get a good seat (arrive on time) the music is live and you can bring a picnic. 

The calendar will update on this page when new events are added, so check back, or use the "+Google Calendar" button on the bottom right corner to subscribe in Google Calendar. Alternatively, use this .ics file in ical or other calendar applications. 

Suggestions for additions are welcome.

ps. I'm trying out some schmancy drop caps at the top of each post. If they don't display/line up well, let me know. Blogger doesn't have much of a way to add something like that without it being an image, and because the settings for images (e.g. the border) are universal, I don't think I can change that for an individual post. 

Father's Day Carrot Cake

It has come to my attention recently that for the most part people don't need more stuff, and so instead I bake them gifts for most of the assorted Hallmark holidays. It's actually more effort on my part, at least physically, and it's something we can share, instead of another [tie/bouquet] thoughtful but nonetheless impersonal gift. Books don't count, obviously, one can never have too many books.

That being said, I made carrot cake for my dad for this Father's Day, which also meant the most cautious drive from NoVA into MD possible, so as not to lose the cake in a sudden stop or turn. I think I watched the cake more than the road. hm. Any minute now he'll cut a slice, and then I can post this! Unfortunately I don't have the recipe with me to include (and I don't mind keeping it a bit of a secret), but you can easily find it in the Williams Sonoma Essentials of Baking book I'm sure I've touted before.



I'm not sure whether it's harder to zest a squeezed citrus, or to squeeze a zested one. Either way, once it lacks some cohesion it's difficult to handle. Sometimes I forget things like: Orange juice comes from oranges, therefore "juice of one orange" could theoretically come from a carton, not the fresh fruit I just squeezed to death.



This is possibly my favourite frosting: cream cheese, white chocolate and orange juice (and butter). It's pretty sweet, thanks to the white chocolate, but has that cream cheese tang and then the orange flavor. I'm also a sucker for cream cheese pie crust, which gets used most frequently for the awesome cranberry apple pie I make in the Autumn and Winter.

Anywho, Happy Father's Day to all, but especially to mine.

Movies to feel OK by

In the last month I've had a lot of nights home alone, feeling mopey and disillusioned with the world at large. While there was no pint of ice cream involved, I did wind up watching a few too many romantic comedies and lightweight dramas, in some sort of effort to renew my faith in humanity. You'll note from the fact that I'm still using phrases like "renew my faith in humanity" that the woebegone feeling is not yet, in fact, gone, but life's a journey and a path and oh, let's just move on.

These first three movies were of higher quality than some others I came across. All are ranked in order from "least embarrassing to be seen with" on down.

The Lovely Bones- In fact has nothing to do with romance or comedy. This is a fairly recent project from Peter Jackson, concerning the fate of a teenage girl's soul after her untimely death. It's a very pretty movie, with a lot of computer generated graphics, fuzzy focus, and a sort of 1970s Polaroid film feel to it (the girl is a budding photographer). The story itself kept me a little short of breath and wanting to know more about all of the characters. Also, Stanley Tucci in an unusual role.

The Kids are All Right- Dramedy? Categorization isn't all that important, especially because this film has such broadly applicable themes. Both the parents and the kids are trying to figure themselves out, and do so through the character of the "father," who is just as lost in all this as they are. Intentions get fuzzy and things go wrong, but I think a lot of the point is self-discovery through mistakes, and having a family that supports you through it all.

Waitress- I admit that I got this one because Nathan Fillion is in it. It also has a finding-your-way-in-life plot, a lot of pie baking, and some amusing comedic timing. 

Less worthy of note:

Notting Hill- Hugh Grant! Owning a bookshop!
Mystic Pizza- Cute, multi-plotline, 1980s.
Made of Honor- Stupid, but kind of sweet and the guy was reasonably believable.
Runaway Bride- The bottom of this list is not bottom-y enough for how bad this movie was.

EDIT: More recently, I've started having too many nights/days not home, so things like this post (which I started a week ago) have fallen by the way-side. Too many projects, too little time.

Junk information

There's a lot that's been written lately about how much information is available to us through the internet and out in the world. It seems as though people are overstimulated and yet somehow uninspired, almost stifled by the options available. Calvin's dad once had a fit about the wide variety of peanut butters available in the grocery store. It's kind of like that. 

So there are tweets and Facebook posts at the bottom of it, meaningless snippets, but capable of sucking away half a person's day. One level up are blogs, newspaper articles (online or not) and magazines. While these are slightly more in depth discussions or examinations of a topic, a couple of pages are most often not sufficient for true thoroughness. A really well written article can, however, inspire further investigation on the part of a reader by prodding their curiosity and providing a vivid window into the subject.

Here are some bits and pieces of associated information that I've pulled together here. My favourite is a quotation from a professor Aitken, who I referenced in my thesis on childhood memory a few years ago. Aitken suggests that the best way to understand or memorize something is to love and care about it first and seek meaning in it, giving yourself context and motivation for information retention, as well as a more complex understanding of the subject through muti-layered assimilation. 

"The thing to do is to learn by heart, not because one has to, but because one loves the thing and is interested in it." -Professor Alexander Craig Aitken (Ian M.L. Hunter, “An Exceptional Memory,” In Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts, ed. Ulric Neisser (New York: Worth Publishers, 2000), 515.) 

And on the subject of tidbits versus comprehensive:

Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed? Studies by Kevin Sharpe, Lisa Jardine, and Anthony Grafton have proven that humanists in the 16th and 17th centuries often read discontinuously, searching for passages that could be used in the cut and thrust of rhetorical battles at court, or for nuggets of wisdom that could be copied into commonplace books and consulted out of context. - Robert Darnton, "Five myths about the 'Information Age" The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 2011.

Lastly, some associated bits on multitasking, technology and focus from NYTimes and elsewhere can be found starting with this here blog post.


Photo from Capitol Hill Books, winter 2011. Not junk information?

Quotations, photos and ponderings, all. at. once.

    "You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents — each man to see what the other looked like. 

     Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and you own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces and the hopes rooted in your mind — such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger."

  Beryl Markham, West with the Night.

I already posted a passage from West with the Night, but since that was specifically relevant to the airplane post, here's a little more about the book itself: Generally, West with the Night is a ruminative, verbose, sweeping memoir that covers three notably distinct parts of Markham's life. After writing herself into the narrative, she takes the reader through her childhood, hunting lion with African locals, to leaving home and training race-horses, and finally to her career as a freelance pilot. 

So much of the book draws its strength from descriptions of people and places that the silence felt in the above passage is as startling to the reader as it is to Markham. The change from lengthy, illustrative passages about the African landscape and the characters who occupy it to the breathless and fleeting few paragraphs articulating her personal experience of flight parallels her assertion about loneliness. Most everything we do in our day-to-day lives is engineered to keep us from noticing that we are really very alone in the world, thus we keep self-awareness to a minimum in the interest of maintaining sanity. Even when physically alone, humans go to great lengths to avoid confronting themselves, whether by immersion in external stimuli, abuse of a substance, or simply by locking away their thoughts in a mental prison and living in denial of themselves. 

In conclusion, but not really to conclude this ongoing train of thought, West with the Night was an inspiring memoir not just in terms of tangible accomplishments and admirable writing, but in the additions Markham's personal philosophy made to my own modus operandi. Someday, I hope to meet myself.

Photo is of the Potomac River near Theodore Roosevelt Island, April 15, 2011.

Into forever

There are two categories within the spectrum of the noises of man: primary and secondary. The primary are mostly found during the day, when the sun is out, and children are running and yelling, couples are talking idly over lunch, businessmen are debating over cell phones and conference tables.

The secondary are found at night, in the darkness and calm of the empty air. These are the sounds of what man has made, the hum of cars on the highway, the clatter of a train over the tracks, the hum of the metro cars, lit from within, boxes of light passing through the wastes of the night, the purr of jet engines idling on the runway, the roar of planes braking as they touch their tiny wheels to the ground (their true purpose is obvious in the disproportionality of these wheels).

One can feel part of the world when invisible and flying through the darkness, outside the machines and jets and buildings, the well-lit havens of humanity, isolated from the boundless darkness. The warm spring air is heady, and no matter how deeply each breath is drawn the lungs hunger for more.

The bicycle wheels turn frenetically under me as I soar over roads and paths, through the darkness, dodging cars and dips in the road, the gentle whir of gears the only indication of human presence. My muscles know no bounds in this darkness and in this air, thick with dreams from the somnolent crowds of the Earth, if I close my eyes and lift my arms, I might just become one with the clouds, the few pinpricks of light and the three-quarter moon casting shadows between streetlights. My soul grows in this night, spreading a disproportionate wingspan, fueled by all that I have yet to know, and growing beyond reasonable measure.

EDIT 4/16: I'm leaving this post up as an example of the writing process, but it needs some serious editing and revising before I'd be anything like happy with it. As it stands, it's simply representative of some thoughts from the other night, quickly scribbled and thrown to the masses (who have, thank goodness, largely ignored me). Also, those light blips across the airport sky in the photo are a plane taking off, not a random aberration. 

Photo post: What happens when I get bored on Sunday afternoon

• I weed. I weed books, I weed clothes, I weed my life. The result is usually a bag of little-used odds and ends that winds up in my parents' house until I see fit to sort through it all (sorry about that). More to the point, weeding also results in realising that 75% of my jackets are corduroy.

• I clean and dust maniacally, including inside things, which leads back to #1, there. This week my small collection of [also little-used] makeup fell victim to my boredom. And then so did my face. Disclaimer: the most makeup I ever wear is mascara, and I have no clue what I'm doing otherwise. 

• I ponder crafty things. Aside from the long list of half-finished projects and box o' mending I've been avoiding (despite having hauled my sewing machine over here) I recently acquired some little green wool balls. There was a big tub of multi-coloured wool balls at Eastern Market a while back when I went with Wortklauberlein, and I fished out some in my favourite colour. Anyone have ideas as to what I should do with them? I was thinking poms for something scarf-like. There are 10.

...I flew a plane?

Looks like I neglected to post anything for an entire month despite the pile of saved drafts I have going here. eh heh.

A few years back I made a quick list of Life Goals for myself. Being in college at the time, they were pretty basic things: live in one place for more than four months (e.g. not a dorm), learn basic car maintenance, learn to fly an airplane.

Last Friday I made a step the right direction and took the pilot's seat in a Cessna 172 for a 30 minute flight over Gaithersburg, MD. Ok, I didn't entirely fly the plane, but it was pretty gosh darn exciting (and a little terrifying) to be steering a dinky aircraft at 2500 feet. The best part was takeoff. My co-pilot/instructor handled the throttle and details, while I pulled back on the yoke and actually got the plane off the ground. Causing yourself to suddenly become airborne is distinctly thrilling.

Anyway, as exciting as that was, the experience made it very clear how much there is to learn (and how much it would cost to learn it). As accompaniment to this adventure I've also been reading Beryl Markham's memoir, West with the Night. While it is ostensibly and primarily a book about flight, Markham also covers encounters with lions, racing horses and much else about living in Africa in the early 20th century:

Tom taught me in a D.H. Gipsy Moth, at first, and her propeller beat the sunrise silence of the Athi Plains to shreds and scraps. We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it. These I learned at once. But most things came harder.

For a couple more photos, visit my picasa collection.