And then there was Pie.

We had a pretty casual Thanksgiving, just the two of us and our good friend Alex. I had to work all week and the day of, so poor Brian had to make all of the sides and the bird itself. My contribution? The Pie.

Yes, holiday Pies are a proper noun. They are the finale of a day long preparation and fast; the last character on the stage before the curtain falls. The last thing you have to remember your meal by is the Pie.As you read earlier, I had made a pumpkin pie earlier in the month, so the obvious choice for our dinner was apple.

I've had some issues with apple pie in the past. Apples were too tart, or not enough. Filling was gooey or was just very dry. What makes a good apple pie is an exact science, one that I hadn't figured out yet. I have about a dozen mediocre pies under my belt (rather, hanging just over my belt!) so if this was going to be my only contribution to our first wedded Thanksgiving, you betcha it had better be good.

None of the recipes in my 8 million cookbooks had worked for me, so I struck out on the scary path to internet recipe hunting. When you Google 'Apple Pie Recipe', the search engine tells you there are 'About 1,490,000 results'. Which one is the best? Sites like AllRecipes.com usually have good choices, but I've found the results for a lot of there things to be average. So, I used a different rule: The more old school the website, the better the results will be. And boy, did I find a doozy: My Home Cooking. It had everything I was looking for: cheezy graphics, broken links, directions written for a five year old, and the self proclaimed 'Best Apple Pie on the Internet!' Despite the crazy old lady persona the site has, it has very clear instructions with lots of photos.

Careful, she means business.

I started way too late, and was pretty cranky to be peeling a half dozen apples when all I wanted to do was go to bed (I'm thinking about investing in an apple peeler...we'll see!) The last few times I made an apple pie I used Granny Smith's, but I found them to be a little too tart and I had a hard time getting them to cook all of the way through.  I settled on Mac's - according to the illustration in the Shaw's produce aisle, they're a notch sweeter than the GS but still on the tart end of the spectrum.

I also added a cup of oats that weren't in the original recipe.My final tweak was to try a lattice crust instead of the flat crust. I always find that regular crusts get ugly and stretch around the apples, and it can cook unevenly. The lattice is a lot easier than it looks, the key is to start in the middle and work your way to the edges. I used a pizza cutter to cut the strips of dough for the top. The last step that seems easy to skip but you really, REALLY shouldn't is wrapping the edge of the crust in tinfoil when you bake it.  It keeps your crust edges from getting too brown or burnt. Remember, it's just the edges, not the entire top.

The pie got rave reviews, from Alex and Brian and the kids at EMS. Apple pie, I have conquered thee!

It would look even yummier if the stove top were clean.

Master Recipe- No Knead White Bread

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am a total sucker for checkout line food magazines. I hate that I spend money on them, but with snazzy headlines like 'Holiday Baking Extravaganza!' how can I say no? Baking is my thing. You won't find me cooking a roast or perfecting a saute - that's Brian's turf. Show me a bag of flour, a jar of yeast, and send me on my way.

I read once that baking is the harder of the two food arts. With cooking, it's all about a spectrum of taste and flavor. You can mess with it as you go, add more, add less, get creative and throw in the whole fridge and in the end, you still get spaghetti. With baking, most of the time you're not sure if you've messed it up until the very end. You've either made bread, or you've made a flat inedible cardboard pile. You've either made cookies, or hockey pucks.

Anyway, it was from one of these magazines that made me feel like the better master of the kitchen that I tried the following recipe - 'Ultra-Easy Yeast Bread Master Recipe'.   Recipe's with EASY in the title always grab me. This bread, in addition to being easy, is a no-knead bread, which means it sits in the fridge overnight instead of being worked over a few hours. These doughs also tend to be quite wet and make a more artisan loaf instead of the cut bread sandwich loaf. The other appeal of this bread is at the simmering milk stage, you can add other ingredients to get fancier breads like apricot-sage, garlic-olive, and smoked Gouda and ale. 

Here's the abbreviated recipe, courtesy of Better Homes and Gardens Holiday Baking Special:

3/4 Cup warm water (105* to 115*) 1 package active dry yeast
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
Cooking spray or olive oil
Cornmeal
1 Egg
2 teaspoons water

1. In large bowl, stir together warm water and yeast. In saucepan, add milk, sugar, butter and salt; heat till warm (120*-130*) and add to yeast mixture. Add flour (remember, dough will be wet and sticky and seem wrong, but that's good!) Coat large bowl with spray/oil, add dough to bowl (best to use a spatula or two to move the dough, it will just stick all over your fingers) and cover with greased cellophane (use a TON of oil/spray here, or else the dough will stick to the bowl). Chill overnight.



Out of the fridge and wrapped in greased Saran wrap

2. Using spatulas, move dough to floured surface and cover with the greased cellophane. Let sit for 30 minutes.
3. Grease a baking sheet, and sprinkle evenly with cornmeal. Transfer dough to sheet and shape into a loaf. (You can use creative interpretations of 'loaf'!) Cover with a cloth and let rise for 1 hour.
4. Preheat oven to 400*. Mix egg and water and brush over loaf. Bake for 25 minutes.

Our bread turned out super yummy! Brian even gave it the 'O' face, it tasted so good! I'm excited to try variations now that I've got the basic white dialed.  One addition I do have is to crosshatch the loaf right before you put it into the oven, this allows the dough to rise and not be trapped inside of a crust that cooked to fast, which can happen pretty easily at 400*.

YUMMY!

Pumpkin Pie Time!

Nothing quite says 'Fall is here, and the holidays are on their way!' quite like a pumpkin pie. I've  been making them for ages right out of a can, using Bisquick's 'Impossible Pumpkin Pie' recipe which doesn't even require a crust. I've always had an inkling to do it from the gourd itself - after all, who hasn't seen the seed packets labeled 'Pie Pumpkin' at Lowes?

Against my mother's warnings of what a pain in the as it would be, I did it. I grew the pumpkins in my garden (they quickly took over the better part of our plot) and took home the goods.

Cute, and a lot of effort!

We got about three pumpkins from our vines, all around the size of a small soccer ball. As for the recipe, we used the following from Betty Crocker 1978, but this website here looks like it has some pretty solid directions.  


Cutting up a pie pumpkin is like carving up a cantaloupe, except harder. Brian and I decided the easiest thing to do would be to cube the pie before cooking it, but we should have read the Pick -Your-Own site first, as they just chop it in half, gut it, and bake whole, scooping the flesh out when it's done. Judging by my nicked and tired hands, I'd do that! I did cube the remaining pumpkins to freeze them though - I froze about 3 pies worth. Really, the most time consuming part of making the pie from scratch versus the stuff in a can is the cutting and cubing of the pumpkin - which, had we known what we know now, we would have done differently!


All our peels and innards went into the compost bin, and we mixed all of the ingredients up in the processor. Really, once you've got your cooked pumpkin guts, it turns into any old pumpkin pie recipe, so you can use your favorite, the one I used was nothing special so I didn't include it.  In the processor, I was cautiously optimistic: it looks just like normal canned pie, just a tad more yellow than the orange-y brown I'm used to.  I filled the home made pie crust shell (see other post from today) and put it in the oven with a prayer. An hour later, this beauty emerged:

It looks like a pie, it smells like a pie, could it be...

After letting it cool off, we dug in. And you know what? It didn't taste like the canned pie, at all. It was BETTER. It tasted so fresh, so light, not dense like canned. There is more texture from spots where the pumpkin didn't get quite as pureed, but it's a pleasant texture, not a yucky one. All in all, I highly reccomend using your own pumpkin. It took half a squash to make a single pie, so the rest is sitting in my freezer til Thanksgiving. Pumpkins are pretty easy to grow in any clime, so go for it!

Worm Invasion: My Introduction to Kitchen Vermiculture

There's a lot of buzz about composting these days, from turning your own leaves and lawn clippings into compost for your garden, to municipal compost - heck, the ski resort I work for composts all of its food scraps. In college, our house would fill a 5 gallon bucket with scraps and send it off to the compost center - the trash company would pick it up on the curb along with our trash and recycling.

We never gave much thought to processing it ourselves, however, until we were living in Colorado. Unlike Vermont, which is covered in farms that accept household scraps for compost or forward thinking cities like Burlington that collect it, southwest Colorado is high, dry desert with ranches instead of farms and an environment that doesn't produce the hot humidity that works best for composting.


I learned exactly how difficult it is to find composting centers in SW CO when my job at the ski resort there tasked me to explore options for composting its organic waste. The only commercial size compost facility at the time was at a prison 3 hours away. So, we decided to do it on our own, and compost on site. Doing so means we had to go small scale, and we settled on using worms, or vermiculture, as our method.

Unlike other forms of composting, many of which require high heat, frequent turning and maintenance, space, and time, worm bins are a self contained system. As long as the temperature is comfortable (if you're not shivering or sweating, they're not either!), there isn't too much moisture, and they have just enough food, you're going to get compost - pretty fast, too.

Towards the end of the winter, we (Eco Adventures) hosted an event with the The New Community Coalition (you're going to want to click that link and check them out - they're awesome!) that was a 1 hour build your own compost workshop. For $20, we got a Rubbermaid bin, worms, bedding, and hands on instruction. I ate an apple and threw in the core to get them started. Sure, you can spend moolah on fancy-ass bins like these,  but you can just spend $7 on a bin, drill the holes yourself, use wet shredded newspaper for bedding, and order a pound of worms for $21 a pound, and go.

As you can see, we threw in pumpkin seeds and old beets - and now it's become a little alien ecosystem!

That's in. Worms eat, they reproduce - their numbers were up after about a month, and we haven't thrown away a worm-compostable food scrap since. We even drove our big back east, across the country, wrapped in a blanket to keep them warm - that's how awesome they are.

I'll add more later with how we built it, our trial and error process, and more - but for now, go ahead and surf the web and learn more about why there is no good reason why you can't rock a kitchen vermiculture system.


vermiculture.net - the best guide to building your own bin I've seen yet, outside of going to a workshop.

Green Product: WIN!

If there is one category of eco products that is full of more lies and propaganda, it's beauty and health products. You either aren't getting what you pay for (false packaging, greenwashing, etc), they make you feel like a hippy, or are ridiculously expensive. I've tried various flavors of Nature's Gate and have been super unhappy with dried out hair - smells great, looks gross, and I'm definitely not getting my $8 out of it - $1 Suave works better.

But, alas, I am a child of the guilt driven eco friendly generation and had to find something that was both eco friendly and ethically sourced.  So I found the Body Shop (thanks to my sister in law) and decided to give their Rain Forest Moisture therapy a go.

 My in-store tests:

• Smells good
• I can pronounce the ingredients
• Has a warm fuzzy feel good story about where the ingredients came from.
• It's not cheap - $14 per large bottle. But with my rewards from their customer loyalty program, it was about $5 per bottle.

Test? It was super thick out of the bottle, the directions actually recommend  adding water to your hands first. So, despite its smaller size, it's pretty concentrated. My hair feels clean, not too many frizzies, and smells GOOD.

Info from their site:

 The Body Shop® difference: Our Rainforest Moisture Shampoo contains no silicones, sulphates, parabens or colorants. It also meets our eco-conscious standard*. It is respectful to the aquatic environment, meets strict biodegradability standards, and minimizes the use of non-sustainable packaging resources.

 That's the warm and fuzzy. Now the ingredients are just damn neat.

The pracaxi tree grows in the wet tropical climate along the Delta of Amazonas River and its precious seeds are cold pressed for its oil. Manketti nut oil is traditionally used as a body rub during the dry African winter to moisturise skin. We buy Community Trade honey from organic sources in Africa and sugar from the Montillo Co-operative in Paraguay. Our trade rewards local suppliers fairly for their expertise, and helps them invest in their futures.

 Moral of the story? Don't be a hippy. Wash your damn hair.

Green Product: Fail

If you haven't heard by now, phosphates are bad for the environment, specifically aquatic habitats (cheap and easy education found here). So bad, in fact, certain states have banned their use in dish washing products where they are most commonly found. So, wanting to help save the ol' gal Mama Earth, Brian and I decided to give the Seventh Gen powder a shot.

Fail. Epic fail. I suppose if I had read the reviews on their website,  I would have known better. Our dishes are clean of food scraps, but they are very filmy, especially with our hard water.So filmy you can rub lines in it with your fingers. Seventh Gen said they are reworking the formula to perform better. Until then, they recommend soaking dishes in a sink of vinegar water before you put them away.

What?!

Really.

To get any dishes that have filming on them back to normal, you can soak them in a sink of water with a cup of vinegar. A quick rinsing afterward should have them back to normal. For any dishwashers that are getting film on the inside you can again use vinegar. Add about 1/2 cup to the bottom of the machine and run a rinse cycle, this should restore in the interior of your machine.

We'll finish this box, and we'll be testing their capsules next. Anyone use their liquid for automatic washers?

Inspiring Recipes

I hate buying cooking magazines because I know I can find it all online, but there's something about flipping through those glossy pages with drool inducing pictures that makes me spend the money. At $9.99, the Yankee Magazine Recipe book was pricey, but I got a good feeling at the checkout line.

No ads. No crazy weird ingredients. Easy to follow directions, lots of pictures, and nothing but recipes - some of the more unique recipes have cute back stories on their origins, which I enjoy.

Go buy it, now. I'll be baking a lot out of this one for a while.

Anadama Bread - put one down in the 'fail' column.

I've been messing around with breads for a few months now, and I find the whole process pretty fascinating. I enjoy the totality of what makes a success or failure in the bread world. So far, I'm 1/3 successes to attempts. I didn't change much with this recipe, from Yankee Magazine. The description was for a 'sweet, well textured sandwich bread'. Hmmm, sounds good. Plus, combining molasses and corn meal? Crazy!

The taste was alright, but it was damn dense, and didn't rise properly. As far as the rise goes, I had a feeling my yeast might be a little off, and it was Instant, where I think I've decided I'd rather regular active yeast over instant. So, one problem solved.

The problem of density took a little more research. I found these causes:

• Too much flour.
• Too little kneading.
• Those cute crosscuts you see on artisan loafs at the store? They're there for a reason. If a crust forms too fast, it can actually trap the 'growth' of the bread, rather than letting it expand. Cutting the raw loafs will allow the bread to rise more freely.

I found this web discussion to be very helpful - in fact, ChowHound in general has some great resources for your baking maladies. 

Since my bread looked nothing like this and I know I had issues, I won't review the recipe quite yet, I'm going to give it another shot in the near future.

Don't forget to put on your blinker.

Every Friday, I cruise down the interstate heading to my part time job in Burlington. This is in addition to the full time job at the ski resort, the committees and volunteer organizations I'm a part of, and my other full time job as a mom to two furries. There are so many ways that we all spend our time that, much like my weekly commute, we all go ten (or twenty) above the speed limit to get around our days.

In good weather, racing along the spine of the Green Mountains is a really pretty drive. Relaxing, almost. When I get on, I'm inevitably running late and spend most of my time in the left lane, guzzling my coffee and bagel and listening to NPR. I pass mini vans, trucks, old beaters, and get passed by Audi's and Beemers. Everyone's speeding along until we get to our exit, then we pull off, park, and start the next part of our day. We race home, microwave some food, scratch the dog, and proceed to watch a movie, go to bed, do it all again in the morning. Surfing through the channels, the web, and life.

I'm ready to get out of the left lane. Get of the highway entirely, if I can. I'm 24, I just got married, I have a stable - if small - income, and I'm ready to slow down.

Those of you who know me would expect a blog about climbing and skiing, a puppy/kitten worship blog, or a blog about trees. Not saying there won't be anything about that, but my focus (for now) will be on home made projects: old school baking, household sustainability, gardening, smart buying, and more. Once I get a better feel for what's taking shape, I'll be asking for ideas/contributions. Expect to see:

• How to build and maintain your own kitchen compost (you thought I was obsessed with my dog, you should hear me rave about my worms!)
• The Bread diaries
• The poor college graduates guide to gardening
• The Lumberjack versus the Picky Wife: Localvore menu's for any palette
• Burly and Nugget's guide to systematically destroying everything of value
• Reviews of 'green' products - this is a new obsession of mine. They're so damn expensive, but are they worth it?

I know there are a million trustifarian's out there blogging about the same thing. I hope what makes this a little different is I try to be green, but we can't afford it. I try to eat local, healthy, and organic, but I also freaking love a Big Mac with extra cheese. All of the documentaries on corn syrup have me scared shitless, but I still drink gallons of Coke. I love my puppy, but sometimes I wish he still had nuts for me to kick him in. Life is full of paradoxes,  but I believe that realizing we have choices to make and educating ourselves on them is the first real step to slowing down and changing our lives.

I don't know if that sounds interesting. I don't even know if I'd read it. But before we run out of gas, we need to figure something out. This is my attempt.