The soup list

I made apple crisp this weekend with the last few apples that were starting to get kind of sorry on the kitchen counter. For some reason I don’t know where my mom’s recipe went for this, so I looked it up online, and then the betty crocker recipe didn’t seem like it had enough butter or sugar in it for whatever disjointed-tracy reason, so I increased both, and it turned out kind of melty and soupy. But it was still yummy, so whatever. I need to make a note to find the recipe I have written down and transfer it to the recipe book on my computer.

Also, my soup waiting list is LONG. I’ve got a big batch of minestrone in the fridge that I made to use the chard that we had to take out of the garden. Which is good. But I think it needed to simmer a little longer. And I have a couple of ugly knobs of celeriac rolling around in the crisper, and some parsnips that seemed like a good idea at the farmer’s market a couple of weeks ago, so those need to get made into soup, too. At the same time, I’m craving chili and chicken soup like nobody’s business, and while I was thumbing through my soup file after a friend asked after something for butternut squash, I came across a recipe for (I think) black bean and squash soup. Or it could have been something else but the point is that it sounded so crazy good and I totally want to make it right now. I think my love for soup has transcended what is physically and emotionally possible to make for one’s small family. Perhaps I need to throw these in a hat to choose.

Today is my last day at my job before I go be what I wanted to be when I grow up. My last day of so many many seven years worth of days that seemed so long and now seems, well, still long, but in a freaky OVER kind of way. I’m excited and super nervous at the same time, and really freaked out over the fact that I won’t ever walk these halls again, likely, and although that is exactly what I want, it feels so STRANGE. It definitely feels like the end of one life and the start to another, in a way. But there are doughnuts, so that takes a bit of the edge off.

Smiling

Thank you, Sarah, for posting this. It made me smile. It’s too good not to put here, if not just to save it for future me, maybe.

Words

Today is the last day of a little staycation I’m taking, a really long weekend before I start my new job. A few days to recharge, regroup, organize the closet. I’m hoping to get to that today. It’s been pretty nice, although it rained for 48 hours straight on Thursday and Friday, but I had lunch with a couple of friends, and it’s lovely to get to do that on a weekday for a change. Today it’s cloudy and kind of dark, and I’m relishing the candlelight and the cats draped over me as I write this. I think I might have apple crisp for lunch.

I was so happy to be invited to contribute to Words To Shoot By for the next couple of rounds. Words To Shoot By is a biweekly photo collaboration between four girls, each of whom puts together their own photography triptych based on a word. This week that word is “Evening.” As much as I love diptychs and triptychs, I guess I tend to forget to put images together this way, so this is a nice challenge for me. And as the days grow shorter this autumn, evening is more often the time of day that I have available to shoot, so this word is so timely. Go have a look at what Steph, Robin, Kristy and Heather, as well as the other guest contributor, Claire, have put together to visually describe evening, and browse back in the archives as well. It’s such a cool group of work. Thanks ladies, for inviting me to play along!

The Pie Crust Search

{Thank you for all of the well wishes about the job! I really hope it’s going to be a new start.}

The search for a butter pie crust to rival my grandmother’s trans fat filled shortening crust lives on. I’ve been trying to find the right one for awhile now. It’s number 9 on
the list. I’ve gotten so many suggestions, which I thank you for. And yet, whether it’s me, or the crust, it’s been a battle, one which I’ve not been winning.

Until now, perhaps. I made a pie right away after we went apple picking, and it was less than exciting (and also got melted butter all over my oven). We ate a couple of slices, a houseguest ate a few more at our arm twisting urging, and last night we threw away the last nubby, saggy slice because we just couldn’t bear to eat it. But after that, I got some more suggestions for crust, and thanks to Rhymes With Spoon I tried a recipe from America’s Test Kitchen (thanks Sara!). A recipe which includes vodka! I know. Seems weird. But it worked out way better than any of my previous attempts. The recipe mentioned that it would yield a fairly wet dough, and even though I measured and weighed my flour, I still initially had a pretty dry mixture. I was prepared for this, though, as every butter attempt in my past has been very dry, so I added about 1/6 cup more water just at the moment I realized that it was too dry, but before I’d worked it too much (like the time before). I also used spectrum organic shortening, which is trans fat free, for the shortening portion.

In the end, it still wasn’t quite as tender and flaky as my grandmother’s all shortening crust, but it was a much better crust than any of the all butter crusts that I’ve tried so far. Next time I’m going to include a step from Alton Brown, where the butter is added in two separate steps, and I’ll add that extra liquid right away since apparently my kitchen is extra dry. But I think I may be getting closer to a final recipe.

Vodka Pie Crust
(adapted from America’s Test Kitchen)

For one 9-inch Double-Crust Pie
2 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (12 1/2 ounces)
1 teaspoon table salt
2 tablespoons sugar
12 tablespoons cold unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), cut into 1/4-inch slices
1/2 cup chilled solid vegetable shortening, cut into 4 pieces
1/4 cup vodka, cold
1/4 cup cold water (+ up to another 1/4 cup per the humidity of your kitchen and flour)
1. Process 1 1/2 cups flour, salt, and sugar in food processor until combined, about 2 one-second pulses. Add butter and shortening and
process until homogenous dough just starts to collect in uneven clumps, about 15 seconds (dough is supposed to resemble cottage cheese curds and there should be no uncoated flour. This didn’t exactly happen for me, it was pretty dry at this point. I processed a little longer trying to get it to look like this, but next time, would stick to the 10-15 second rule). Scrape bowl with rubber spatula and redistribute dough evenly around processor blade. Add remaining
cup flour and pulse until mixture is evenly distributed around bowl and mass of dough has been broken up, 4 to 6 quick pulses. Empty
mixture into medium bowl.
2. Sprinkle vodka and water over mixture (I combined them before adding to the flour mixture). With rubber spatula, use folding motion to mix, pressing down on dough until dough is slightly
tacky and sticks together. If dough still seems not sticky, add a few more sprinkles of cold water or vodka at this point, and fold a couple more times, being careful not to overwork. Divide dough into two even balls and flatten each into 4-inch disk. Wrap each in plastic wrap and refrigerate at
least 45 minutes or up to 2 days.

Moments and news

As I was jogging yesterday evening, I passed through this little family of people, a couple kids and a couple adults, and I didn’t notice until I was right next to her, the little lady lying in the leaves. Wow. I didn’t alliterate that on purpose, really. But it was funny, and a bit startling, and it just made me smile as I ran.

So, that stuff I was distracted with last week? Well, I got the new job that I was going for! One that is actually in the graphic design field! I know, crazy. I kind of started to think it was never going to happen, and I guess those are the times that things do happen. So, I’m excited to actually get to use the skills that I have in a real place, to sit at a mac all day and make stuff, hopefully cool stuff. I’m certainly nervous about the whole thing, but hopefully it will be good.

Also, just a reminder, the Indian Summer Collection is only available through next Monday, 10/26. At noon (eastern time) those images and paintings will no longer be available in the shop, as I prepare for something new. So, if you had your eye on something, you’ve only got a few days left to snap it up, and I especially want to thank those that have supported this collection.

Let the Wild Rumpus Start

:: We’re going to see Where The Wild Things Are tonight, and I’m so excited! I hope it’s as good as… well as good as I hope it will be.

:: I need to finish some stationary design concepts for a client this weekend, and probably my 2010 calendar as well, so that I can get it for sale.

:: I showed a group of paintings and photography to a friend of mine who used to be one of my best instructors last night, and she was really digging the body of work. I’m getting more excited to round it out and try to show it.

:: I hope it’s nice enough to shoot a roll of black & white film sometime this weekend.

I hope your weekend is full of something fun! Do you have plans?

Change of plans

We were planning a last camping trip of the season for the past weekend, up north in Door County. We were really looking forward to the cheap pumpkins and fall foliage up there, but the weather took a turn for the very cold and we ended up canceling. Although we were prepared for a little chilly, but the thought of spending three days next to a gigantic lake in the wind and waking up to potentially 26 degrees was daunting. Plus we still needed to get some things out of the garden before it froze too badly, and I wasn’t sure the kale would make it. So we spent Friday evening harvesting, washing, trimming, and blanching kale. It was time-consuming work, but I’m so pleased to have three big bricks of it in the freezer now, to throw into soups and things through the winter.

It definitely did freeze, or severely frost at least, on Saturday night, and we woke in the morning to see the leaves falling from the trees like snow. The ground was blanketed in places by color, that I knew would dry and crumble soon enough.

Distraction and Polaroid news

I’ve been so distracted for the past 13 days. Hey, that’s the entirety of October! So much so that I haven’t really gotten much work done, or design designed. My mind just circles one thing like a hula hoop, and I hope that it resolves itself soon so that I can move on, and hopefully tell you about it. So, I don’t have much that I can remember to say other than my cat caught a mouse and we brought home a bunch of pumpkins. And I’ve been making lots of soup.

Apparently there is good news in the world of Polaroid, though! It sounds like the Polaroid licensee will re-launch some of the most famous Polaroid instant cameras, and The Impossible Project has been commissioned to develop and manufacture limited edition film for them in 2010. Yay!

Action! Adventure!

My quiet morning at home got a little more exciting the other day when I heard a loud high pitched squeak and some rustling coming from the other room. It sounded like a chipmunk had found its way into the house, and I wasn’t quite sure what I’d do about it if that was the case, but luckily, I didn’t have to deal with chasing any woodland creatures around. I went to investigate to find my kitty carrying something in his mouth. My first thought was that they’d finally gotten the squeaker mouse out of the middle of the toy that they’ve been working on for awhile, but then I realized that this was a real mouse.

Good kitty! We haven’t seen any rodentia in the house since we moved in so I kind of thought it was a sealed fortress, but I guess not. I’m always so proud when the the cats do their job so efficiently.

He carried it from room to room and finally dropped it in the mudroom where I caught one action shot right before it ran and bounced stage left into the dog’s water dish and he caught it again. I felt sort of bad taking it away from him, he wanted it so badly, but it was alive and seemed like it might make it if I let it go, although it had a potentially fatal wound to the head. But it calmed down and looked at me like the lifesaver that I was for a moment and didn’t jump at my face when I took the lid off the container I caught him in. And then hopped sprightly across the street to go have more adventures. Dodged a bullet on that one, little mousie!

Repetition

I can’t really seem to stop taking pictures of leaves, and I know this happens to me every fall, and I always think, noone cares about all of these images of leaves, but I still take them. I was putting together my 2010 calendar and one of the images I had in the running for october was a shot of leaves from last year, and it dawned on me how similar it was to one from this year. And I’ll probably take one next year and the year after that.

As an artist I want to create something new, but there’s also this sense of rhythm, of repetition, of practice to it as well, and I think this just illustrates that. And I’m glad for having a place where I can easily look back on the process and see how that repetition happens. I don’t want to continuously take only the same pictures as I already have, because there would be no growth then, I think, but I do see the value in going to that comfortable place of practice sometimes, too, both to see the similarities, the differences, to try to grow, and recognize if I’m making the same image too much.