I think we got about 15 inches in Blacksburg, Virginia. Our daughter and I made her birthday cake (tiramisu) and dinner rolls for her birthday dinner while the snow came down.
Rose & herb bed in snow
Snow coming down
Snow plow
Category: At home
-
December 9, 2018 Front garden in early December snow -
We’re having a bit of a pie crisis. Our daughter had her heart set on a strawberry rhubarb pie, which we made last year and it was everyone’s favorite. This year, I’ve been to 6 grocery stores and cannot find rhubarb anywhere. The Krogers say they haven’t been able to get it. The Food Lions don’t have it. Our local natural foods store, Eats, hasn’t seen any in a while.
The family all agreed we also want cherry, so we have one pie for Thanksgiving. It’s on this second pie that we’re falling apart. I want pecan, our son wants apple, my husband already made a pumpkin pie because that’s what he wanted and he knew nobody else would want it on Thanksgiving. Our daughter, distressed by our inability to make her first choice, can’t put her finger on what she wants instead. As is often the case when the first choice is a bust, nothing else compares.
She said she wants to try something new. Something we’ve never made. When I asked what she wanted, she couldn’t articulate it. “Some kind of small pastries, like individual ones.” Sounds easy :|.
We’re all kind of hovering around apple pie, and our daughter mentioned maybe some kind of apple tarts would do. I told her about the best apple pie I’ve ever had, which was made with a shortbread crust, and how I tried to replicate it once but working with the shortbread resulted in nearly as much swearing as caramel cake. She knows this level of swearing. We’ve made caramel cake before.
“I bet if we did small pies, we could use shortbread and it would be easier to work with,” I said. “And we could make a crumble topping for something different.”
She likes this idea. So the question now is this: how do we make these pies? If you’ve ever successfully made mini apple pies with shortbread crusts and crumble topping, please help! My primary questions are these:
- Can we bake these in a muffin tin or do we need special mini-pie vessels?
- If muffin tins are usable, what diameter circle do we need to cut the rounds of dough?
- What recipe have you had success with?
Thank you!
-
A friend asked recently what it is about gardening that I love so much, and with such intensity. What is so compelling? What do I get out of it?
When we moved into our house, it was surrounded by nothing but mowed grass. A vast expanse of green blades, all the same height, all the same color. No flowers. No birds. No butterflies. It was uninteresting. When I’d go out on our back deck, there was nothing to watch except the clouds. Though the grass itself was living, the landscape didn’t feel alive.
What I love with intensity is life. Life is miraculous to me. I grew two human beings in my body who are now teenagers. Fifteen years ago they didn’t exist. They were nothing. Now, they walk and run and talk and laugh, they think, they create, they have ideas. They’re baking cakes and learning Spanish and riding bikes and swimming 3 miles a day. That’s amazing! It blows my mind.
What I love with intensity is beauty. When I look at a flower — the arrangement of petals, the colors, the shape of the flower to attract the right pollinators — I could get lost in it. When I look at a garden, or when I work in the garden, I do get lost in it. Digging a hole for a plant unearths a worm, which makes me think of the subterranean world, and all the underground activity happening to create the soil for my flowers. Filling in the hole, and knowing the soil is loose now, makes me think about the robin that will soon be along to take advantage of that loose earth to find the worm. And then I’ll think about how funny robins are, hopping around in the garden, with worms wiggling in their beaks. The next thing I know I’ve been in the garden digging holes for 4 hours.
That’s beautiful to me. The beauty of the connectedness of all life. That’s not the beauty I was originally talking about, though. I was really just talking about superficial beauty, of different flower colors, petal shapes, leaf shapes, leaf colors. The beauty of the curved contours of the flower bed, of the Chartreuse green of spring, of the red of the male cardinal, the yellow of the goldfinch, the deep blue of the indigo bunting, the black and white check of the woodpecker.
Which brings me to what is most compelling to me about gardening, and about why I continue to replace lawn with flower beds: I love with intensity is how diverse life is. An expanse of bright green, freshly mowed grass bores me if that’s the only thing there. An expanse of bright green, freshly mowed grass is lovely when it provides a clean backdrop for pink roses, purple Salvia, magenta butterfly bush, yellow sunflowers.
Those plants, when they’re growing in the spring, provide daily absorption for me: how much did they grow? How many leaves do they have? Are there any flower buds yet? I walk the garden every day inspecting for all of those things. When they start flowering, the insects come: fat fuzzy bumblebees; yellow, orange, white, and blue butterflies; honeybees and moths; caterpillars and ladybugs, aphids and aphid-eaters. And the hummingbirds! I’ve already seen a hummingbird this year. All those insects attract birds, and when the flowers go to seed, even more birds come. My favorites are the goldfinches that sit atop the dried seed heads of purple coneflowers in late summer. The long stems nod under the goldfinches weight, but remain upright.
What I get out of my garden is that it invites diversity to come back. It creates a space where I can continually be struck by the wonder and connectedness of life on earth. Not only did life once not exist at all on this planet, but it didn’t exist, and then it did, and then it turned into millions of species who are dependent on one another for survival.
I didn’t think about that or experience it on a daily basis when our lawn was just lawn. Now, as I sit and write this, I look at the pansies in our flower boxes and wonder at the arrangement of the petals, and what advantage that might create for the continued survival of that species. I think about the curly leaves of the purple kale and marvel at their water-funneling capability. I hear the calls of multiple bird species. I see bees buzzing. I eagerly await the warmth of the day, when the butterflies start arriving.
This is my entry for the Core prompt.
-
We wanted to prepare a feast on the spring equinox to mark the final cold breath of winter. We hadn’t planned a meal or shopped for it, our kids were sick, and with a looming snowstorm (that resulted in 2-3 inches of snow on our garden), the weather was decidedly not spring-like on the first day of spring.
We skipped the dinner and said, “We’ll do it this weekend.”
As I wrote yesterday, this weekend brought yet another dumping, this one three times deeper than the first-day-of-spring snow.
Snow falling on Saturday, March 24 
Kitty in the window, watching for birds This morning, the sun rose over a scene out of a Christmas card. The sky was clear, the trees and rooftops coated in piles of heavy snow.
Spring pastels: pink sunrise over snow 
Drooping dogwoods and bright morning sun on snow 
Back garden under snow 
Oak and spruces (?) under sticky snow With the bright sun, the morning FWUMP of piles of snow avalanching from trees, the drip drip drip of snowmelt, and the gorgeous blue sky, we’ll have our spring celebration today.
I made seed muffins this morning, filled with walnuts, sliced almonds, flax seeds, toasted sunflower seeds, and poppy seeds.
Spring seed muffin I started herb and kale seeds indoors today, our daughter wrapped the front door wreath in spring green and pink ribbons, and she dipped strawberries in chocolate for dessert. My husband made bread and will grill fish. He shoveled the porch first thing this morning so it could melt all day for him to get to the grill. I made deviled eggs, a spring greens salad, and a spring pea and mint salad.
Pea and mint salad for spring Who knows if winter is really done. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. But after yesterday’s beautiful snow, we’re celebrating as if that was the final snow, and as if spring is imminent. Maybe we can will it to come by swallowing all the seeds in the muffins, or with all this green on our table.
-
I’ve officially given up on resisting winter. It is day four of spring, 3 new inches of wet, sticky snow have fallen since 2pm, and it’s still coming down.
I’m leaning into it now. I’m all in. I’ve got a blanket on my lap. I’ve drunk afternoon tea and afternoon coffee. I’ve positioned myself towards windows all day so that I can watch the snow fall: when I ate lunch, when I lay on the couch reading My Cousin Rachel, when I sat upright on the couch to play Boggle, when I curled my legs under me to read Financial Intelligence. As I sit here first to type in my diary, then to type this blog post.
We have a new rule in our house: no electronics between noon and 4pm. For any of us. Laptops are closed, phones are face down, TV and Xbox are off. During that time today, I read physical books, stared out the window, and played Boggle with our daughter. I was once the undisputed Boggle champion in our household. Nobody could touch me.
Our daughter beat me in our first round today. She found a 24 point word. She’s twelve! Last week, I found her in her room, sitting up in bed, with her blanket over her legs, a candle by her side, and her school-issued Chromebook on her lap. She had the twinkly lights strung across her headboard turned on.
I asked, “Whatcha doin’?”
She looked up and said, “Writing.”
Be still my heart! The next day she sat curled up in a chair in the living room, again with a blanket, again with the Chromebook, writing. She’s getting good with words, and I have to watch out. Ultimately I won at Boggle after our requisite five rounds, but I don’t think I can count on winning much longer.
But back to our electronics rule. Now that it’s after 4pm, all four of us are on screens. One cat lies on our daughter’s lap, the other is annoying my husband by walking back and forth across his laptop. Three of us are in the living room, listening to Rachmaninoff on the record player while we do our various computery things. I can never see or hear Rachmaninoff’s name without thinking about that scene in Willy Wonka.
On the weekends, when 4pm comes around, I start thinking about my new diary, and that I can write in it.
I was talking to a friend recently who keeps a diary on her hard drive. Given that I’m in a rut with writing in my notebooks — the rut being that I am uninspired to write in them anymore — I liked this idea. A lot. For some reason when I’ve been writing in my notebooks lately I’ve felt like whatever I wrote in them had to be, I don’t know, good. I guess I’d gotten to the point that my notebook pages were rough drafts for blog posts. Which means I was cautious with them. Which means I wasn’t free.
But a diary! I’d been looking for an excuse to use Bean again, an uncluttered, lightweight word processor for OS X that has a live word count and a distraction-free, full screen mode. There’s no toolbar on the full-screen: just a blank page.
I love my new diary so much. It’s amazing for stress-relief. I have a file for March, and I dump my brain in it at the beginning and end of the day. It’s full of unfiltered writing, never meant to go anywhere. Thoughts jump from cats to work to dinner to chores to ideas and back again. No structure. No concerns about propriety or swearing. Whatever is in my brain ends up on the page with no worries attached. It’s sole purpose is for me to unload.
Two other things I love about my new diary: it doesn’t take up space on a shelf, and it’s searchable. Not that I’ll ever search it, but if I wanted to…
The record has ended. My husband now has a cat on his knee, so I’ll get up to flip it. Soon it will be time to start the spaghetti sauce, light the fire, and open the wine.
Snow is still coming down.
-
It’s Christmas Eve morning. Brahms plays quietly on the record player, our cat Tubbles rubs her face on my pen, smudging my words, and coffee steams on the end table next to me. The sky is blueing after the black of night. My husband is in the kitchen making dough for a braided cranberry walnut bread. I hear the crinkle of the craisins bag. The living room is fresh with the scent of orange zest.
When he moves out of the kitchen, I’ll move in. I’ve got four pie crusts to make: top and bottom for a cherry pie and top and bottom for a strawberry-rhubarb. After those are converted from dough to crispy pies, golden on top with sweet ruby fruit bubbling through the slits, our daughter will make buttery rolls to go with Christmas Eve dinner. The rolls and strawberry-rhubarb pie were the two biggest hits at Thanksgiving, and the kids begged to have them again today.
After the pies and the cranberry walnut bread and the dinner rolls, I’ll prep cinnamon rolls to bake on Christmas morning. These are are possibly our longest standing Christmas food tradition. I flatten the dough into a rectangle on Christmas Eve after dinner, pour melted butter over it, heap brown sugar and cinnamon all over, roll the rectangle into a log, and slice into 1 inch rolls. The unbaked swirls will rest in the fridge tonight, and whoever gets up first tomorrow will need to preheat the oven.
The oven is clicking and groaning now for the first pie. The baking stone is on the top rack in preparation for the braided bread. I smell the warmth of stone and cornmeal dust.
I hope we have enough flour.
Butterfly Mind 