America, my hair was on fire: an open letter.

Dear America,

I trust that you know how I feel about pumpkin pie, especially in November, especially made with a freshly roasted sugar pumpkin. This year, I ran across a recipe that called for maple in the puree, your usual assortment of ground spices, a chocolate crust, and--get this!--a brûléed topping. As in: get out your blow torch, which is always a good time.

Whilst preparing my offerings for the family feast, I mentally inventoried--as we all did, I think, America--the various political persuasions of my family members. I thought, as I pierced the skin of the pumpkin with the tip of a knife, perhaps we can all just agree--without ever saying so out loud, or in words--to talk about other things. I pulled the spices from their rack, and guesstimated the measurements, and thought, it'll all be fine. I thought,  I might lose it if someone says I have to be grateful for America. Because--no offense, America--America is really making me sad these days.

Before you get up in my face, America, let me just state for the record:

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Well, never mind. It's an ugly list. I'm trying really hard to not pick fights--which, I'm not even sure that's a good idea--and you're just going to have to read my mind, America. Hear me out in a private hour. As Allen Ginsberg said, and he should know, "America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?" Except substitute sinister for silly.

Anyway, I did my thinking-and-cooking, my meditation-and-chopping, my pureeing-and-praying, as you do when the republic hangs in the balance. (America, this is quite serious.) I assembled my salad and roasted my cauliflower and put everything into sensible containers and carried it all out to the car. Oh, and I tested my blowtorch. It worked great. I brought it and extra fuel, for just in cases.

We had a beautiful dinner. I was touched that my dad asked me to say the prayer. My nephews and niece were there, and many children, and my sisters and brother, my mom and dad. Me and the historian. Everything was delicious.

Because I was full of sass, what with my fancy pie and the drama of a blow torch in the offing, I kept asking: is it time to brûlée the pie? Is it time now? How about NOW? And so forth. It was a little comedy routine and everyone indulged me. So when it came time for the brûlée-ing, lots of people came to the kitchen.

It goes without saying that, at precisely this point, my blowtorch decided to take a powder. I added more fuel. I clicked the switch--there was a flame, but it stopped as soon as I tilted the torch to get to work on the sugar. 

I consulted my nephew, the firefighter. We tested all the various switches and combinations thereof. Nothing doing. More fuel. Still no joy.

"I can hear the fuel," he said.

I clicked the switch--a quick flame, then a flame-out. "You can?" 

"Yeah, you can hear it when you tilt it," he said.

I clicked it as I lifted the torch to my ear and shook it a little. A collective gasp--at least that's how I remember it--went up in the room. I heard a cascade of your hair's on fire, Lisa, your hair's on fire, and then my nephew patted it out with his firefighter hands.

Just like that: my hair was on fire, and then it wasn't. And that will always be part of the legend of that Thanksgiving, with the chocolate crusted maple-scented pumpkin pie brûlée. It was delicious, by the way.

America, this may or may not be a metaphor. The fire in my hair, at least. I went back to school on Monday and didn't tell a soul, not because I somehow didn't want to, but because I forgot. I forgot that my hair had been on fire, but it was, and I'm telling you now. America, I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. It's not exactly a good time right now, America, but it's time to talk about it. It's time to talk, and deal with the fire, and also--not to be trivial--it's time to share the meal that allows us to do all of that.

America, it's too late for all of that to happen at Thanksgiving this year, but Christmas is right around the corner,

htms

(lines from Ginsberg's "America" are scattered, like grains of sugar before they're brûléed, throughout this post.)

And now, a cooking report.

Today, unlike yesterday, was cloudy. Big clouds, big cloud cover. In a word, chilly. The temperature dropped a good ten degrees from yesterday.

I got up and plugged in the space heaters. Put on my slippers. Made some pancakes. (Pancakes are not just breakfast, they are an epistemology, and don't let nobody tell you different.)

I worked, sort of, on a poem, sort of. I felt dissatisfied with my efforts, and possibly my poetic means, and also my feet were cold.

We went to the store and chatted with our friends the grocers there. We bought bread and a newspaper and some snacks. We came home and made lunch.

I wrapped myself in a voluminous afghan to do a crossword which I did precisely half of and then fell asleep. My cold feet woke me up. I got in the bed. I put extra layers on my feet. Still cold. I got up and put on socks. Yes, the obvious thing, socks. Why did this take me so long WHY. I blame the chilly weather and the gray situation happening in the sky.

Well, I finished that crossword and read a chunk of my French detective novel, then got out of bed with decisive power, because I was going to make a pie, and for a pie you need pie crust. I found a serviceable pie crust recipe on the internet--well, it was better than serviceable--and got started.

DIGRESSION: in the middle of the above paragraph, I got up to fortify myself with a snack and also another small sliver of pie. The historian said, 'Are you finished?' meaning my blog post.

'No,' I said emphatically. 'No. What do you think this is, child's play?'

'Actually, I sort of do,' he said. I wheeled about, nostrils flaring. (Or that's what I think I looked like. I like imagining myself as a very nimble dragon.) 'Not too much revision,' he continued. (More wheeling and flaring.) 'For you,' he amended.

'No,' I said, emphatically. 'No. I need fortifications, so I can finish.'

'Will you read it to me when you're done?' he said.

'Yes,' I said, with emphasis. 'Yes.'

END OF DIGRESSION.

So I made the pie crust. Cold butter. Flour. Salt. A little sugar. Very cold water. I put it in the refrigerator to rest. So that it could dream of expanding into layers and becoming flaky, or else being perverse and leaden. Whatever things pie crust dreams of when it's resting. And we went out for a walk.

We saw a new eagle's nest, and some skittery, unrevealing birds, and then we went down to the water and saw some water birds of an indeterminate variety. One of the birds was diving and coming up with fish which it ate with a great deal of showy flipping and swallowing with its long neck.

When we got back, I took the pie crust, located the rolling pin, and made a smallish, very thin circle on a piece of foil. I have been making galettes instead of pies in pie tins because galettes are, frankly, easier--you don't have to lift and fit the crust into the tin. Also, galettes seem Frenchier, ergo more nonchalant, insouciant, and je ne sais quoi. I ground some almonds with a little flour and sugar and cinnamon, and put that on the rolled out crust.

I peeled four fat peaches and layered them onto the ground almonds. I tossed some more of that almond mixture onto the top of the peaches, then folded up the edges of the crust (so French!) over the peaches. Baked at 375.

While the pie was baking, I took pretty much every vegetable there was and made a glorious frittata. This included onion, a purple pepper, a zucchini, mushrooms, and the remainder of an excellent corn salad I had made back home, as well as the last of a potato, yellow bean, and feta salad. Six beaten eggs and a bunch of parmesan. When the eggs had set on the bottom of the pan, I slid it under the broiler for about five minutes. It was puffy and perfect. (I had to take the galette out of the oven for this broiler magic--then back into the oven it went.)

This, my friends, was an excellent cabin dinner. (The sliver of pie I just ate--research & fortification!--only strengthens this judgment.) We needed it, what with the strenuous laying around we did in gray weather.

Plus frittata for breakfast. Plus toast.

To bake a pumpkin pie.

First, you must have purchased a pie pumpkin. These are generally round and compact and not of jack-o'-lantern proportions, rather smallish, modest, without aspirations for Cinderella transport or anything of the sort.

A Google Images reenactment
of my pumpkin pie/tart.

Next, you must assess your time and space availability. Because you will need to make a crust. You will need to roast the pumpkin. You should allow for the possible difficulties, crust-wise, and you must assess your butter stores. This is important. Without enough butter, your pie crust will be tricky, and you will not be happy.

You must develop a Plan A and a Plan B and possibly a Plan C. Plan A is the one where you make the pie dough the night before, so that it can "rest" and be at peace with itself. Plan A is the one where you come home from the movie on Friday night, get out your butter--ample and sufficient--and cut it into tiny cubes and rub it with your fingers into the flour, &c. &c. until the dough "gathers" into a "ball," and you press it into a flat round and put it in the refrigerator.

Plan B is where you decide you can do all of that the next day, the day the pie is to be taken to a party. And why not? In Plan B, you remind yourself of all the pies you've recently made, very successfully, you remind yourself, and also why be so ahead of yourself, when you're tired, heaven knows you are? And you still have to walk the dog?

Fourthly, at 4 p.m. the day of the party, you must reckon with the fact that you may have left yourself only barely enough time to make this damn pie.

Fifthly, you must reckon with the fact that you have only barely enough butter. Maybe not even quite that much.

Sixthly, you will forge ahead and make a pie dough that perhaps exhibits the symptoms of the not-quite-enough-butter factor, and thus the mark of a smallish bit of over handling. Alas.

HOWEVER: The fact that you have engaged with pie dough with great success and quite recently to boot will mean that the pie dough does not quite get the best of you. Almost but not quite. It will be crack-y and difficult, it will not quite cohere, it will show the seams. It will, in fact, deconstruct itself.

BUT:

When you whip up the roasted pumpkin with half and half and eggs and spices, &c. & c., when you dice up candied ginger and strew it in the bottom of your tart pan, when you in fact use a tart pan, which elevates your difficult crust into something slightly more suave, something slightly more European, when you bake the pie/tart, and an ineffable aroma disseminates and insinuates itself into the kitchen and then into the byways of the house:

THEN your pie will have arrived and fulfilled its destiny, and you will have nothing to apologize for. You will take it to the party and serve it up in tiny slices, and you will be glad yet again not just for this pie, or the arrival of pumpkin season, but for the category of pie itself.

And that will be that.

Fillo dough vs. me.

I'm going to start at the end:

this wasn't hard. not at all. or only a little bit. okay, there was a hard part.

That's spinach and feta pie. We ate it for dinner two nights ago and also last night. It was delicious.

[backstory: A couple of months ago I bought yet another cookbook, yet another Jamie Oliver production.

so cute! and righteous! and cute!

30 minute meals! Let me state parenthetically that I think Jamie Oliver is the cutest, and also I admire his boundless energy and optimism and the way he throws himself behind a great cause, and also how cute he is. And a thirty minute meal sounded good to me, me who wanted to cook more in the new year blah blah blah and also buy more cookbooks, obviously a goal I am superb at.

SO a couple of weeks ago or maybe sooner, who can keep track? I decided I was going to make three things from the cookbook: tomato soup (made it, good but not thrilling), cauliflower curry Rogan Josh (interestingly, there's a curry paste called Rogan Josh, which, when I read the name, sounded like either a movie star or a good mate of Jamie's, but no: it is a Pakistani/Kashmiri dish of lamb)(which I have not yet made, fyi), and spinach and feta pie.

The latter recipe sounded rawther interesting and not so terribly challenging, because it was only eggs, feta, lemon, oregano, spinach, a little salt, pepper, cayenne, and fillo dough. Which, it's important to note here, I had never ever ever worked with before, or maybe only once but erased from memory. Since "how hard could that be?" is my life motto, I was all about this dish. The historian loves spinach and feta, and I love a pie.

So I came home from work on a long and exhausting day and thought, dammit, I am making that damn pie. I think we can all agree, this is an excellent state of mind for fussing around with a fussy and easily-dried-out and therefore infinitely-self-dismantling pastry. Hells yes! Let's make that damn pie, and let's be quick about it because: thirty minute meals!

It goes a little like this: beat 5 eggs in a bowl with 12 oz. feta, crumbled, and 2 oz. cheddar, grated. Add in a sprinkling of oregano, dried. Squeeze in half a lemon's juice. In a large-ish (10 in"?) cast iron or otherwise ovenproof frying pan, heat some olive oil and a little butter, and wilt 1 lb. of spinach until it is entirely wilted. Put the wilted spinach in with the eggs and feta, etc. You have an empty frying pan now, just to be clear.

See? that's just one paragraph. One paragraph takes seven minutes, tops.

Now, spread out a giant sheet of parchment paper. Is your parchment paper not a span wide? then take two giant sheets, side by side. Put some olive oil all over that paper.

I'm about to unleash the fillo dough on you, so I feel it's time to have a new paragraph.

Brace yourself.

Unwrap and unfold the fillo dough. With your extra-sensory perception and/or your third eye, observe how the dough begins to dry out even as you have barely unwrapped it. Lay four sheets, slightly overlapping, on the parchment paper. It will be a large four-sectioned rectangle. Pour some olive oil over that and lightly pat it all over and try not to let the fillo dough grip you in its fragile death grip. Put some more fillo dough over that first layer and oil it up again. Salt pepper cayenne. By now your wad of fillo dough will be almost as dust and will want to crack and fragment and otherwise make you want to scream. But that's okay, you just need two more layers! Just two! And then there will be another difficult part! So man up, you big baby!

Okay, so do you have your four layers? That took, like, three minutes--it only felt like your entire life.

NOW.

[challenging part ahead, so: paragraph break.]

You just have to fit that fillo dough rectangle into the bottom of the frying pan. Piece of cake. Piece of crumb cake.

Let me just say that your fillo dough rectangle will not be jaunty and more or less planar. No, it will be floppy and flippy and also crumbly and just, in general, a horror. So you can either (a) try to flip it in a very speedy, smooth way, if you're a fillo-athlete-genius type, or you can (b) turn your frying pan upside down on the fillo, and then flip the entire misbegotten affair over, stuff the fillo into the bottom, and try your damndest to peel the parchment off the fillo dough which will cling like the neediest little codependent person.

Go ahead and scream. Curse. You probably better. Who knows if you'll make it through unless you do?

Then you put the spinach-egg-feta mixture in the dough-lined frying pan, fold all the remaining fillo over the top (this is easy), and put the whole thing into a 400 degree oven for, like, 18 minutes.

Thank what ever God you worship for getting you through that. But when you eat it, you'll think, wow, this is so good! I will probably make this again!

Make a little cucumber salad to go with it and you are good to go. Better than that: you'll feel like a virtuoso and a champ. So you might as well chop some hazelnuts with some powdered sweet chocolate, and roll scoops of vanilla ice cream in it. Because it's good, and it is your (second) sweet reward for going to the mat with fillo dough, which you are the boss of, and don't let nobody tell you different.]

I am the boss of fillo.

Plan/wish.

Right about now, I would like to skip over the part where we orchestrate the exit strategy of all the classes. Students would have turned in their final projects and exams, and the halls at school would be quiet. There would be no more events and all the meetings of the semester would be completed, the minutes taken, the action items nestled into their little bulleted lists.

Pies, Pies, Pies. (Wayne Thiebaud)

I would be happily grading. There would be a Christmas tree and it would be lit. I would have a warm beverage and I would be happily grading. When I had completed, happily, a swath of grading, I would bake something. Like, perhaps, a pie. Perhaps several pies. After the grading was entirely completed, I would bake so many pies that I would have become, in point of fact, a pie baker, a baker of pies. I would bake pies of all kinds and I would deliver them to people. After I had baked a zillion pies and delivered them to a zillion houses, I would open a shop. Or maybe I would start a pie blog. Either way, the endgame would be a cookbook, that I would sell on the internet. The cookbook would be called PIE, and it would sell a zillion copies.

And that's how my life would be transformed.

Alas, I am but a community college English professor, a professor of English. And, within this calling, there is nothing I make that is so delectable as pie (arguments? assignments?). Having recognized this, there is nothing for it but to orchestrate the final projects, to lift the spirits of the dejected, to take pleasure in the good work and not take the not-so-good work personally. To grade, happily, even though the halls are still teeming and the meetings still glower, and there is so much, so much work yet to do.

And cookbook or no, I will make pie within the week. You mark my words.

Last night I dreamed that Mitt Romney was in my writing group.

This election needs to happen, and quickly.

In other news, my writing group is meeting tomorrow, at my house, which means a tart is in the offing, and also ratatouille.

Also, I wrote a draft of a new poem today.

Also, I got my necklace fixed, one with a super fragile chain. "Be careful, please," the jeweler told me after he (a) fixed my necklace and (b) gave me a reduced rate because he has fixed it so often. I did, however, feel slightly chastised. I should just buy a new chain, but I love this one because it is so delicate, which is a synonym for "fragile," which is a synonym for "breaks often." But I will be careful, whatever that may mean. I thought I was being careful.

Tonight we saw Cosmopolis, a David Cronenberg adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel of the same title. I was fascinated by this movie and the novel, but your mileage may vary. I was not sorry I saw it, not in the least.

I am currently reading this about Obama and Clinton. And also this, which is pretty dang interesting.


Tomorrow I will get up and make pie crust. And then I will add more stuff to my poem. In the new and improved version, I hope to use the literal translation of a Japanese song, "Sakura Sakura," that my nephew did for me. Thank you, my nephew!

The moment.

Tonight, my daughter and grandson came over. The man of the house had the stomach flu, and the AC situation at their house was all fouled up.

Our house was all cooled out because of the rain. Just moments before, the historian and I took a spin around the neighborhood on our bikes, at the end of which there was a little more rain. I was just putting my bike back in the garage when they arrived. We went inside and chatted away in the kitchen. I had two pounds of pie cherries from the farmer's market last Saturday, which I decided to turn into a tart.

The farmer had instructed us that, when we were ready to work with the cherries, we should plunge them into an ice water bath, and the pits would come out "like that," he said, with a gesture that indicated both ease and quickness. "Back when we had two hundred trees, when we'd take 'em to the processing plant, that's what they'd do with 'em--put in in a vat of ice water."

Well, that was good enough for me. So I plunged my cherries into ice water, started this tart dough, and started popping the pits out. I just used my hands--no cherry pitter, no knife. I fished four or five cherries out of the ice water with my left hand, then used both thumbs to split the cherry and extract the pit. Times two pounds of cherries.

"That's going to take you forever," my daughter said. "It'll take you till, like, your birthday, I bet." For the record, my birthday is in August. I was moving quicker than that, but it was still a little bit of a process.

When I was done pitting, I finished off the tart dough, spread it into the pan, and put the cherries on the stove with some sugar and a little bit of cinnamon. They bubbled away after a few minutes. I ground some almonds and sugar and cinnamon in the blender, and spread that in the bottom of the tart shell. And waited for the cherries to thicken.

My daughter, who is not a fan of cherries nor of cherry tarts, said to my son, "Aren't you a little upset that mom's going to all this effort for a dessert that's not even that good?" He agreed with her, but frankly, this did not bother me. When I make a cherry pie, I know I'm not making it for anyone but the historian and me. If anyone else happens to be around who likes cherry pie, all to the good.

Once the tart was in the oven to bake, I turned around, flung my arms in the air, and said, "Cherry tart!" A small amount of grumbling sent us into the living room. I briefly picked up my laptop, to check for important breaking news updates on important breaking topics, but put it down again as I was instructed. There were important games of Memory to play, and games of tug o' war with Bruiser, involving an old collapsed basketball. Stories to tell, laughter.

My daughter in law, on her blog, recorded her efforts to be really present with her children this evening, to set aside distractions and be with them instead of just by them. Our children can call us to this kind of presence with a piercing urgency, but really, being present for our lives is the challenge. Today, I had close to a perfect day: I got up, rode my bike, took Bruiser for a walk, wrote a draft of a poem (the Tom Jones poem, in case anyone's interested), saw a friend for lunch, read and drifted for awhile this afternoon, made dinner, and got the call that my daughter wanted to come over. It was good to be with them. Talking and listening, and taking the seeds out of cherries to make a pie, and playing with my grandson--all this was just about the best end to such a day that I could imagine. This, and a slice of pie.

Industrious.

Today, I did some research for a photo essay-ish thing I might be writing. I'll tell you more about it when I'm further along. Maybe. To a great extent, this meant identifying photos to use--I had done some brainstorming and writing already, and identified photographs in my mind...but that's different than locating them in my (you can already predict this) disorderly photo filing system on multiple computers.

Sigh.

But it was all good times, anyway, because I needed to also figure out how to turn on Photo Stream on my iMac, blah blah blah, don't even listen to this part--it all got resolved with only a small chat with the Apple guy and all my computers are now talking to each other, photo-wise, and I did create a new file with photos for the photo essay-ish thing, with titles for the photos and so forth and what not. So that was good.

I also went out into my lush but untidy yard and found that the following was happening, with or without my permission:

 

 

So that was good, too.

And also, there was a packet of huckleberries that I bought at Dave's Market in Ashton, sitting in my refrigerator, mutely pleading with me to do something with them, the way huckleberries will, in a packet situation. They were picked somewhere in the surrounding area. Frozen, but local. I kept them in the freezer, and also I kept thinking I would bake a pie up there in the wilderness. But I didn't bake that pie in Idaho. No, I baked that pie in Utah.

Let me just say that I remember picking huckleberries as a child with my parents and grandmother. And I remember eating a huckleberry pie, baked up there in heaven only knows what contraption. If it was the old stove that required wood (it couldn't have been coal, could it?), then all respect to my grandmother. There's a modern range and oven situation up there now, so baking a pie would have been fun but not heroic. Anyway: pie. Huckleberry pie. It took me back.

I used a recipe that I found on 101 Cookbooks--it had a rye crust which gave me fits and was not pretty in the rolling out, let me tell you, the people. It had a serious falling-apart issue, both the top and bottom crusts. The top crust looked like the land in an earthquake zone, after the earthquake. But it was delicious, and the filling had lemon verbena leaves chopped (or pestled, if that's the way you roll) into the sugar, so it had an extra quotient of lemoniness. That was good. We ate it at nine o'clock with vanilla ice cream that my son ran to the store to get.

That's pie, ladies and gents: pie.

 

The good news is,

And lo, there was pie.

Cooking & cleaning.

Well, mostly cooking. With a little laundry and dish-washing on the side.

In the cooking department, though, in a grand flourish, commensurate with the great wealth of fruits and vegetables at the market of late, I:

• roasted some squashes, some just on the verge of being not quite good anymore, along with some garlic, onions, and peppers;
• steamed some yellow beans;
• roasted some green beans with olive oil and garlic;
• made some corn salad;
• made some caprese salad;
• made a quinoa salad with some beautiful Rancho Gordo beans, and various herbs, greens, etc.;
• and roasted some potatoes, to eat as they are in their olive-oil-and-garlicked state, or with leftover harissa.

And what did I learn from this cooking extravaganza? Some things:

• you need a vat of olive oil when you start a cooking extravaganza.
• having already-made food in your refrigerator, the result of a cooking extravaganza? A truly excellent state of affairs.
• we buy a lot of food at the farmer's market, and it takes a detailed logistical plan to eat it all.

For instance, I have a giant bag of basil in my refrigerator right now. (Me, to farmer: Is that whole bag for sale, for real? Lady Farmer: The Pesto Bag? Yep. Man Farmer: We call that "the pesto bag," because that's about how much we use when we make pesto. Me: Gimme that.) I'm going to make pesto out of it. But I need to get on that right away, and after my cooking extravaganza, I might not have quite enough olive oil up in here.

I would also very much like to make, or at least have, a pie--and I have got the peaches, blackberries, and blueberries to do something pretty spectacular in neighborhood of pie. But I need to make pie crust, and you know--logistics. What I mean by this is, I wish there were already a pie crust made. But what with having extravaganza'd around in my kitchen for hours, my desire to make a pie crust is kind of diminished, from my formerly ambitious state. Can't have everything, I guess. Although, having now whined for awhile about this, I feel strangely in the mood to actually make a pie crust. Check back for further information on this very important topic!

(I should add to the "cleaning" portion of this post that I also cleaned out some sad greens and herbs and a handful of leftovers and whatnot from the refrigerator. So now the fruits of my cooking extravaganza labors fit in there. Barely.)

And on the Sabbath day,

I made jam, because it was apricot day at the market yesterday. It might be apricot day again next week, but you can never tell, really, so it's good to seize the day.

I like to use citrus instead of commercial pectin. It makes the fruit taste more like itself, and also like sunshine. I am not kidding.

It's half a lug of apricots, about 2 c. of sugar, juice of 2 oranges and 3 lemons. Bubbling away.

Sharpies were made to label jam jars. True story.

So this is about 2 half pints and 10 little quarter pint jars. I might give one to you if I really like you.

After the jamming--which will continue into tomorrow after I buy more lids and rings and probably more jars--I had plenty of apricots left to make a blackberry apricot galette. The blackberries were because yesterday, it was also blackberry day at the market.

This week in baked goods.

All week long it has been bagels aplenty around here. First, I bought a bunch--cinnamon raisin for the historian, plain for running/former missionary/college son. Then, when I took said son to the store for other food, he thought we might need some more. This bagel-buying orgy started because of my bagel-in-the-morning habit, which started after my sabbatical when I foolishly agreed to be a faculty l*****. I had to be at school in the m*******, so freaking early so many days, that stopping for a bagel started to seem like my earthly reward.

I know, I know. Going to work doesn't mean earning an extra earthly reward. Your paycheck is your reward for going to work. But I am just telling you: this is how the bagel habit got started. Stop judging me.

So, my bagel place had this promotion--every time you bought something, you got a punch in your little card (shaped like a bagel--cute, but you had to fold it in half to put it in your wallet. A folded bagel, with punches in it. This I faithfully kept for twelve full punches). Once you got the full twelve punches, you got a free baker's dozen of bagels! Calloo callay, oh frabjous day. All of a sudden, having piles of bagels around seemed like the thing to do.

Anyway, now we are down to less than six plain bagels, which might be worrisome if I hadn't just recently baked

• a chocolate cake last Sunday;
• a pumpkin pie on Thursday; and
• bread today.

I already told you about the cake. There's still a little left, and it is still more than edible, that's how good the cake is.

The pie is maybe the best pumpkin pie I have ever made. Let's see if we can figure out why, shall we?

• I baked it in a tart pan, ergo more elegant and possibly also--and paradoxically--cuter.
• I roasted the pumpkin the perfect amount of time, so there was no faint redolence of scorch.
• there was cream.
• there were perfect eggs.
• there was a delightfully buttery crust.
• I baked the pie the perfect amount of time--the custard did not crack and it was perfectly creamy.
• the pie had the exact right amount of crystallized ginger. I think this factor was aided and abetted by the extra amount of flat space made possible because of the tart pan. The ginger was more evenly distributed per bite. I could draw you a diagram, but I don't have time for shenanigans like that.

Anyway: that pie was grand. It was the kind of goodness that makes you want to make another pie tout de suite. But now that pie is gone.

First of all, some of it was eaten on Thanksgiving. I kind of like the fact that my family, overall, loves the pecan pie more than the pumpkin. For myself, the pecan pie is a tad too sweet. Anyway, this demographic data means that there is usually some leftover pumpkin pie to bring home from the feast, and that means pie for breakfast, yay! Pie for breakfast leads inexorably to no more pie, however, and that's exactly where we are.

But today was another snowy day (not to say "snow day," alas.), so I decided to make bread. Whole wheat bread. I took the slow rise method (not a scientific slow rise like those very serious bread bakers advocate. I aspire to their scientificness, but I really wanted to eat bread today, so I just used a little less yeast.), which meant that there was a wheat-y smell in the kitchen for several hours. I used two different kinds of Montana wheat flour and a little (very little) rye. This bread tasted delicious. We had it with our dinner.

All this baking is preparatory to the orgy of baking I hope to undertake for the fun of it over the next few weeks. If there happened to be enough snow falling at the exact right times, I could even start it right now.

Accountability.

In the spirit of transparency, I would like to ask for a full reporting of all the data on the following trend I have recently observed in my household:

We are currently suffering a dearth of treats.

We have butter. We have sugar of many kinds. We have chocolate and eggs. We have almonds and various types of flour.

But can we scare up a cookie around here? No.

A piece of cake? No.

Pie? Forget about it.

The people, there is not even a gum drop.

This cannot stand.

Pie party: the breakdown.

Pies: pumpkin, pumpkin cheesecake, eggnog, strawberry rhubarb, apple, chocolate pecan.
Pie accessories: whipped cream.
Party indicators: see below.