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.

Rue is the national herb of Lithuania, and other facts.

I meant to prune my grape vines, plant the seeds I bought late in the winter, clean out all my closets. Now that the harvest is in, the time is clearly ripe for regretting. Or not. I think: not. In mythology, even a basilisk, the breath of which could wilt plants and crack stones, could not destroy rue. Weasels bitten by basilisks could eat rue to recover and return to fight. Perhaps my tendency to regret is a talisman, but for now, I am trying not to let even a single thing in this autumn pass my notice. A couple of weeks ago, I washed the quilt that I will be using all winter, substantial, a little heavy, on our bed at night, to curl up in when doing the crossword, to wrap around me when I'm working here during the day. I am loving the light of autumn, of walking around the neighborhood with Bruiser and seeing, just seeing, the brilliance of everything--leaves tree bush flower stem berry--blazing and burning. It seems to me that the whole valley is, sometimes, glowing, not just with color but with an equinoctial slant to the light. What's the point of regret? Bruiser loves the colder air in the morning and at night. We take a bike ride around the neighborhood at dusk and it is all beautiful. All of it.

TAGS: comfort me with apples, harvest, grapes & roses

Pumpkin pie.

My mother is a pie baker of the first rank. She was the one who told me the key thing about pie crust, which is that you don't over handle it. Also, by her example I learned to tell an excellent pie from an inferior one--again, it's all about the crust. Her pies are not only delicious, they are beautiful. She's an organized and meticulous cook, so her food never looks or tastes hasty or slapdash. Everyone in my family loves going to my folks' house for dinner because of this.

When we were kids, my mom and dad formed a dinner group. They all subscribed to the same cooking magazine, Cuisine, which sadly folded long ago--I honestly don't think any other cooking magazine is or was as good, had the lovely blend of good writing, enough pictures, interesting features. Not even the Ruth Reichl-edited Gourmet, in my opinion. What the dinner group would do was divvy up the recipes for the spectacular dinner featured in that month's issue. Then one couple would host, and they would eat and talk the night away. I remember an Indian meal that no one was too fond of. They were ahead of their time.

Anyway, I learned from watching my mom that you could teach yourself to cook. She taught herself how to dip chocolates, and no one in the world makes better dipped chocolates than my mom. When she married my dad, the story goes, she knew how to make cornbread and how to open a can of soup. (I might be making that last part up--she may have had another recipe in her repertoire.) From that humble beginning, she has turned into a woman who can throw a big party, plan many a celebratory family dinner, bake like no one's business. Also, she fries chicken according to the ancient method, and if, as a mostly faithful vegetarian, chicken weren't a real problem for me, I would sit down and happily eat her fried chicken dinner (rice, pan gravy, steamed broccoli, five-cup fruit salad) once a week for the rest of my life.

However, this post is supposed to be about pumpkin pie. Not everyone in my family loves pumpkin pie, though the pumpkin pie of my youth, made with canned pumpkin and evaporated milk (if I'm not mistaken) was mild, smooth, and delicious. Here are the things I taught myself about pumpkin pie, once I was on my own and I was responsible for the pies:

1. Pumpkin, which is spicy looking, is actually mild though sweet. Another way to approach pumpkin pie is to make it spicy. The recipe I use has lots of spices; one version of it adds crystallized ginger, which makes it even spicier. Spicy pumpkin pie is deeee-licious.

2. Fresh pumpkin makes a difference. Once you know that you have to get a sugar pumpkin--the little, round pumpkins--then roasting it is easy. Some people say to cut it open first, but you can pierce the skin and roast them whole, thus sparing yourself the ordeal of cutting a hard fruit with a big dangerous knife. Once it's roasted--and basically, you can tell if it's done by if it's soft--you can cool it a little, cut it open without threatening life and limb, puree it, and you're on your way.

3. I believe in an all-butter crust, which just means you have to start cold, keep things cold, and get 'em cold again in order to prevent butter-related sogginess (pre-bake a very cold crust), slumping (hook the crust over the edge of the pie plate, and put it in the freezer before pre-baking), and non-flakiness (use very cold butter and a minimum of very cold water).

After having spoken with great confidence about this all-butter pie crust, I am hoping very much that it turns out as delicious as I have talked it up to be, because I am bringing the pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. I am also baking a pumpkin pie for a party tonight. I usually only get to eat pumpkin pie once a year, so this is a double treat, assuming that the crust doesn't let me down.