A new pie crust recipe, easier than the first

This last August was the sixth anniversary of this blog. That milestone went by in a haze of work and travel.

My baking has also suffered somewhat with the new job, but not completely. I still like to bake when I'm stressed, and I've had lots of opportunities in the last year. But I'm more back to basics now, fewer ingredients, fewer steps whenever I can. God bless Betty Crocker.

However, my most frequently used pie crust is still a variation on Marilyn M. Moore's Foolproof Pie Dough from The Wooden Spoon Dessert Cookbook. And I'm teaching my older son how to make pie so he can keep it up when I'm really too busy.

My most frequently used pie crust (for a two crust pie):

Pour a tall glass of water, add one or two ice cubes, don't drink out of it yet.

Mix 1/2 teaspoon salt with 2 cups unbleached all purpose flour.
Cut 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter into small cubes, then add to the flour and cut with pastry blender or two knives until the largest lumps are half the size of peas.

Add 5-6 tablespoons water from the glass, 1 tablespoon at a time, stirring with a fork after each addition, a little longer than you think you should have to. After the last addition, keep stirring until it all comes together into a dough. It always seems like forever, but it will come together.

Mold the dough quickly into a ball with your hands. Place it on a floured cutting board (or wherever you're going to roll it out later) and cut it in half. Mold each half into a ball, then press each half flat in the middle, keeping the edges round with your floured hands. It will look like a cheese wheel, or a car's tire.

Wrap each half separately in plastic or waxed paper and refrigerate while you make the filling. You can even make the crust ahead and keep it in the refrigerator for up to two days.

Now drink the rest of the water before you make the filling. You'll feel better. I always do.

If you want to get a little fancier, here is my old-fashioned pie crust recipe. You can also look through the archives under pie for more recipes for pie fillings, and a few other things.

Rhubarb-Nectarine Crisp

Finally a new recipe!

Most people think of strawberries and rhubarb together, but that’s just because in many places they are harvested in the spring together. Thanks to the miracles of California agriculture, I have rhubarb from my large grocery store and nectarines from the farmers’ market that both needed to be eaten soon.

Butter a 9x13 baking dish.

Slice into ¼- ½ inches six cups of rhubarb and three nectarines. (If you have a different ratio in your kitchen, that’s fine. But you want 8-10 cups of fruit.) Mix with one cup white sugar and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350°. In another bowl, mix together

2 cups brown sugar
2 cups flour
2 cups oatmeal (rolled oats, not instant or steel cut)
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Cut into this mixture 1 cup salted butter until the lumps of butter are no bigger than peas. (If you only have unsalted butter, stir ¼ teaspoon salt into the flour mixture.)

Spread the fruit into the bottom of the pan, then cover with the flour mixture. The pan will be full, so spread it as evenly as you can without spilling.

Bake for 30 minutes or until the topping is slightly browned and the fruit is bubbling up around the edges.

Serve warm or room temperature with vanilla ice cream or plain yogurt.

Eat Pray Love: Three Variations on a Theme

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Take This Bread by Sara Miles
Jesus Freak, also by Sara Miles

These are three of the books I’ve read in the month of August. They all have to do with God, food and love.

Eat, Pray, Love is one of the biggest cultural references to religion in America today, and now a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts. Have you read it yet? I finally did, when my mother offered to loan it to me. People have been asking me about it ever since it came out, but I’ve been resisting. Why, you ask? What’s not to like?

Well, it’s because I used to know Liz Gilbert. Not very well, to be honest, and it was a long time ago, back when she was first dating the guy she got the horrible divorce from at the beginning of the book. She was a charismatic young bartender back then. Somehow the articles on EPL never mention her time at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. As I have mentioned before, the bar was not as crazy then as it is in the movie, but the plot is basically a fictionalized version of an earlier chapter of the Liz Gilbert story.

So anyway, it felt like a bad omen to read the story of the bitter divorce of a woman who got engaged on the same day as me. But when my mother said she was done reading it, it felt like the time had come.

Other people, I’m sure, have written more about the Eat and Love parts of the book. I was more interested in the Pray part. In fact, I really liked it. It reminded me a fair amount of Mary Rose O’Reilley’s account of her time at Plum Village (Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery in France) in her book, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd. Very similar struggles with the ascetic life in a foreign culture. Both are funny and profound, sometimes within the same sentence. And they both do a decent job of trying to explain the attraction of a stint in the monastic life.

Liz Gilbert’s accounts of her mystical experiences ring true for me. I don’t know how I would have reacted to hers if I hadn’t had my own. Mostly I just nodded as I went along. It is so hard to take something so intense and effervescent at the same time and make it come out in words. I’ve never been able to write about my most profound mystical experiences in anything like a coherent manner. Liz does a good job AND I’m sure that the words are inadequate. God is like that.

I haven’t seen the movie, and I’m not sure I will. Probably I will, eventually. I’m curious about how the religious aspects of the book come across in a Hollywood movie. But I heard that Julia Roberts converted to Hinduism after her experience. That sounds intense. If you’ve seen the movie, feel free to comment here with your opinion. At this point, there’s not point in worrying about spoilers.

I wanted to read Take This Bread a couple of years ago when it first came out, but for some reason I didn’t until Chris checked it out of the library last week. (Thank you, sweetheart.)

It’s the story of how this radical, leftist, political, lesbian journalist ate Jesus, became a Christian and started the food pantry at an artsy Episcopal church maybe a mile from the SF Meetinghouse. (For the story of how SF Meeting started our own, much smaller food pantry, on the model established by St. Gregory of Nyssa and the SF Food Bank, read Chris’s blog.)

One of the funny coincidences is that Miles went to Friends World College, an experiment in education, in the early 70s. She says that mostly what she knew about Quakers at the time was that they were mostly old and they had opposed the Vietnam war. Which is pretty much what she thought about communists then too. Along the way, she developed a fierce need to experience things for herself and then help others to understand them. Which basically explains this book.

She starts with how eating Jesus in the form of good homemade bread in the Eucharist was the central element in her conversion. Nothing about it made sense, but she couldn’t stop. And then she wanted to feed others. So she started the food pantry right in the sanctuary of the church. She quotes the inscription on the altar at St. Gregory’s,

“Did not the Lord dine with publicans and harlots? Therefore, make no distinction between worthy and unworthy: all must be equal in your eyes to love and to serve.”

She writes about finding God in real food and in real people. How being a Christian means loving and forgiving everyone, including fussy middle-aged men who are overly concerned about doing things the right way, and little kids who spill rice everywhere, and really big guys who’ve done time in the army and in prison, and pushy little old Chinese ladies, and all the perfectly ordinary looking people who seem fine now but will probably be annoying any minute now. The ones at the food pantry on Friday and the ones at the 10:00 service on Sunday.

The two things that struck me were 1) you can’t control where God will show up, and 2) when you truly encounter God, you have to do something about it. Amen.

Jesus Freak is the book I’ve been waiting for. The book that explains why following Jesus is important, in language that doesn’t take for granted that you think being a Christian is a good thing. The quotes on the back are like the pantheon of religious writers I’d most like to meet: Anne Lamott, Rob Bell, Diana Butler Bass, Tony Campolo, Phyllis Tickle and Brian McLaren. Like Gilbert (and O’Reilly and Lamott), Miles is laugh-out-loud funny and made-you-cry profound. It has great exegesis of Biblical stories and everyday stories from Miles’s life. Maybe the right word for this is midrash.

I will quote here the end of the Introduction, pp. 19-20:

“Everything Jesus has revealed, through stories and parables, bossy directives and patient touch, remains available to his disciples. He’s shown that we have the power not just to feed and heal, forgive and cleanse, but to do these things in new ways that reflect God’s nature and give us life.

It doesn’t take a special kind of person – the selfish and obtuse are welcome, too. It doesn’t take a lot of equipment, or training – little kids can lead. Jesus is still with us, which means we can say yes to God’s call, without knowing what the outcome will be. We can jump right in, instead of waiting for a committee to authorize our work. We can come and see what God is doing, all over the place, instead of worrying that we’re not good enough. We can get over our fear of strangers, free ourselves from superstition, and find sweet streams of mercy in the middle of the world’s driest places. We’re not alone.”

I am deeply moved by Sara Miles’s ability to articulate the kind of Christian I want to be. And I’m grateful that I was able to read her books while cooking, because she inspires me in that sense too. The peach pie I made for our Friendly 8’s potluck last weekend, with vanilla ice cream and fresh raspberries on the side, I wouldn’t have been ashamed to serve it to anyone.

Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake

I've got THREE serious posts building themselves in my notebook. But my head hurts and I'm not making any progress on them today. Instead I'll post my new favorite recipe for rhubarb. (Proper rhubarb pie recipe here.)

This is from the Martha Stewart Living magazine - I'll admit it, I bought it just because it said "Martha's favorite rhubarb recipes" on the cover. She made it on her tv show too.

I made it with salted butter, because that's what I had in the house, and just adjusted the quantities of added salt. If you use unsalted butter, add 1/4 teaspoon of salt to the topping and the cake. Also, I didn't have a 2 inch high pan, so I just used my tallest cake pan, and miraculously it didn't spill over onto the bottom of the oven. But if you have a taller pan, I recommend it.

Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake (serves 12 pieces)

Topping:
4 tablespoons salted butter
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar

Cake:
12 tablespoons butter, room temperature plus more for buttering the pan
1 pound rhubarb, sliced 1/2" thick, on a very sharp diagonal, into long thin strips
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 1/2 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon orange zest
1 tablespoon orange juice
2 large eggs
1 cup sour cream

1 Stir the topping together. (It may be runny, rather than crumbly at first, but when the butter cools off, you can crumble it.)
2. Butter a 9 inch round, 2 inch deep cake pan. Dot the bottom of the pan with 4 tablespoons of butter cut into tiny pieces.
3. Stir the rhubarb together with 3/4 cup of the sugar, let it sit for two minutes, then stir it one more time and lay the slices into the bottom. If a fancy arrangement matters to you, now is your chance. Remember this will be on the top when you're done.
4. Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.
5. Beat the remaining 8 tablespoons (one stick) of butter with the remaining 1 cup sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat in the zest and the orange juice, then the eggs, one at a time, scraping down the bowl between each addition.
6. Beat in the flour in three additions, alternating with the sour cream, until smooth.
7. Spread the batter over the rhubarb, then crumble the topping evenly over the batter.
8. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and the top springs back when touched, about 1 hour.
9. Let the cake cool in the pan on a rack for ten minutes, then run a knife around the edge and invert it onto a wire rack. Cool completely. (If you take it out of the pan too soon, the rhubarb will be too runny, and too late, it may stick. Don't worry too much about this.)

We ate it for dessert while it was still just barely warm. Divine! On the show, Martha said somebody she knew served this cake with creme fraiche, and I'm sure that would be delightful. Or a little whipped cream, or vanilla ice cream, all good. But just by itself, it's delicious!

Persimmon Cookies

It's not a pie, but it's worth sharing. This recipe came to me from my mother, who got it from my grandmother, who loved persimmons. She would keep them in the freezer and eat them with a spoon.

But I don't remember ever eating these cookies before this week. They are really good. Basically, they're light and moist spice cookies. If you didn't know there was fruit in them, you might not notice.

The recipe calls for nuts and raisins and maybe chocolate chips. I don't like nuts and raisins in my cookies, so I just left them out. It worked out fine for me, but I'm sure they would be good with everything in them too.

Persimmon Cookies

1 cup persimmon pulp*
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup Crisco (but I used butter)
1 cup sugar
1 egg
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup nuts (optional)
1 cup raisins (optional)
1 cup chocolate chips (optional)

Mix persimmon and baking soda, set aside. Cream shortening and sugar. Put egg into pulp mixture and add after dry ingredients. Make teaspoon sized drops on greased cookie sheet and bake at 375 degrees F until lightly browned, about 10 minutes.

*To make 1 cup persimmon pulp, I used six persimmons. I washed them and cut off the leaf-like tops. One cookbook I have says to put them through a food mill, but I don't have a food mill. So here's what I did. For the really ripe ones, I just split the skins and squeezed out the insides into a sieve over a bowl. I used a spoon to push it through the sieve. For the less than squishy ones, I peeled them, then took all the flesh (and any big chunks from the fully/over ripe ones) and chopped it really fine, 1/8" dice, and added it to the pulp. It worked out fine.

Phyllis Tickle and Joanna Macy? Anybody?

Has anybody out there already read both Phyllis Tickle’s new book, The Great Emergence, AND any of Joanna Macy’s writings about The Great Turning?

I just finished Tickle’s book, and it’s as good as people said it was. A Friend at SF Meeting was able to loan me Macy’s 1998 book, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World, co-written by Molly Young Brown. I'm just starting it, and it seems relevant for me on several levels.

I think these two women are prophetic voices for our times, coming from different backgrounds, both observing and commenting on the same mega-shift as Brian McLaren, etc. I’d like to talk to anyone who’s read both authors and would be willing to compare and contrast with me.

In exchange, I’ll offer two end-of-year gifts to readers:

One is a link to an opportunity to win a trip to the Obama inauguration next month by submitting your commitment to change in 2009. It’s offered by the Case Foundation.

Second is a recipe with a fine Quaker pedigree. I first ate these cinnamon-sugared pecans at a couple of SF Meeting events. The woman who made them said she got the recipe from a long-time Friend from another meeting who always brings them to AVP gatherings. It also appeared in the December issue of the SF Meeting newsletter.

Cinnamon-Sugar Nuts
Can be any kind of nuts, but pecans are good. Makes one pound.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Lightly beat one egg white. In a medium sized bowl, mix with one pound nuts until coated. In a small bowl, stir together 1 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, then stir mixture into nuts until evenly coated. Spread on a baking sheet. Bake for a total of 20-30 minutes, stirring at decreasing intervals (after 10 minutes, 8 min, 5 min, 3 min, etc.) During the first ten minutes or so, the egg white will puff a little. Watch them carefully near the end and take out when they are lightly browned.

Happy New Year!

Granola and Grumpy Trucks

Should I be concerned that my six year old has made up a new theme song for his trucks, a la Bob the Builder or Handy Manny, that is titled "Grumpy Trucks"? He sounds happy enough. Maybe he'll get it out of his system.

In the meantime, we did a scientific experiment this morning and made granola eight different ways, to see which we liked best. We narrowed the selections down to four. I like it best with sliced almonds. The six year old likes sunflower seeds and raisins. The ten year old likes it with dried apricots and apples. Chris M. can try these, and the Everything Mix when he gets home.

Here's our basic recipe, adapted from Jane Brody's Good Food Book:

6 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup real maple syrup (could be all honey or all syrup, but we only had a little of each)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup wheat germ
1/2 cup nuts or seeds (sliced almonds or sunflower seeds)
1/2 cup dried fruit (raisins, blueberries, chopped apricots, chopped apples)

Set oven to 350 degrees. While it's heating, melt the butter in a 9x13 baking pan.

Mix in the honey and syrup, then the cinnamon, then the oats and nuts. (If your nuts are already toasted, mix them in later with the wheat germ.)

Bake in oven for 15 minutes, stirring every five minutes.

Stir in wheat germ, bake for additional 10 minutes, stirring often, or until lightly browned.

Remove from oven and stir in fruit. Cool completely, then store in airtight containers. Jane Brody says it will keep for weeks on the counter, or longer in the freezer, if you refrain from eating it all right away.

In keeping with the somewhat neglected pie theme of this blog, this recipe (minus the nuts and fruit) can be mixed with a little additional melted butter and sugar and pressed into a pie crust, in place of a graham cracker or cookie crust.

Strawberry Jam for the Last Week of School

Today is the first day of the last (half) week of school.

Yesterday, I went to the farmer's market and bought a half-flat of strawberries in order to make jam, mostly to give the boys' teachers as end of year presents. There's enough for a few other gifts and for us on special occasions in the winter as well.

Last night for dinner, we had scrambled eggs, with spicy salsa for the grownups and fresh Ranier cherries on the side. And unlimited slices of whole wheat toast and minutes old, not quite set, strawberry jam.

I also made a batch of apricot jam, but apricots don't work as well as strawberries in freezer jam. The sugar doesn't dissolve as well. I think I tried this once before and was disappointed then too. Maybe I'll remember next year if I write it down this year. It should cook up into a fine apricot sauce anyway.

I'm not going to post the recipe for jam, because it's on the box of pectin. I recommend Certo brand liquid pectin and the freezer jam recipe for the quickest, easiest, most delicious jam you'll ever make. In the grocery store aisle with the baking ingredients, you will probably find the jars, the pectin, and the sugar you need. I also recommend getting new plastic containers with screw on lids for freezer jam. The back of the box will tell you how much fruit you will need for strawberry jam. Recipes for many other kinds of jams and jellies are on the paper insert inside the box.

Deee-licious!

Birthday Goodies!

Chocolate cupcakes for the party with friends...



Glazed Strawberry Pie for actual birthday dinner with family...
(It was too hard to put 10 candles into a pie without a top crust, so we compromised on one giant candle to wish on.)



Prepare one baked pie shell and allow time to cool.

Wash and hull six cups fresh strawberries.

Using the smallest berries, crush enough to make one cup strawberry puree.

Cover and refrigerate the remaining berries.

In a heavy bottomed saucepan, combine 1 cup sugar and 3 tablespoons cornstarch.

Stir in 1/2 cup water, then the strawberry puree.

Cook over medium heat, stirring continuously, until the mixture thickens and the gel is clear.

Remove from the heat and stir in 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice and 2 tablespoons butter until the butter is completely melted. Let cool to room temperature.

When the the crust and the glaze are cooled, cut the pointy ends off the reserved strawberries and set aside. Thinly slice the rest of the reserved strawberries and fold into the glaze. Spoon the glaze into the pie shell. Arrange the strawberry points in a decorative pattern on top of the glaze, pressing the cut sides into the glaze as far as you can without the glaze running over the sides of the crust.

Refrigerate pie until serving time. At the last minute, top with sweetened whipped cream.

Thanks to Marilyn Moore's Wooden Spoon Dessert Book. The birthday boy went on and on and on about how good it was.

It's Spring!

I don't care what the calendar says. I promised my dad I'd make him a rhubarb pie this weekend.

Another pie crust recipe

A poetic one.

Making Pie Crust by singer/songwriter/Quaker Carrie Newcomer.

I heard one of her new songs on the "America's Back 40" radio show this afternoon on my way home from the Ben Lomond Quaker Center annual Board retreat. "There Is A Tree" If you go to her website, it's on the playlist that starts up right away.

She's coming to the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley, CA on March 30. Chris M. and I are planning to go. Want to join us?

[Update: if you were really looking for a pie crust recipe, click here.]

When dinner isn't quite enough

A few weeks ago, my anchor committee came to my house for dinner and a meeting. By the time I knew for sure how many people were coming, it was too late to make more lasagna. So I improvised a dessert that would also be a little filling and a little nutritious.

Pumpkin cake, with canned peaches and whipped cream.

Because we happened to have left-over pumpkin puree, a jar of peach halves canned in white grape juice, and some heavy cream that I had meant to use for something else but then didn't.

Yum. Chris M. took a picture of his dish for me.
















Here is the recipe for the cake.


1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup water
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vinegar
½ cup pumpkin puree (if you only have canned pumpkin pie mix, use half the following spices)
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspooon ground cloves

Heat oven to 350°. Mix flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and spices in ungreased square pan, 8x8x2”. Mix in remaining ingredients. Bake until wooden pick in center comes out clean, 35-40 minutes.

Very attentive readers may notice that this is very similar to my recipe for vegan chocolate cake. In fact, it's based on one of the variations listed in my Betty Crocker cookbook. You can alter the flavorings many ways, and it still mixes, cooks and serves neatly in the same pan.

I couldn't resist

How could I resist a quiz to do with PIE?

You Are Mud Pie

You're the perfect combo of flavor and depth. You are overpowering and dominant - and that's what people like about you. You bring energy and a new direction to most interactions. People crave you in a serious way. You're that important to them. Those who like you give into their impulses. You don't represent reason. You represent pure temptation. People get addicted to you rather easily. You offer people a dark side that is very hard to resist.

What Kind of Pie Are You?

I've never made a "mud pie", you know one that doesn't actually include dirt, but I know when and where I first ate mud pie. I was very young, maybe five or six, at The Flying Lady in Morgan Hill, CA. Which, alas, is no more. It was the first restaurant I ever went to that had memorabilia all over the walls and ceiling. My parents used to take us there occasionally with their friends from the Salinas Owners and Pilots Association.

I'm not convinced this quiz was very accurate for me, but apparently it was good for Amy and Anj.

Healthy sweet things

When I'm sick, like this week, for example, or my whole second pregnancy, I crave fruit breads: banana bread, zucchini bread, etc.

This week, Aj posted a new-to-me recipe for pumpkin bread that I am going to try this weekend, and linked to some more pumpkin recipes. I thought I would take this nudge to re-post a link to my recipe for pumpkin pie and then offer my favorite recipe for zucchini bread (or muffins). My kids love it. It's basically cinnamon cake, but it's healthy, you know. It has zucchini and whole wheat flour!


3 eggs
2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups grated zucchini
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Grease either 2 9x5x3" loaf pans or line 24-30 muffin cups, or go half and half: one loaf pan, 12 muffin cups.

Beat the eggs until light and foamy. Add the sugar, oil, zucchini, and vanilla and mix lightly but well. In a separate bowl, combine flours, salt, soda, baking powder, and cinnamon and add to the egg-zucchini mixture. Sir until well blended and pour evenly into prepared pans. (If you're going half and half, pour the muffin cups 2/3 full first, then dump what's left into the loaf pan.)

Bake loaves 1 hour or muffins 25-30 minutes.

This is my slight variation on Carl Goh's Zucchini Bread, as presented in James Beard's Beard on Bread, which I received as a wedding present.

If your family won't eat anything with green flecks, you can peel the zucchini, but I don't. You can use all white flour, but not all whole wheat flour. And you can add one cup of chopped nuts (filberts or walnuts) if you want, but not at my house. You can use less sugar, or less oil, or whatever else you want to do to try to make it more healthy, but then don't blame me if it's not as delicious as I said.

Noli Irritare Dracones

What do you get when you invite a heavy duty blogger to dinner with your children?

An intergenerational discussion of historical and contemporary Latin, contraception, the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, modern child naming practices and the effects of various housing options in social inclusion and exclusion at elite universities. It was fun, really.

We had the honor of hosting Lynn G.-S. for dinner at our home on Sunday night after a long business meeting. The hardest part so far of being married to the clerk is that you can’t sneak out and go home early.

Just as Lynn arrived, Chris and the boys came back from a quick run around in the park. I was just taking the brownies out of the oven. H. asked if these were the same recipe that was so good with strawberries and ice cream. I said yes, and started slicing the strawberries. H. explained to Lynn that most of my good dessert recipes come from The Wooden Spoon Dessert Book. She remembered that I had offered her two dessert recipes for her recent dilemma and made a mental note to bookmark the one for vegan chocolate cake, perfect for Quaker potlucks. I said that’s what I often make it for.

Here is my mother’s recipe for brownies, which I think she got off the back of a bottle of Wesson Oil.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease bottom and sides of a 10"x15" jelly roll pan.

Melt 4 squares unsweetened baking chocolate. Stir until smooth and set aside to cool a little bit.

Beat 4 eggs until foamy.
Gradually add 2 cups granulated sugar.
Mix in 1 1/3 cup vegetable oil, 2 teaspoons vanilla extract, and the melted chocolate.

Stir together, then add to egg mixture
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Pour and scrape into greased pan. Spread evenly with a spatula to fill the corners.

Bake for 20-25 minutes. (This is the tricky part. My mother does it perfectly, pulling them out at just the right moment so that the brownies are a little moist and a little crumbly. They are dense, not fluffy. She always says, "These are brownies, not cake." )

Cool in the pan on a wire rack. Cut into squares and eat just plain, or add sliced fruit and vanilla ice cream for a quick and widely pleasing dessert.

You can also make half a recipe and bake it in a 8x8" square pan, but I prefer to make the whole batch and freeze half for another day. Even though it is a pretty quick recipe to make.

[Update: here is the link to Lynn's post about the same dinner.]

Apple Pie for Clerks' Dinner

Last night we invited all the former clerks of our Meeting (and their spouses) over for dinner. Five out of the six who are still alive and active in our Meeting were able to come. We've been meaning to do it since Chris became clerk this year, but what with moving and all that this summer, it didn't happen until now.

It was a lovely time. Just an informal get together, a chance to invite all these friends of ours to visit our new home. At the same time, it was good to be reminded that we have these Friends as resources in our Meeting. As several of the very involved, long-time members have moved away or passed away over the last few years, there has been a tendency in our Meeting to lament that we have lost so much, so many elders. But last night, Chris and I looked around and realized that our Meeting is still blessed with much experience, hosted in the form of some really nice people who get along with each other pretty well.

And plus, the dinner turned out all right, our kids were well behaved, and we had two! kinds of pie. (This is the advantage of having so many people come - must have two pies.) The recipe for pumpkin is here; the recipe for apple is here:

Prepare one recipe of pie crust and chill while preparing the filling.

Peel, quarter and core 3 pounds of tart, crisp apples,* or enough to make six cups sliced. Drop the quartered apples into a bowl of water with a little lemon juice or cider vinegar in it, so they don't get too brown. When all the apples are ready, drain and slice them into 1/4" (or thinner) slices. In a medium bowl, toss the sliced apples with the juice of 1/2 lemon.

In a large bowl, combine and mix well

1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons flour
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Roll out one half the dough and use to line a 9 inch pie pan. Trim off the excess. Roll out and have ready the second half for the top crust. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Transfer the apples to the sugar mixture using a slotted spoon, leaving behind excess liquid. Toss the apples and sugar mixture to coat the apples and transfer all to the lined pie pan. Arrange the slices so that their flat sides are horizontal. Otherwise, they will mound up too high in the center. Use all the apples. They will compact as they cook.

Dot the top with slivers of
2 teaspoons firm unsalted butter

Top with the rolled out top crust. Trim so that it extends just a little beyond the bottom crust. Fold this extra rim under the bottom crust, gently working your way around the pie. Press gently but firmly around this edge, sealing the crusts together (so that less juice will spill on the floor of the oven and smoke). Flute the edge and cut vents in the top crust (not too close to the edge either).

Brush the crust with
1 teaspoon melted unsalted butter

Sprinkle with
1/4 teaspoon granulated sugar

Bake in a preheated 450 degree oven for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 degrees and bake for an additional 35-40 minutes. Cool on a wire rack. Serve with the best vanilla ice cream you can get.

(This recipe adapted from Marilyn Moore's The Wooden Spoon Dessert Book.)

*apples: Marilyn Moore recommends McIntosh, but only in the fall soon after they are picked. Other widely available varieties that work for pie are Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and Jonathan. Ask at your local farmers' market which varieties are tart and will not dissolve into mush when cooked. The softer ones are better for making applesauce.

Seventeen days til school starts

Both my children. One school. One pick-up and drop-off location. One vacation schedule. If I were even a little more obsessed, I'd find one of those countdown widgets to put in my sidebar.

And on the home front, I have a desk again. By the end of this week, I should have shelves on which to put my papers/supplies/files/diploma again. (Since my desk is really just a folding table.) And maybe, once that happens, we can move the computer back to a more functional location. And then, THEN, I'll be itching to write once again. Or rather to type once again, rather than just the bare minimum to respond to comments.

Until then, I'll recommend to you the blueberry pie recipe I posted a year and a half ago. I made it again last week and it was great!

Vegan Chocolate Cake & Annual Meeting Retreat

Memorial Day Weekend is always the SF Monthly Meeting’s annual retreat at Ben Lomond Quaker Center. There was some discussion this year of how long this has been going on, and I think we had one Friend say he’d been coming for 30 years, and one Friend say she had been at the workcamp that laid the foundation for the building we were in (with her six month old baby, now a 40 year old father who had brought his own sons) and that the retreat couldn’t have started before that. So, in any case, this makes it one of the longest standing traditions of SFMM.

Chris M. and I have been attending for a dozen years or so, having missed one because of a niece’s baptism and one for a cousin’s wedding along the way. It is still a wonderful way to get to know people better, some new and some we met at that first retreat we went to, about four months after we arrived in SF. Some of the regular retreat attenders are former members of our meeting who still come back once a year to connect and relax with us.

It is a very low-key affair: the only parts planned in advance are the meals. The rest of the schedule is developed by a group process on Saturday morning after breakfast, when anything anyone wants to do with other people can be proposed and assigned a time and place. And even then, all activities, from bible study to water balloons to worship sharing to hiking to the waterfall, and including the daily meeting for worship, are entirely optional.

Anyway, at lunch on Sunday, some one asked if I would publish my recipe for vegan chocolate cake on my blog. I hereby comply. I ask only that that Friend leave a comment in the near future.

Vegan Chocolate Cake

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Stir together in an ungreased 8x8x2 inch baking pan, pressing out any lumps with the back of a fork:

1 ½ cups unbleached all purpose flour
1 cup succanat (regular white or brown sugar also work fine)
3 tablespoons cocoa
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda

Make three holes in the stirred dry ingredients. Into these place< 6 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Pour over all

1 cup cold water (or coffee or milk, depending on your flavor and ethical preferences)

Mix with a fork just until all ingredients are well blended. Bake at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes, or until the cake springs back when lightly pressed in the center. Cool in the pan.

This recipe can be doubled and baked in a 9x13x2 inch pan, but it will probaly need 40 minutes or so to bake, depending on your oven.

When I prepared this to serve after a memorial meeting for worship once, I sprinkled the top of the cake, while it was still warm, with vegan & organic chocolate chips. After they melted a little bit, I spread them out into a thin layer of frosting. This was amazingly good.

This cake is also fabulous with vanilla ice cream and sliced strawberries.

The funny thing for me is that this “vegan” recipe is readily available in almost any basic cook book, sometimes called Crazy Cake or Wacky Cake, because of the vinegar, etc.

I first had this cake as part of an after school religious education program at First Presbyterian Church of Salinas when I was in fourth grade.

Each week, the teacher brought in one of the ingredients for us to taste. Most weeks she brought in both the kitchen-ready version and the unprocessed form of each ingredient, like flour and a wheat stalk. Some ingredients were yummy, some were terrible, some were just bland. But when she put them all together at the end of the semester, the cake was rich and delicious.

The point was that religious practice is like that too. We enjoy some aspects, we may dislike other aspects, but the result wouldn’t be the same without them all.

Banana Cream Pie

In honor of a fabulous discussion, discerning the sins of modern, secular and liberal Americans. Which we are.
And postmodern, Christian, progressive globalists. Which we are.

Following an old fashioned meal of meatloaf and baked potatos, culminating in a banana cream pie. Which we loved.


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Roll with a rolling pin, in the bag they came in
about 55 vanilla wafers
(You can use the organic kind, but they never taste the same as the Nabisco Nilla Wafers)

This should make approximately
1 3/4 cups vanilla wafer crumbs

Mix crumbs with
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
5 tablespoons melted butter

Remove 1/4 cup of the crumb mixture and reserve. Press the remaining mixture evenly over the bottom and up the sides of a 9-inch pie pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes, or until golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.

In a heavy saucepan, stir together, pressing out any lumps with the back of a spoon
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch

Stir in, in this order
1/4 cup cold milk
3 large egg yolks, beaten

When the mixture is smooth, stir in
2 cups scalded milk
(this means heated to just before boiling, when the skin forms on top, and then taken off the heat)

Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly. As soon as the mixture begins to thicken, turn the heat to low and continue to cook, stirring constantly, until thick and bubbly, about one minute longer. If the mixture threatens to become lumpy, remove it from heat at once and stir vigorously until smooth. When thick, remove from the heat and gently stir in, in this order

2 tablespoons soft butter
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Let cool 10 miutes, stirring occasionally to prevent a film from forming on top. Spoon one-third of the filling into the cooled crust. Peel and slice into 1/4-inch slices over this filling

3 fully ripe bananas

Spoon and scrape the remaining filling over the bananas. Sprinkle the reserved crumb mixture over the top. Chill until firm, at least three hours.

When ready to serve, stir together in a small chilled bowl

1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 tablespoon extra fine sugar

Beat at medium high speed until the cream mounds into soft peaks. Do not overbeat.

If you have very polite guests, you can pass the bowl of whipped cream and allow people to top their own pie. Otherwise, serve it up yourself to be sure there's enough to go around.

With gratitude to The Wooden Spoon Dessert Book by Marilyn M. Moore and my mother-in-law, who gave it to me.

Shepherd's Pie

It's been a while since there was a pie recipe around here, and this isn't quite the same as the rest of the series, but it was an experiment that worked, so I'm willing to share.

1 medium onion, diced
8 oz. sliced mushrooms
1 lb. asparagus, cut in 1" pieces
5 small sweet potatoes
2 1/2 cups minced roasted lamb (trimmed of all fat, gristle, etc.)
3 tablespoons butter, divided
1 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups pan drippings (including water to deglaze the pan), fat skimmed off
1 tablespoon worcestershire sauce
Salt

Obviously, the first step is to roast the lamb and pour off the juices into a cup and put both in the refrigerator. This is basically a leftover recipe.

Boil the sweet potatoes in salted water for 30 minutes or until soft when pierced with a fork. Cool slightly and remove the skins. Mash and set aside.

In a 2 qt. saucepan, saute the onion in 1 1/2 tablespoons butter over medium heat until golden. Add the mushrooms and continue to stir until the mushrooms release their juices. Resist the urge to sit down and eat the whole pot of mushrooms and onions right now. Pour mushrooms and onions into 3 qt. casserole dish and set aside.

In the same cooking pot, melt the remaining 1 1/2 tablespoons butter over low heat. Add flour and stir until the mixture is smooth and begins to brown slightly. Add drippings slowly, stirring constantly to make gravy. Cook until the mixture begins to thicken, then remove from heat and add worcestershire sauce. Taste and season with salt if needed. (If the roast was rubbed in salt, you may not need any more.)

Add the minced lamb and asparagus to the mushroom-onion mixture in the casserole dish. Stir in the gravy.

Salt the mashed sweet potatoes to your taste, and spread over the lamb mixture to cover the casserole.

Bake at 350 degrees for one hour or until the potatoes are crusty and the sauce is bubbling around the sides.

Serves 8 as a main dish. I served it with homemade biscuits and a fruit salad.