lemon lime pie

Clement & I have a long history of making published and invented variations of lemon cookies and lemon cakes.  Ever since he discovered the puckery pleasure of sucking on lemon wedges, that has become his favorite dessert flavor.  For this Thanksgiving we branched out & made a lemon pie  or tart  (texture similar to lemon squares we've bought in bakeries).  

We made some changes to a recipe published in the November 2011 issue of Glamour.  I started getting it as a substitute to longtime Domino subscription after it folded. Glamour it turn adapted it from Food52 cookbook by Hesser and Stubbs. 

The recipe calls for Meyer lemon which we didn't find in the store.  We used an organic lemon & peel & a lime (no lime  skin, I tasted it first & rejected the colored/pesticidey? yucky flavor).  We used our Vitamix blender which really pulverizes stuff to a fine consistency.

Lemon lime pie recipe
Anyhow, I peeled the lemon skin off,
put the skin & lemon minus the pith & seeds into the blender.
Added a lime, no skin, no seeds.
1.5 cups regular sugar (recipe said superfine, but the blender ground it up just as well)
1 stick soft butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 eggs (like sister Eymard taught, broken one at a time into a cup, pick out shells, toss if spoilt,
if clean & good only then toss in blender)

pulverize

pour into shell (open faced)

We made recipe for 2 shells from my first cookbook by Doubleday from about 1979

Recipe for 2 pie shells
2 cups flour
2/3 cup Crisco (we used butter flavored)
a tiny bit of icy water

cut first 2 ingredients with 2 butter knives, the a little bit of water,
mold into 2 balls, roll with rolling pin cut to fit tin.  Wisteria was a big help with the rolling. 
It's very freeing to delegate kitchen duty to offspring especially since it felt like playtime to her.

Sweet potato pie freeform recipe
The second shell we used to make invented sweet potato pie. 
So, baked sweet potatoesand/or butternut squash,
(I like the dry fluffy texture of these combined, maybe you like pumpkin, I don't so much, seems it comes out too wet/stringy for my taste, I don't like most banana breads for the same reason)
use your own good guestimate
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
some cardamon, ginger, pumpkin pie spice (which typically includes cinnamon & nutmeg)
to your taste

pour into shell (open faced)

Our oven's dial is kind of deformed,
so we baked each pie at some mediumish temperature for about 40 minutes. 
I kept checking, so things didn't burn up.
If you can regulate with some accuracy, 350 degrees is probably good.

One of my favorite sweet potatoe pie memories was a former roommate's mother coming to visit for Thanksgiving weekend.  She brough with herself 4 sweet potato pies. 4 days later they were all gone.  Before leaving Sunday she baked more to leave behind.  What a kind, gracious person.

Technical note: the blender definitely speeds things up.
But grating the skin and squeezing the juice and  mashing things up would be fine too.

Before the weekend washes away in the rain, the children and I will make a second round to ease us into the week.

High winds

It's a beast, it's a bear, it's tugging at my hair, not so chill and not so balmy, but certainly ferocious.

November winds have descended on our corner of the concrete landscape.  Brings to mind childhood story book illustration with North Wind with puffed up cheeks swooshing out a tremendous, forceful burst of wind (of course) with plenty more where that came from.  He is howling now. Portends rain, sleet, hail.  Anything can happen.   In July, ice balls, the size perfect for cooling off drinks, pounded down.  My dentist's car suffered $9000 of damage. Car sirens all around bellowed for salvation.

Now, today, our windows are shaking in their frames.  No hatches to batten down. I hope the roofing holds.  I hope the girls in their high heels and short dresses are safely blown home from the bars.  I hope their beaus hold on to their wads of cash money. 

Windy, rainy weather shakes dollars loose.  A tenner outside the darkest bar (now sadly closed and beautiful, sinister building demolished and replaced with crammed into the spot moderne mansion.) A $20 in a clump of dried leaves.  Folded into quarters, looking like a trick, but real for sure.  Eighty summthing coiled up tight in a rubberband.  Pay$ to look down sometimes.

Twig fencing, "yard" art flamingos, mystery lady mask all casualties.  Went out before midnight. Glorious full moon with blue clouds flowing past, choppy like waves. As I dreaded, noticed wide gaps on the clothes lines where this afternoon I optimistically used the usual 2 clothes pins per garment.  The good new was that most of the remaining clothes, even thick sweaters  and blue jeans were whipped dry.

Will have to conduct a search tomorrow in the daylight in the alley, neighbor's patio, didn't see anything on the nearby rooftops.  Must hold on to hope.  Last week, I  distractedly dropped favorite, worn sheepskin mittens in an alley.  Discovered their missingness at work. Retraced my steps in the afternoon.  Found them soaked and clinging to the ground almost the last place I could have looked.   Sometimes it's the small things that can sink a person or pick her up.

  

bale of straw!

wow! so we were getting a ride from a nice person in her large family van, when I spied with my little eye a lovely bale of hay sticking up out of a trash can next to a park, I had her pull over, I ran  walked back quickly and with dermination lifted the golden parcel up and out, I was very happy in spite of the plastic cords cutting into the pads of my fingers, I had read that straw was a good mulch for the garden, very hard to find in the city, not to mention hard to transport without wheels, will save in a dry place for next summer,  will be nice to save on the chore of watering our little patch in the comunity garden

autumn beauty from the dumpster

swooped by/behind local flower shop, picked up what I could reach, branches of bittersweet, dried oak leaves, bird of paradise(?), walked home with aching armful like demented fairytail babajaga carrying faggots to fuel the fire up in her house perched on chicken leg

too much Halloween

There is a bath towel, not a beach towel, mind, on the living room floor, holding a bounty of catogorized, snack-sized candies. 

Wisteria and her older brother Clement worked hard gathering treat door to door.  She as a princess with a basket, he as a knight in shining armor with a white pillowcase.  Happily they decide to share at the end of the night.  I was a little worried about inequity since she got an earlier start and helped herself to handfuls at unattended sites.  She made out like a bandit at a car dealership that had basins of treats in the trucks of their used cars. 

Her favorite thing was not the candy, but that she got to see new people.  Neighbors are usually behind closed doors.  One older lady with her arm in a sling, I believe, is the mother of a classmate who was shot dead at age 14. A girl at the car place party the daughter of a woman I went to kindergarden with.  The woman at the funeral home, lost her husband recently.  My father was laid to rest by her father. I that occasion & candy corn are forever linked in my mind. Thankfully, no candy corn made it into our collection. 

So what to do with the candy we have?  Tuck away into our mouths, store in drawers, savor new happier memories, take as omen of sweeter days to come.