Pie of the Week: Grampy's Strawberry and Danica's Banana Pie

My grandparents love me. But perhaps not more than a fresh strawberry pie since that's what they hung up the phone on me for. ;)

It seemed appropriate to stammer loudly into the receiver before *click* "You better send me that recipe!"

And they did! My grandparents love me.

I wasn't sure what to expect for the contents of a strawberry pie. I sort of imagined how gross cherries for cherry pie can look when cooked (despite the wonderful taste) and was already dreading seeing a pound of lovely strawberries under the duress of heat. But as it turned out, you used fresh strawberries and they STAY fresh! Now, in my version of the pie, there are bananas... this is because I accidentally bought the wrong jello mix. In a fit of anger and swearing as I realized my mistake over the boiling pot of sugar and jello power, my brilliant husband simply said, "why not just add bananas?" So I did!

This pie is a lovely "ice box" pie that is served after chilled and from the fridge – best for hot summer nights after a trip to the farmer's market.

I love Mumford & Sons.

For a long time I have been trying to figure out how to post about Mumford & Sons. I didn't want to merely refer to them or provide only a simple sound clip. When Ashley came to visit for a few weeks from Indonesia, she brought with her this wonderful band. Matt and I have been listening to it almost nonstop since making the deliberate decision to patronize the band!

And now, from a friend of my friend's blog, I have found a take-away-show style video of our favorite song:

I know that lines from their music have been posted as facebook statuses for sometime now, and that many a blog has pondered on their religious affiliation. I am by no means a music critic (or any kind of critic, beyond boisterous, opinionated mediterranean-style family exchanges!), but Mumford & Sons does some wonderful things with their lyrics - in conjunction with some wonderful wailings on their stringed instruments - that warrant some meditation. Below are the lyrics to the song above:

How fickle my heart

and how woozy my eyes

I struggle to find

any truth in your lies

And now my heart stumbles

on things I don't know

This weakness I feel

I must finally show

Lend me your hand

and we'll conquer them all

But lend me your heart

and I'll just let you fall

Lend me your eyes

I can change what you see

But your soul you must keep,

totally free

In these bodies we will live,

in these bodies we will die

Where you invest your love,

you invest your life

Awake my soul, awake my soul

You were made to meet your maker

I learned to make Japanese water balloons!

A few weeks ago, Ashley put up a series of lovely blog posts what engendered great feelings of whimsy in me. One of the things she mentioned was sending a birthday package to a friend (I would venture to guess it went to mutual friend currently featured in Ashley's blog) that had a bag, with instructions, full of folded origami balloons. I decided I must learn this for myself! And then put these little balloons in an emergency party kit a long with some other goodies (mentioned below) - you can, too! With these step by step photos, I did my darnedest to depict how pictorial instructions for you (mouse over the image for step instructions):

At the same time as discovering Ashley's balloons, Hollin visited and photographed the 6th Annual Puces Pop DIY Craft & Fair where equal amounts of celebratory decor dotted the church's basement and merchandising displays of crafters' booths. A particularly lovely and simple decoration Hollin captured were the pom-poms strung up above the entrance:

Apparently, though, you can purchase something similar for $65 from anthropologie (while these pom-poms are felted, they do NOT make this project worth that hunk of change in my humble opinion):

I finally got myself to Michael's where I was able to purchase a HUGE bag of brightly colored pom-poms for $5 and string them together myself with some magenta embroidery floss - it was very therapeutic:

(Yes. Our hallway is pink.)

Chinese 5-Spice Winter Squash Pie

In the interest of the book I have been cooking from, Pie, I will not post the recipe in it entirety. But an image of the book's page of ingredients for the Chinese Five-Spice Winter Squash Pie can be seen here; below is a brief description and notes on my own experience making it.

Ever since our trip to Avila Barn, I have been pondering on squash. I have yet to show-off my crazy "winged" squash, but I overheard some ladies talking about the fact that all squash can be eaten. This brought to mind the mistake I made last year of cooking a decorative pumpkin from Casey's farm (awesome!); despite its green skin and whitish innards, it turned out to be the best pumpkin soup I ever made. While listening to the women, I wondered what wonders could be made with the zillions of squash before me and, sure enough.... there is a magical pie!

The Chinese Five-Spice Winter Squash Pie was a little bit more involved than the Apple Cheddar Cheese Pie. It required a total of 2.5 hours of preparation (most of which was done during the cooking time or food processor) and a handful of more ingredients, but all in all it was not terribly complicated.

I did, however, have to learn about (and brave) delicata squash. This variety of winter squash is rather ugly in the humble opinion of Sarah I and I. It's yellowy-greeny and plastic looking. It just doesn't come across as something good to eat - but if you submitted to this superficial assessment, you would be sorely missing out! After performing the first step of the pie recipe (cooking the squash for 50 minutes), it was clear that the wonderful sweet-potato-like smell filling the house was, in fact, not coming from the butternut squash the recipe called for, but the delicata! Thusly, it is actually known as "the sweet potato squash" for this familiar aroma and taste. The squash was not only more manageable to cut and deseed, it had a great smooth texture and sweet, woody or nutty flavor. This is probably because it is far less dense and stringy than most squash. This latter fact is likely why it fell into obscurity until fairly recently since its introduction in the 1920s - the thin skin and creamy flesh doesn't transport terribly well.

(More on winter squash!)

As I said before, I would like to encourage looking into the book, Pie, so I will only summarize the recipe; however, I am quickly learning that pie-making consists of four, usually very simple, steps:

(0)Prepare the crust)

1) Cook the filling

2) Puree/chop up the filling

3) place it in the pie crust

4) Bake

Essentially, this pie required me to simply bake the squash at 50 min, puree it with all the other ingredients, and bake for another 50 min!

Butternut Squash	Delicata Squash

I might give up my pumpkin pie preference in favor of delicata. I can't wait to try it in a soup!

One very helpful tip I learned from Pie was that only a very shallow bed of water is required for the dish in which the squash are being cooked - putting the right amount of water will keep the squash dense and make a more creamy puree than a lot of water, which will get absorbed during the long cooking process.

Also, I made an almost vegan/vegetarian version (I still used eggs) for my father-in-law and sister-in-law (one has a wheat allergy and both avoid dairy). I replaced the flour with rice flour (often the preferred gluten-free pastry alternative) I used almond milk in lieu of the half-and-half; but since it is so much thinner I added an extra two table spoons of rice flour. I got a nearly identical consistency! But the flavor was a bit off. The rice flour also had a distinct flavor that I recalled being present in anything I've cooked with rice flour. I might try 1/4 c of tapioca instead. I think next time around, I would want to play more on the almond tones that definitely compliment the nutty delicata flavor, too - perhaps by adding an extra tsp or two of nutmeg and then roasting some almond slivers and garnishing the top with them!

I learned that foil is a very useful crafting tool.

I think foil is a lot like duct tape: cheap, all purpose, and probably grossly overused when it comes to amateur crafting (I used foil in EVERY diorama I ever made. Including the tiny reproduction Fort Ross which featured weapons fashioned from toothpicks covered tin foil). I also recall my old art professor scoffing at a piece I made using predominantly foil... he also hated duct tape.

In any case, it turns out this stuff can save you a lotta money & headaches when properly applied to projects. For example, instead of using muslin or some scrap fabric - which can always be re-appropriated to something else - I used foil to hold the shape of the thing I was creating a pattern for (including my torso) and cut it (not with my fabric scissors!!) where I guessed I would want the seams. I also used it to take the shape of the inside of the little treasure boxes the pocket sea creatures come in. It's the easiest way a right-brained like me could think to translate something three-dimensional to two-dimensions.

Foil is also great for Halloween costumes.

Today, however, when I frustratingly failed at my third makeshift row marker, I discovered that little candy foils (like the kind on Kisses) can also be re-appropriated by being twisted into strands used for marking rows! Oh how I love to give things, like wrappers, a second life:

(oh and what is this picture of you ask? It's going to be a crocheted VAMPIRE SQUID!! available this weekend at my shop :D )

I filmed Kansas.

While most of my fun and not-so-moody videos can be seen here, on my minorheroine Vimeo account, pieces - like the one below - that I spend some time editing or conceiving can be viewed on my grown-up, professional Vimeo here, searchable under Danica Complex.

This is one of those pieces that serendipitously came together from the hodge-podge, thoughtless snippets of video I collected over the course a Christmas visitation to my parents who were on a vicarage in Kansas in 2008.

This first video was the product of listening to the piece Gymnopédie No.1 (featured in the piece). Whether or not I ever heard the music before didn't make it any less nostalgic and it conjured up images from my most recent adventure: a train ride across the country. On thinking on trains I remembered my habit of running out to watch the trains pass behind the school from my job as a clerk in college. One of the cinema professors caught me during one of my escapes and stopped to stare with me at the beast chugging by. Before trotting off he turned to me and said, "Wow... let's make a movie about trains!"

I think I am particularly fond of the "time" theme that accidentally presented itself throughout the film. We see young faces and old hands, old-fashioned words in the cards and new ones being scribbled down - all the while the train moves forward through landscapes, days, and nights.

I meant to create three video pieces to mirror a tradition style of composition that is the sum of three movements usually with a pattern of brisk, ballad, and ending long & lively. I just didn't have enough video to fulfill this pattern, so I satisfied myself with two contrasting paces in the different videos using the same piece of music. In addressing this limitation, other interesting contrasts arose - I found that the first piece which utilized the ballad was more tightly themed, but very loose in structure. This second piece has a distinct narrative that seems to follow the imagination of a protagonist into a whimsical world separated by images of fire. We also see a train again, tying it back to the first film.

I Made Cephalopods.