"Gotta use up this flour..."

Back at the beginning of the month, which seems an incredibly distant time in light of current circumstances but turns out to be less than 30 days ago, I baked a fancy banana bread for my friends. They enjoyed it, and ate it all, but it used up almost all of the flour I had in the house. I added flour to my grocery list without a second thought, but that was the week when Knoxville decided to start panic buying, and it has taken until this past Wednesday to have flour in stock at Kroger again.

The last bag of flour.

It turned out to be a 5 pound bag, which is larger than my flour cannister will hold. I'm sure there are people who just sit the bag of flour in their cabinet and think nothing of it, but I'm always worried that if I leave the flour just sitting in the bag then bugs of some kind (weevils? mites? centipedes, which are not a bug but are an arthropod?) will get into it, even though I've never seen a bug in my kitchen. Unwilling to leave this flour just sitting out as an insect buffet after I waited almost a month to be able to buy it, I decided that I would use it up this weekend instead.

The first thing I made was scones. I've been using the same scone recipe since 2011, but my recipe is for pear and goat cheese scones, and I didn't have any pears in the house. I did have an apple, though, so I decided on apple cheddar scones instead.

I chunked up my apple:



peeled and finely diced it, and lumped everything into my scone batter:



and baked them. I didn't bother shaping them, and instead just made them like haystacks of dough:



and they came out fine.

That didn't use up enough flour, though, so I thought about what else I could make, and decided on a quick bread. Years ago, Food Network Magazine published a 50 Quick Breads recipe guide in the magazine, and I've never gone wrong using it. I looked around the pantry and saw half a bag of dried figs leftover from when I made a flatbread with figs on it and an almost empty bottle of honey (I had a spare right behind it), so I decided to make the honey bread (number 30) and add the figs to it. Calling this a bread is misleading, though, because it's really a fig and honey poundcake.

The batter came together quickly and fairly easily, and then I decided to try something new. Every time I make a bread with things in it, most of the things sink to the bottom. I've seen people on Food Network talk about how you have to toss your add ins in flour, so that they suspend in the dough rather than sinking, but I've never actually tried it. I saved back an eighth of a cup of the flour that was supposed to go into the batter and tossed the diced figs in it:



The figs were folded into the batter, the batter went into the loaf pan:



(Look! You can see figs floating near the top!) and it worked:



Fig and honey bread with figs in pretty much every bite. I can't really taste the honey, but I can taste the figs, and I love figs, so this is delicious. Next time I have dinner at a friend's house I might even bring this as dessert.

I figured this was enough baking, and decided to pause until Sunday.

This morning I was originally planning to make chocolate chip cookies, but they called for a lot of eggs, and I was worried about using up too many eggs in one weekend. I also used a crap ton of butter this weekend between the baking and a lemon pasta dish, but I had extra butter in the freezer, so I wasn't as worried about that. Changing gears, I decided to make shortbread cookies instead, because I've made them once before, they use the same amount of butter and flour as the chocolate chip cookies, and they only use one egg.

I couldn't remember what recipe I used when I made these before, but a quick google search turned up this really easy one, and it mostly worked with one minor snag.

After mixing up the dough:



I went to eject the mixer blades so I could get the dough out of them, and I accidentally hit spin instead. Little pieces of dough, all over the counter and the stove:



I guess it got mixed a little more than I intended it to.

I got the dough back together in the bowl, pressing it into a ball with my hands, and then dumped it onto my floured countertop. Learning from my recent troubles with piecrust I floured my rolling pin and rolled the dough out to the right thickness. Once that was done, I used my hands to shape it into a square to cut out evenly sized cookies:



I cut them into triangles and got them to the cookie sheet with a minimum of trouble, then separated an egg to make an egg white wash for the top:



The recipe said to put sanding sugar on top, but I didn't have any. I did have leftover gold colored sugar from making Unicorn Fudge a few years ago, so I used that instead, and it actually came out really pretty:



It's sparkly and shiny, and gave the tops a nice crunch.

Tomorrow night, I'll probably make some banana bread, because I have bananas to use up, too.

A Greek Tragedy on Pi Day

So many of the best Greek tragedies, and really tragedies in general, rest on the idea of hubris. Generally one thinks of hubris, if one thinks of it at all, as a folly of youth, but I'm here to tell you a tale of hubris from yesterday morning, starring me and a pie crust.

Our story begins, as so many do, with a tiny act. See, a few months ago I bought my friend a Harry Potter spatula at Williams Sonoma, and let them email my receipt rather than printing a paper one. Since that day, I receive one to three emails from Williams Sonoma a day telling me about sales and reasons why I should rush to their store to by four hundred dollar toasters and hundred dollar mixing bowls. Yesterday morning, for Pi Day, they sent me one about "6 Pie Essentials", which I casually deleted and then tweeted about.

Thanks for your thoughtful email, Williams Sonoma, but I don't really need 6 pie-making essentials right now.

Please email when you have toilet paper.

The stage is now set to move on with our story.

Around lunch time yesterday, after a morning of cleaning, laundry, reading, and video games, I realized that I didn't have any pie to celebrate Pi Day. I thought about running to the store to pick up a small one, but then remembered that I'm supposed to be practicing social distancing right now, and trying to stay in my apartment instead of running out to the store whenever the impulse hits me.

"What if I just made a pie?" I thought, surveying the contents of my cabinets. Mixed in with a dozen boxes of Jello, I noticed a box of instant chocolate pudding and pie filling. "All I need, really, is a pie crust. People make pie crust all the time. How hard can it be? I mean, I own a hundred cookbooks. One of them must have a recipe."

So, hours after casually mocking the idea that there are pie essentials that I might need help with (making pie crust is probably one of them), I decide to make a pie.

Hubris.

Now, on with our tragedy. I started by surveying the book case where I keep most of my cookbooks:



My parents got that bookcase as a wedding gift. It has survived a dozen moves over the years, and the only damage is a chip in the corner of one of the sliding door panels. It holds most of my cookbooks, although there is a shelf of overflow cookbooks in the second bedroom, which I sometimes grandly refer to as The Library. I picked through for a few minutes, and found a basic recipe for pie crust. I had all the ingredients, so I preheated the oven and got started on the pie crust.

The recipe said that the butter needed to be really cold, so I cubed it and then put it in the freezer for ten minutes:



Then I prepared to cut the butter into the flour and salt:



After adding the ice cold water, the recipe insisted that I now had pie dough.



It didn't look like pie dough. It looked like a pile of sad ruins, but I had now used butter and flour on it during our time of social distance, which meant I shouldn't waste it to just make pudding. I soldiered onward, and followed the instructions, which said to roll out my dough.



The recipe gave no indication that the dough could stick to the rolling pin. When I talked to my mom this morning about it she casually said, "Oh, you didn't put enough flour on your rolling pin," but the recipe didn't say to put any flour on the rolling pin. I pointed this out, and mom added, "Everyone knows you put flour on the rolling pin."

I guess everyone doesn't know, but maybe it was one of the six essential tips that I, in my hubris, deleted and mocked.

Eventually, I gave up on trying to roll out the dough, and just plopped it into the pan and pressed it into shape with my fingers.



This is not ideal pie crust.

I baked it anyway and it came out even worse.



Actual bakers are probably staring at that in horror, but I was all in at this point. I waited for it to cool, then filled it with my newly mixed chocolate pie filling and put it in the fridge. The finished product looked mostly like a pie, with sloppy edges.



It sliced right up, though:





and it tastes fine.

It would probably taste a little better if I'd followed those six essential pie tips, though.

Water into Wine(flavored)

We live in exciting times, as far as food goes. Or, more correctly, as far as "food" goes, as I'm not sure some of the things I am often excited about in the grocery store actually qualify as "food", technically. I'm not talking about things like exotic fruit from the far side of the world or a soup you've never tried or a new sauce for chicken. I'm talking about things like Peeps milk, or Cheelows, or the return to popularity of exotic Jello molds and desserts. And, yes, I'm also talking about Wal-Mart's wine-flavored water enhancers.

Earlier this week a friend posted an article about them on Facebook, but the article didn't seem to know that Rose Wine isn't the only flavor. When I made an actual trip to Walmart on Friday night (because that's the kind of fun we get into around here on a Friday night), I discovered that they also make a Berry Sangria flavor. As a person who drinks water all day long at my desk, and a person who likes wine, I decided that I needed to try these.

But also that I needed some actual wine to compare them to, in order to properly evaluate the flavor.

I'm told that day drinking wine alone in your apartment on the weekend is a sign of several different but severe problems, so I immediately rationalized two good excuses:

1) I have to drink this in order to properly blog about it. I am performing a service for my few dozen readers. Taking one for the team. Some kind of sports metaphor. I'm not day drinking alone on the couch. I'm [SPORTS METAPHOR HERE] for my friends and readers.

2) If you have wine with a cheese plate, you're not drinking; you're fancy. The $5 and under cheese bin at Kroger was happy to help me with this, so I assembled a cheese plate with some crackers and accompaniments (by which I mean jelly, to keep the cheese from sliding off the cracker) and prepared for my taste test.



Said preparation consisted of letting the cheese sit out for an hour and getting out two glasses.

Like I said, fancy.

I decided to start with the Rose Wine flavor, as that was the one discussed in the article.



(If you're wondering why the wine glass has a bicentennial design on it, all of my barware comes from a matched set that was in my Nanny Maggie's house. No one else wanted it, and I have successfully move it three times now without breaking any.)

I wasn't sure how much flavoring to add to just one glass of water (at work I have a water bottle, so I'm flavoring a much larger quantity), so I figured for a proper test I would go ahead and add flavoring until it was about the same color as the actual rose wine spritzer I bought at Walmart.

(Yes, I bought wine at Walmart. As I said, fancy.)



Before sipping, I attempted to savor the bouquet, but the rose-flavored water had no smell at all. It really did taste like wine, although without the noticeable bite/sting of alcohol. I'm not saying it tasted like good wine, mind you. It tasted more like I imagine the wine that Schmendrick makes in "The Last Unicorn" tastes; weak, non-offensive, but definitely something wine-flavored. If you were blindfolded and given a glass of this, I'm fairly confident you'd be able to guess "wine" as the flavor, but not a specific kind of wine.

Satisfied that I had properly evaluated the rose flavor, I slammed the remainder of the glass of rose and cleansed my pallet with several bites of cheese and crackers. Then we moved on to the Berry Sangria flavor:



Like the first test, I added enough until the colors matched:



and then sipped the actual wine, and then the water, to compare.

The berry sangria water has a faint smell of berries. I wondered if maybe I hadn't added enough flavor to the first one, or if maybe I was tipsy from the first round. (Confession: I drank all the wine from the first round, but only a couple sips of the water.) Even more importantly, though, it definitely tasted like the sangria. Out of the two flavors, I would say this one is definitely the better choice if you want to sit at your desk and pretend that you are slowly drinking your day away.

Or if you just like the taste of wine.

It's also good for that.

Books and Baking Banana Bread for Brunch

Earlier in the week I saw this recipe for chocolate peanut butter banana bread, and was intrigued. I shared it to Facebook, and the reaction from my friends ranged between also intrigued and concerned. My friend Sean expressed doubt about the flavor combination, and I pointed out that peanut butter and banana sandwiches were Elvis' favorite.

And also killed him.

Technically, that's probably more the fault of the sandwich preparation than it is the fault of the flavor combination. After all, according to the potholders for sale at the Graceland gift shop, every sandwich took an entire stick of butter.



That's why Elvis is dead. Four or five sticks of butter a day.

Anyway, by a happy coincidence I had some friends coming in from out of town this weekend, and they rented an entire house from Airbnb and invited many of us to brunch today. This offered the perfect opportunity to bake the bread but then not have the bread hanging around my house waiting to be eaten all week, so this morning I got to work.

When cooking anything, I like to take out all of the ingredients first, and then put them away as I go.



I bought those bananas, the ripest ones at the store, on Wednesday so that they would be soft by this morning. After preheating the oven, I mixed up the dry ingredients:



then mashed up the bananas:



and mixed everything together:



and put it in a bread loaf pan:



and popped it into the oven for an hour.

While it's cooking, let's talk about the books I read in February, since it's also the end of the month. I only made it through two books this month, mostly because things were busy at work and I was often too tired when I got home to stay up and read.

The month started with the news that Mary Higgins Clark passed away, and I realized I had Death Wears a Beauty Mask on my shelf of unread books. It's a short story collection featuring the title novella and other stories, some of which are interesting, but some of which seem like they could have used a little more work. Overall, the collection was a mixed bag, but reading it still felt like a nice sendoff to a beloved author. I've been reading Mary Higgins Clark's books since I was in high school, when I received several of them in a box of books my grandmother gave me. While my library has been a little pared down over the years, I still have all of those.

The other book I read this month was a reread of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, one of my all time favorite books in the world. Throughout the month of February I tried to figure out if I was rereading the book because I was melancholy, or if I was melancholy because I was reading the book, but that may be an unanswerable question.

Enough about books, though, because the bread was done:



I think I might need to lower the racks in my oven, because the top of that is really brown and I think it might be too close to the heating element. By the time I got it to the house and sliced it, though, it seemed fine:



and my friends ate all of it.

I brought home an empty loaf pan.

"Would you or your dog like a postcard?"

It's been three years since Trump was elected. In those three years, I have posted on social media, I have donated to Democratic candidates, I have written to legislators (even though I live in Tennessee and asking our state legislators to do anything against Trump is about as useful as slamming my hand in the car door on purpose), I've gone to marches, I've gone to protests, I've cut people out of my life, and very little has changed. Yes, Democrats were able to take back the House in the last election, but they're not actually able to do anything there with Republicans in control of the Senate, but that's all we've gotten accomplished and it hasn't been enough.

For the past several months, I've had a feeling building in me that I have not done enough.

We all know that I'm not having kids, ever. Some of my friends have kids, though, and someday those kids might look at me (they'd be in their thirties at this point, past the age of jam hands and acting out in restaurants) and say, "What did you do to help stop Trump?" and I feel like I wanted to be able to give some kind of an answer besides, "I tweeted a lot," so when the Warren campaign called me and asked if I wanted to volunteer, I said yes.

And that's how I ended up knocking on doors alone in 27 degree weather at 9 AM on a Saturday.

The call to volunteer didn't come out of nowhere. Both the Warren and the Sanders campaigns have been texting me. I've been having a lot of really good conversations with the Warren texters about health care, student loan debt, consumer protection, actually taxing businesses, saving the middle class, and salvaging the remains of the Presidency, and I've been avoiding conversations with the Sanders people by staring awkwardly at the phone and hoping they believe that I'm just really super busy and can't talk right now but totally might text them back later. While texting with the Warren people they mentioned that there are opportunities for volunteers, like canvassing, texting, and phone banking, and I eventually said, "Sure, go ahead and have someone call me about that."

I'll admit, I tried really hard to get phonebanking or texting, but they had plenty of people to do that already.

"What we really need are canvassers. To knock on doors."

"Just random doors? Like, knocking on strangers' doors?"

"No, no. There are lists of people who have polled as Democratic voters, or donated, or expressed interest in Democrats online, so you're not knocking on hostile doors. We really, really need people to canvass before Super Tuesday."

"I..., well, I..."

FLASH FORWARD:

It is 20 years from now, and one of my friends' kids who is now an adult but I don't know their age in twenty years because I have no idea how old they actually are right now looks at me with big, wide eyes and asks, "What did you do to help stop Trump?"

"Oh, you know, they wanted me to talk to strangers but it was supposed to be cold on Saturday so I just tweeted out some early voting location information, and that's how we ended up in a fascist theocracy like in 'V for Vendetta'. Now, eat your Soylent Green, and I'll tell you about how we have always been at war with EastAsia."

"I'LL DO IT. I WILL CANVASS ON SATURDAY FROM 9 TO 11."

"Great! I'll send you some instructions this week, and then call to confirm."

The instructions were to go meet up at a campaign volunteer's house near me, and being the person that I am I got there twenty minutes early while they were still setting up signs in the yard and the guy's wife was still in her robe. I also met my first dog of the day, their rescue, who has a bit of a short term memory loss and thought I was a new person to meet each time she left and re-entered the room. It was delightful. I've never canvassed before, but in my head it was going to involve clipboards and checkmarks. This turns out not to be the case. Instead, you download an app onto your phone, and it tells you where to go and then who to ask for. We ran through it a couple times, and then I got a stack of informative postcards and was ready to go.

"Who's going with me?"

"Nobody else is signed up for the 9 AM shift."

"I'm going to talk to strangers by myself?"

"It'll be fine! Come back at 11!"

For a minute, as I walked to my car, I was nervous about knocking on strangers' doors, interrupting their Saturday mornings, and then trying asking them questions and trying to tell them about the Warren campaign. What if they got mad? What if they all decided they were voting for Trump instead? What if, this being Tennessee, they had guns and tried to chase me off their suburban land? I took a deep breath, remembered that I am from New York and have talked to a number of hostile residents of New Jersey as if they were actual human beings, and set out to canvass.

It actually went pretty well. In many cases, there were multiple houses on the same street, so I could park in the middle and walk up and down. I met a ton of dogs, all of whom were friendly, and I ended up peering at a ton of Ring doorbell cameras and pointing at my Warren postcard for people who would not come to the door. Several people thanked me for being out canvassing, but out of 30 or so people that I actually got to speak to (a lot of people had cars in their driveways but no one would answer the door; I marked them as "not home" so that someone would call or knock on their door again in the future), only two had decided on Warren. One had decided on Trump, although she didn't seem like an evil fascist racist wall-builder, two were set on Bernie, and everyone else said they were undecided. Many of the undecideds also said they were planning to early vote, so I hope they make up their minds soon.

Only one person closed their door on me while I was trying to tell them about early voting. They smiled when they did it, but that doesn't make it less rude.

Overall, it was a good experience.

But I told the volunteer that I'm probably busy next week and won't be able to do it again.

Next weekend is someone else's turn.

All The Books I Read in January

It's February, which means I have to tally up all the books I read in January before they end up sitting in a big pile on an end table, waiting for the end of the year. I only made it through four books this month, but if I'm going to make it through a book a week this year then I'm right on track.

1) I started the month and, I guess, the year with politics. As the election approaches and the field of Democratic candidates narrows, I've read Mayo Pete's book, Kamala Harris' book, a book about Joe Biden, and now Elizabeth Warren's This Fight Is Our Fight. Warren does a good job of clearly defining the problems facing the American middle class, and lays out defined, logical policies for addressing them. Right now I'm planning to vote for her in the primary, and really hope that Harris gets a vice president nod from someone, or maybe becomes attorney general.

2) My parents got me Rainbow Rowell's Carry On for Christmas, and I enjoyed it, so I ordered the sequel, Wayward Son. It finds our heroes, Simon, Baz, and Penny in a road trip across America in a convertible, finding wild magic, dragons, vampires, monsters with goat heads, and maybe themselves? What does the hero do the summer after he fulfills his destiny?

I enjoyed this, but the end makes me want another sequel and it took a few years to get this one, so now I'm a little bit sad about it.

3) Stephen King's Elevation was a novella, rather than a novel, and probably would not have gotten full hardcover treatment if it came from a less established author. Scott is busy fighting with his neighbors, a married pair of lesbians who moved to town to open a struggling restaurant, over their dog pooping on his lawn. Scott is also, a few pounds at a time, becoming immune to the effects of gravity, a secret that he'll only be able to keep for so long as his scale slowly counts down to zero. This was an interesting character study, but really should have just been part of a larger collection.

4) On the last day of the month I finished Mike Pearl's The Day It Finally Happens. Pearl is a disaster thinker, and this book walks through a number of world-shaking scenarios: the day Saudi Arabia runs out of oil, the day the internet fails, the day we verify the existence of extraterrestrials, and even the day we build Jurassic Park, among other things. What was a little surprising is that even though Pearl is a worst-case thinker, he manages to sound rather optimistic and hopeful. Overall, he thinks we'll get through it.

So, like I said, I'm on track for reading in January. Let's try to keep it going in February or, possibly, maybe even get a little ahead.

Magical Adventures in Pudding

Yesterday, I ate a unicorn.



No, not that unicorn. That's the unicorn skull I bought at the grocery store on clearance after Halloween, and then stuck on my bookshelf like any other normal, grown adult. No, yesterday, I ate this unicorn:



I was at the grocery store, where I bought juice but somehow left the juice in my cart in the parking lot and now will die of scurvy, and as I was sliding down the snacks aisle looking for something else, I saw that pudding. The colors stood out in the middle of the pudding display, a wall of browns, beiges, and sometimes pale yellows, and then when I got closer I saw, "Naturally flavored".

"What natural flavors taste like unicorns? What does a unicorn even taste like? Maybe I could ask that guy from Harry Potter?" I thought to myself, and then thought, "I should buy this."

So I did. It turns out that the pudding cups are not actually that terrible for you, as prepackaged entirely processed foods go. They don't contain high fructose corn syrup and they're only 100 calories per cup, so you can eat one and feel like you had a decent little dessert. Although the ingredients don't say so:



the unicorn pudding is also made with fairy dust and princess kisses (Am I going to get princess mono from eating this?), and tastes like joy and rainbow sparkles:



Oh, there's also star dust in there:



Since every atom inside us, and inside the unicorn pudding, was once part of a star, this statement is actually correct.

Anyway, after dinner, I decided it was pudding time:



and the pudding was sort of interesting.

The pink:



smells like Play-Doh. So does the blue. Neither of them has a specific flavor that I could isolate, but my notes say that they tasted vaguely of some sort of berries. The taste is either very slight, or the Indian food I had for dinner destroyed my taste buds and everything was numb.

This morning, since I have to take my morning medicine with food and I decided to pretend that this was food, I turned my attention to the dragon pudding. While it claims to be made with "dragon magic":



it is apparently made from rocks. Rubies and emeralds, to be more specific.



No fairy dust or princess kisses here.

The dragon pudding is aggressively colored, and would not look out of place at Christmas:



Before you start to think, "Why would you even eat something that color?" you need to know that the clear plastic cup is muting the green. Once you open it, it's even brighter and greener (more emerald?) than it looked:



My body's natural response to that color was "SHOULD NOT GO IN MOUTH", but let's face it: if I listened to my body, I wouldn't keep getting on the treadmill, so I ate it anyway. I ate the red pudding first, though. Like the unicorn pudding, the red pudding was vaguely fruit-flavored in some way. My brain kept telling me it might be artificial cherry, but I also wondered if my brain was just suggesting that because of the color, and it was really just "Undefined Fruit #77" flavor from a chemical plant in New Jersey.

The green was even less flavored. It smelled of nothing, and initially tasted of nothing, but as I spooned it into my gaping mouthhole there was a little bit of an aftertaste. It was sort of like mint, but also sort of like a menthol cough drop. Either way, it wasn't very strong. Maybe these taste differently if you have youthful taste buds?

Either way, I now have two packs of these to finish.

And I have to go back to the store for juice.