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The happy surprises continue chez PTMYB.  Thanks to the sharp, clever, witty and beautiful Juno, and her swell essays on bowl food, I’ve had a mindboggling number of hits over the past two days, as well as new friends and acquaintances saying hello, looking up recipes, and just generally reminding me why I started this silly little page in the first place.  It has been four years—four years on December 1, actually—since I decided that what the world needed was 5,000-word monographs on Astoria, Queens and long rants about DeBeers ads and terrible poems by the former First Lady of Connecticut, and started PTMYB so that these essays would have a place to live.  I can’t say that I’ve been happy with what I’ve done with the place, especially in 2007, but I also know that I’m not about to pack up and move out any time soon.  Even when I am feeling dead boring and about as creative and inspirational as a lint screen, I do have fun here. 

Speaking of fun, it’s been a little while since I turned out one of these:

Well, okay, it’s been about two weeks, if you count the pumpkin pie I made on Thanksgiving.  If you don’t, then this is the first pie I’ve made since the end of sour cherry season in July, although I did turn out a batch of grape/hazelnut tarts in September, when local grapes were still in the market.  I try to tell myself that it’s because Lloyd and I are trying to be better about eating our vegetables and giving the pastry a miss, but, no; I know when I’m fooling myself, or when I try to, anyway.  I haven’t been baking pies because I’ve been off my baking feed.  This is a shame, because I forget how much I love to bake them until I start a new one, flouring my pastry cloth and my rolling pin sleeve, patting out the chilled disk of dough, noticing with satisfaction that the butter hasn’t been overblended into the flour, but still remains in easily visible pats, the better to encourage flakiness in the final dough. 

When I roll out a pie crust now, I think back to the first pies I ever made, some outright disasters, some disastrous in form but still edible, and occasionally even tasty, in content.  Luckily, most of these pies were made after I met Lloyd, who is not only more than happy to eat a near-miss pie, but who is also more philosophical than I am about them.  “There’s always a little learning curve when you bake something new,” he would say, kindly and reasonably.  “Next time you’ll get it the way you want it.” I am ashamed to admit that I used to get peevish when he would say this to me.  “But I’m not SUPPOSED to be on a learning curve.  I’ve been doing this half my life.  I should KNOW.” Why that dear fellow never stuck a fork into my forehead, I’ll never know.  Now that I’m older, I realize that he’s right, and that really, there’s no shame in a learning curve.  That said, I’m glad I’m over the pie curve.  It’s a satisfying thing to blend butter and flour and sugar and salt and egg yolks and ice water together, and to know how much of each you need, and how much handling with which you can get away.  Once upon a time, I used to flinch as I added water to the dough, convinced that I would add the teaspoon that would turn the whole thing into a chewy, tough, overdeveloped mess.  I would bundle underhydrated crumbs into a general disk shape and send it to the fridge, loath to apply even the minutest pressure to it, lest I—gasp!—knead the dough.  Three hours later I would try to roll it out, only to see it splinter into pieces and refuse to come together; the bits that would come together would develop a dark, waxy appearance, like old parchment.  Stubbornly I would soldier on, pressing that unyielding crust into a pie plate, watching helplessly as new breaches would crack open, filling and baking the damn thing anyway, and then preparing for the next battle:  sawing the caramelized bottom crust remnants off the floor of the pie plate.  I don’t know how many hundreds of pies I made like this before I figured out that a) it is acceptable to test for hydration by squeezing some dough crumbs in your fist; b) if those crumbs don’t hold together, it is acceptable to add more water; c) once they do hold together, you can make a coherent disk out of them by pressing them together gently (you don’t want to knead them, exactly; just gather them and press them with the heel of your hand two or three times until a uniform dough just begins to form); and d) you can hedge your bets against overdeveloping the gluten by using pastry flour, but you can also use all-purpose flour and still turn out a fine, tender pie crust.

The peerless Yarn Harlot has written about the difference between process knitters and product knitters:  Process knitters knit something for the thrill of the work-in-process; whether they are learning a new technique, or revisiting a technique they know well, the joy is in the work at hand.  Product knitters may indeed enjoy the process as well, but for them, the real joy comes when the last stitches are bound off, the ends woven in, the whole worked blocked to size.  I’m still a fence-sitter on what sort of knitter I am, but with baking, it’s no question:  I’m definitely a process baker.  I won’t say no to a slice of pie, of course—in fact, I’m waiting for the appropriate hour when I can say yes to this pie here—but I definitely bake a lot more than I can possible eat, even more than Lloyd and I can eat together, and end up sharing much of it with friends and coworkers.  For me, the whole point of a pie is to roll out the crust and watch it behave; to mix fruit and sugar and spice and starch, or eggs and sugar and milk or buttermilk or chocolate; to pour them into the shell and admire how, even unbaked, the whole pie already comes together so beautifully, self-contained and self-assured; to notice the fragrance radiating from the kitchen and know that the pie is about ten minutes away from being perfectly done and ready to come out of the oven; and to pull that perfectly-done pie from the oven, knowing that once it’s cooled down all the way (hot-from-the-oven pie sounds really sexy, but really, you want to wait until it’s fully cooled down, even refrigerated in the case of some custard pies, before you cut into it), it will look as good as it tastes—and it’s going to taste great.

Well, that’s all lovely, Jen, but what about this pie? Why, I’m glad you asked.  This particular pie is the Shaker Boiled Apple Cider Pie, from Ken Haedrich’s superb and satisfying Apple Pie Perfect.  Ken Haedrich is one of my baking heroes:  his pies (and soups and breads) are wonderful, and his recipes are about as close to foolproof as you can get.  His magnum opus of pies, called, funnily enough, Pie, is pretty magnificent, too, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Apple Pie Perfect.  I bought it in 2002, when I was enrolled in professional breadbaking classes at King Arthur Flour in Vermont, writing my business plan for my bakery, in love with production baking and prepared to work my heart out for it.  After turning out hundreds of loaves of bread every day in class, I would come back to my hotel room and read through Ken Haedrich’s hundred apple pie recipes, vowing to try them all as soon as I got home.  I haven’t tried them all yet, but I’m close.

But again, I digress.  As an egg nerd scholar, I have a soft spot for custard pies.  I’m a particular fool for buttermilk pies, but really, anything that involves either dairy products or fruit juices, sweetened with sugar, thickened with eggs and poured into a pie shell, that’s a pie I want to meet.  (Once upon a time, I began a conversation on Flickr with a fellow who was similarly impressed with the effect of milk, eggs and heat on each other; today, that fellow is a good friend, and he and I still pick each other’s brains about pie. It was he who engaged in the interstate chess-pie conspiracy with Ragnvaeig—and this gives me an excellent opportunity to clarify my previous post:  the chess pie recipe was Amanda’s, but it bears a close resemblance, as chess pie variations often do, to Joel’s.  But all other details are correct:  Joel provided the technical assistance, Amanda provided the baking chops, and I was rewarded with the best chess pie I’d ever had.) This pie definitely falls into that continuum:  you have eggs, you have butter, you have heat, and at the end of it all, you have pie.  This particular pie, however, eschews milk and fruit juice for other liquids, namely maple syrup and boiled cider, magnificent stuff made from taking apple cider and reducing it to 1/7 of its original volume.  You can certainly make it yourself, but I usually opt, as Ken Haedrich does, to buy a ready-made boiled cider produced by Wood’s Cider Mill in Springfield, Vermont.  You can buy it directly from the mill (http://www.woodscidermill.com) or from the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Catalogue (http://www.kingarthurflour.com).  The syrups are heated together with a little butter and enriched with egg yolks.  The egg whites are beaten separately and folded into the mix, but not completely incorporated, resulting in a dense custard layer and a spongy, meringue-like top.  The whole mix is poured into the pie shell over apples that have been sauteed in a little butter, just until tender—this keeps the apple pieces from floating to the top of the pie—and baked.  The finished pie has terrific depth of flavor and resonance, thanks to the boiled cider, but it is also very, very sweet, thanks to that same boiled cider, as well as the maple syrup.  Ken Haedrich recommends serving the pie with unsweetened whipped cream, which I think is a smart idea.  Plain Greek yogurt is good, too.

Shaker Boiled Apple Cider Pie (from Apple Pie Perfect by Ken Haedrich)
makes one 9” pie

When the pie is fully baked, remove to a cooling rack and let cool to room temperature.  Chill at least two hours.  Chilling it overnight will firm the texture even more, and will help take an edge off the sweetness.  Serve with unsweetened whipped cream or Greek yogurt.

*Edit: The pie has been cut into, tasted and deemed good by Lloyd.  It is indeed a sweet and lovely pie, but it is also a bit underdone on the bottom crust.  Although Ken Haedrich’s directions indicate baking the pie shell directly from the freezer for 45 minutes, adding another 5 minutes if the center is too liquid, I would hedge my bets and either bake the pie for an additional 10 minutes, or else blind-bake the crust for 15 minutes (10 minutes with pie weights, 5 minutes without, just until the bottom is dry to the touch).  I sense that a Cooks-Illustrated-style test is in order.

Oh, dear friends.  I have spent hours and days trying to recapture my work-fractured attention span, sit down, breathe deeply, and write with organization and care.  I have spent the better part of 90 minutes trying to write an opening sentence, something that would encapsulate, with elegance, the events of the past week.  I’ve never been a good off-the-cuff writer, shying away from it out of fear of writing what one of my college professors used to call “guts on a page,” but tonight I’m going to have to run the risk of guts-on-page and give elegance a pass.  Dear friends, I have spent 2007 in such a miserable, sad state that I had forgotten just how lucky I am.  I have a brilliant, wondrous family and brilliant, wondrous friends, and this week, they have made me feel like the most well-loved creature in the world.

Before I proceed any further, though, I’ll answer the big questions of the weekend.  Yes, the LSAT prep is over, as is the actual LSAT, which I took yesterday morning.  I would love to say that I went in and showed that test who was boss, but, well, despite all my best efforts, I panicked midway through the logic puzzles and ate up too much time on the penultimate fact pattern, which meant that by the time I was ready to diagram the last fact pattern and start answering questions, the proctor called the five-minute warning.  I would also love to say that I did so well on the other sections that it doesn’t matter how I did on the logic puzzles, but I just don’t have that level of confidence in my work.  I’d really hoped to substantially improve my score this time around, but now I’m thinking that as long as I match last year’s score, at least, I’ll be fine.  It will keep me out of most of the schools to which I’d planned to apply, and it will definitely keep me out of all of the New York metro area schools, but it will still get me into a decent school—and as long as I eventually pass the bar, and as long as I can eventually work hard and well, I won’t be crying into my beer because I can’t get a job with some white-shoe firm that only hires graduates out of Harvard or Georgetown.

Here endeth the digression.

I’m not being disingenuous—at least I hope I’m not—when I say that I have no idea what I’ve done to deserve the week I’ve had.  Ever since I received the last of my thanks-but-no-thanks letters from last year’s round of law school applications, I have been, to put it mildly, a pain.  I have been a weepy, attitudinal pain in the neck.  Nearly every word that has emerged from my mouth has been either a rant, a crying jag or an apology.  I have allowed letters to remain unanswered, phone calls to remain unreturned, plans to connect with friends and family to remain unmade.  A level of awkwardness I have not felt since I was a teenager has reared its ugly head:  I blurt out stupid, tacky things, apologize for them, and find myself unable to stop apologizing, which I’m sure is a neverending delight for anyone fortunate enough to be in my company at the time.  In short, I have been a dreadful human being this year—and yet my nearest and dearest still rallied around me, still showered me with love and affection and humor and goodness, as if I hadn’t been.

Of all the issues, worries and fears weighing on me—LuthorCorp, law school, another year of general fecklessness and unrealized dreams—one of the biggest has been Birthday with a Zero.  It is probably, no definitely, vain and silly to dread it, but dread it I did.  “It’s just a number, you know,” other, wiser people said, but I would have none of it, particularly if the wiser people in question were under the age of 35.  (When I think about how insouciantly I said the same thing to Lloyd the year that he turned 40, I want to beat my head against my laptop with embarrassment, and apologize to Lloyd until he begs me to stop.) I was certain that this was going to be a bad, bad birthday.  Fortunately, my family had other plans.  “Where would you like to go to dinner?,” Momerina asked me, and when she did, I began to perk up ever so slightly.

My mom and stepdad, my brother and sister-in-law, all came to town last Saturday.  As celebrations go, it was low-key and delightful, exactly the sort of thing at which my family excels.  We did a little retail therapy, we walked to the Guggenheim, took one look at the sea of humanity and left, took a leisurely stroll around the Upper East Side.  At the appointed hour, we met Lloyd (who opted to skip the museum trip) and Bunni (who my folks generously invited to join us) at this little charmpot restaurant, a big favorite of both mine and Bunni’s.  We ate like kings, we drank like poets, we told long and silly stories, we just relaxed in the pleasure of each other’s company, and when the waiter made flambeed bananas and zabaglione for the table, I did not think I could have been happier than I was at that moment.  Then I opened my presents:  a gold-and-pearl choker and matching earrings from my parents; a Coach bag (a Coach bag!, she whispered excitedly) from my brother and sister-in-law; a hand-crocheted bag filled with Lush bath products from Bunni (a Bunni original! with Lush products!); and—I am still shaking my head in amazement over this—a new digital camera, specifically a new Canon EOS Rebel XT digital SLR, from Lloyd.  I think I came as close as I’ve ever come to turning into a Tex Avery cartoon when I unwrapped that box.  I don’t know if my eyes actually sprung from my head, if my jaw hit the floor, if my limbs actually sprung off and reattached themselves while making a sound like a klaxon horn, but I would not have been surprised if all these things happened.  Dear friends, I was surprised. 

I was so happy for the rest of the weekend that I almost, almost didn’t mind returning to the box factory on Monday.  It would be a short week for me, because I was taking two days to dedicate to last-minute study prep and relaxation, and really, how bad could a three-day week be when I had the memory of this beautiful evening with my beautiful family?  As it turns out, it could be pretty honking awful, and it was.  By the time I left the building on Wednesday night, I was convinced that I could feel my blood growing thicker.  I was surprised that my head didn’t explode from stress, and then realized that I couldn’t tell whether I was relieved or disappointed by the lack of Exploding Head.  Once I’d got away from the office, though, my equilibrium, and my sense of humor, crept back bit by bit, and I found myself almost looking forward to Saturday, which was the test day.  I’d have a day to do the last bit of studying, I’d have a day of quiet contemplation on Friday, and then I’d head to Bunni’s on Friday night, where we would watch silly movies and I would get a good night’s sleep.  Since Bunni lived only ten blocks from the test center, I knew I wouldn’t have to leave Astoria at some ungodly hour to make sure that I would get to the test on time even if the N train broke down.  I would get up early, get that pesky test out of the way, meet Lloyd for lunch, and then we would meet Bunni for fishbowl-sized martinis.

Sure enough, I did indeed do all of the above, and if I didn’t exactly mop up the floor with the test, at least I could say that it was put behind me, done, fable finito.  Lloyd picked me up and took me to a Thai restaurant for a restorative and impressively spicy lunch.  I called Bunni, who was stuck at home grading papers, and who I knew needed a break from them.  “Ohhhh,” she said.  “I’m not nearly ready to go out yet.  I have a lot of work left.  How about if you come back at, oh, 5-ish,and we’ll go to dinner from here?”

By now, probably everybody in the known world has figured out how this story ends, but no, I didn’t have a clue.  I was still back in a fifth-floor classroom at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, staring mutely at a fact pattern I couldn’t decipher.  “Do you want to go to Kitchen Arts?,” asked Lloyd, who knows me like his favorite poem.

I did.  We went.  We stopped at a pub on the way back to Bunni’s so that we could get out of the cold and hold hands in the dark for an hour or so.  At 5 we headed to Bunni’s, rang the bell, and…

Well, we did not go out to dinner.  We did not go out for fishbowl-sized martinis.  For the life of me, I don’t know how they pulled it off, but—surprise!— there was Julie, in Bunni’s apartment.  There was Heather.  There were Ragnvaeig and Smarriveurr, who not only traveled to the city from north Jersey on the coldest Saturday in ten months to come to this party, but who did so via two trains and two subways.  There was Steph, the Pie Queen, freshly returned from her Excellent Adventure on the Left Coast.  There was Bunni’s friend, and former office elf, who is now my friend, too, and who is welcome to be my future office elf if he ever decides to eschew teaching for law.  And, of course, there was Lloyd, who was in on the whole plan all along, and never dropped a single hint.  Surprise!

I do not have the words to describe how I felt when I realized just what my friends had done for me.  I still don’t.

Bunni, for those who might still be wondering, is a goddess.  She fed us sugared spiced nuts, tea eggs, little prosciutto/artichoke heart sandwiches like the ones you find in swell wine bars, salami, cheese, tiny Welsh rabbits and an absolutely brilliant main course, a filet mignon with a tarragon and cornichon sauce, and with little potatoes on the side.  Red wine, and plenty of it, accompanied all.  To those who asked what to bring, she suggested dessert, and baby, was there dessert.  Julie brought birthday cake, specifically the chocolate walnut torte that was a fixture of her childhood birthdays—but I will leave the telling of the tale of this cake to Julie, because I promised her, long ago, that I would.  Julie also brought a tart made with oranges, pistachios and mascarpone cream.  Heather brought apple pie.  Ragnvaeig and Smarriveurr brought fabulous and moreish spice cookies, made from an 18th-century recipe, stamped with an antique cookie stamp.  Ragnvaeig also took me aside at one point to mention that an interstate conspiracy was afoot:  she and Joel had conspired, at his request, to bring me a chess pie.  Joel supplied the recipe, he and his mom supplied the technical assistance, Ragnvaeig supplied the ingredients and the baking chops, et voila.  Dear friends, trust me when I tell you that this pie is a masterpiece.  I should be lucky enough to make a pie this fine.

Of course there was music, hours of music, from “The Power of the 45” by Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys to “Lawyers, Guns and Money” by Warren Zevon, from “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass” by Nick Lowe to a cover of the theme from “Perry Mason” by a band which eludes me at the moment.  There was a whole night of music, thanks to ‘mouse, our music man, right there with us even as he was 3,000 miles away.

I have a brilliant, wondrous family and brilliant, wondrous friends, and this week, they have made me feel like the most well-loved creature in the world.  I wish I had better words for them than thank you and I love you, but tonight, they’re the only words that come close to saying what I would say.  Thank you.  I love you.

There’s no other word for it, dear friends.  It takes a special kind of moxie to post a picture of your pumpkin pie, promise scintillating tales of the Thanksgiving That Was, and then bugger off for a week, only to resurface with...another picture and another promise of tales to come.  It takes an even more special moxie to do this after you’ve spent the remainder of the holiday weekend in the bosom of your family, who take you out for the world’s best birthday dinner and shower you with beautiful and astonishing gifts in celebration of your Birthday With a Zero.  And it takes all available world stocks of moxie, after years of self-indulgent birthday blogging, to turn 40 and not utter a peep about it.  Shameless?  Oh, without a doubt, yes.

Having established my scoundrel credentials, I will hereby certify them:  I blame it all on the LSAT.  Or rather, I blame much of it on the LSAT.  I blame much more of it on the rapidly-rising toxicity of the environment at LuthorCorp, but as LuthorCorp becomes more unpleasant, it also becomes more unbloggable, so I won’t pursue that avenue of thought any further.  What energy I’ve had left at the end of a day has been dedicated to studying for the LSAT, running puzzles and drills, and trying to improve on last year’s train wreck of a test score, which I achieved after a pre-test bout of flu, or food poisoning, that robbed me of my good night’s sleep, leaving me a nauseated, keyed-up wreck on the bathroom floor at the Parker House in Boston.  Since I am not traveling the day before the test, since tonight I will be at Bunni’s house, watching The Magic Christian and a few hours of Law & Order and/or Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares until I feel sufficiently Zen-minded, I’m pretty confident that this year’s test will be much, much better.

The test is tomorrow morning, from 8:30 until about 1:30.  I’ll be back sometime after that.  No, really, I will.  Don’t look at me like that.

Indeed there is, dear friends, and it will come.  I finally got my ganglia together and actually managed to buy a turkey this year.  It goes in the oven in an hour. Once it’s there, roasting in its 500-degree-high-heat-roasty goodness, I will be making mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, gravy and salad.  Stuffing and cranberry sauce are done.  I am totally in my element right now, and I am feeling fine. 

Even though I’ve not yet got it together enough to write a post, I have been doing play-by-play over on Flickr, if you’d like to see pictures.  Here’s one:

Happy Thanksgiving, dear ones.  I will be back properly, soon.

orionoir is fine.  Thank you, universe.