Rind-up

This pie, cake really, was great. So delicious and moist . . . . The recipe came from Cooks Illustrated, which has to be the most enjoyable cooking magazine, whether for pleasant perusal or serious study. Bon Appetite has pretty, glossy pictures, but Cooks Illustrated has art, not to mention actual articles to accompany each recipe, sprinkled with good advice and culinary science. The cake itself is harder to find than cook, in the index it’s not called “Boston cream pie” but something like “wickedly delicous boston cream pie,” which can throw off even the best index skimmer. There are three parts to this delight: cake, cream, and glaze, and I cannot wait for an excuse to bake the cake all by itself. It’s that good.

If you click it, it expands.

The cake was for Easter, which was delicious thank you, but even before that blessed day arrived I managed to check off one of my culinary goals: the watermelon rind pickle. I found this recipe in The Woman’s Home Companion Cookbook, which was published in the early forties, and also in The Foxfire Book. If you have never heard of The Foxfire Book (I believe it’s derived from an old magazine series, but I haven’t actually looked it up) than you are missing out. Such useful information lies within their covers. Everything from building a log cabin to slaughtering a hog. There are even pictures.  My copy of Foxfire comes from my misspent childhood, when I went around reading The Black Stallion, My Side of the Mountain, and Stalking the Wild Asparagus*. Now I read Heyer. Oi vey.
Anyway, the idea of pickling rind, an hither to useless substance, tickled the remainders of my childhood fancy. Especially since the recipes called for cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. And yes, the two sources provided nearly identical recipes. So last Monday the Geekette came over and helped me boil them into existence. The Geekette has been a co-conspiritor of mine since before we really care to remember, and is responsible for such experiments as fried angel food cake. With her help we combined the ingredients and managed to make the sweetest pickles I’ve ever had. We used the rind of one watermelon, which yielded about one quart of thin, unevenly proportioned, white squares. We left out the slacked lime, because for some reason we were out (I’d also never heard of it before out side of historical fiction, which I make a habit of not learning from. Can you buy this at the grocery store?). The result was a slightly gummy confection with a bite only slightly reminiscent of bread and butter pickles. The squares were deep brown, mostly because we used ground spices instead of their whole counter parts. In fact, the ground spices were such a bother that we had to rinse off the pickles before eating them in order to avoid covering our tongues in cinnamon paste. Blech. Even though these pickles were peculiar I’m definitely going to make them again. Especially since I found a use for the left over juice.
See, the Geekette and I deemed actually pickling the pickles to be a waste of resources, since it wasn’t like we had a whole truckload of them. So there I was, with a whole bucket of christmas scented syrup in my fridge, wondering what to do with it. Mouse? Ice cream?  Delicate lemon squares? The last was the clear winner. When I was a child it seems my mom made desserts all the time, every other memory is about us beating egg whites for meringues – innocently called kisses throughout my whole childhood – or sniffing at the lemon scented air as mom pulled a pan of yellow goodness out of the oven. I haven’t had lemon squares in ages now, so recreating them with pickle juice was a lot of fun. The best part was my family didn’t touch them. Score for the pickle bar.

In other news, I am now the proud owner of a Honda Fit, and Doctor Who has started up again. Oh, and I discovered how to make my dad’s camera zoom and focus. Like, at the same time.

Wow, it’s been quite a week.

Be blinded by the cake, ignore the absence of pickle pictures!
*Speaking of Euell Gibbons, someone I trust and admire deeply told me they had made wisteria fritters before. Wisteria. Fritters. Oh my, imagination overload.

Doing what I love

“What a foolish thing he was doing, walking like this under an open sky, with a beautiful man child for any evil spirit passing by to see!… and he said in a loud voice, ‘What a pity our child is a female whom no one could want and covered with smallpox as well!..'”

– Pearl Buck, The Good Earth

You know those people who love to work because their work is what they love? That is, what they get to call work happens to be, for them, a passion. I never thought I’d be one of those people, well, not in a while. When I was six I naturally assumed it, I knew without a doubt I’d be a librarian. And now I find myself actually living like this, being required to do what I love. What is it I’m doing? In a word: reading.

              I finished Moll Flanders on Sunday, I’ll reserve judgement for after the group discussion, but I don’t think Defoe quite managed what he set out to do. It is mean spirited of me, but I’d have rather she died a penitent in Newgate than live to lie another day. I start Pamela on Wednesdayuntil then I’m reading Pride and Prejudice. Yes, I have read it a million times already, but this time I have to read it. Woe is me, I’ve been ordered to read an Austen. I’m also reading Macbeth and various poems (Free Verse, none of which are to my fancy, so I’ll spare you the names). That’s all for mandatory reading.
                  On Thursday a beautiful package arrived at the post office. I picked it up and opened it with restless hands eager to stroke the spine that they knew was enclosed. Ah, the smell of books – especially books with end papers, gilded

 edges, and leather covers – can simply not be surpassed by earth, chocolate, or even bread. The book’s contents are as much worth mentiong as its aroma. It is The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck, on loan to me from my grandfather,  and it is about Wang Lung and his family. Wang Lung is a chinese peasant who works hard for his food, understands the value of land, and worries, when he gets too happy, that the spirits will punsih him. The facts of his life, even the few everyday ones, are so different from anything that I have ever known that the book cannot help to be diverting, though there is no intense plot (of course, Moll Flanders didn’t have much of a plot either).

               To top off my week from paradise, I’ve actually cast-on for the second sock and have already knit to the heel. This is the fastest I’ve ever knit a sock, not to mention the closets cast-off/ cast-on time for a pair. But even this pales to dinner on Friday: quiche and apple pie toped with vanilla ice cream, all made with a friend in the spirit of anything-goes.