Spiced up apple pie

A friend at work is having a birthday, and she happens to love apple pie. So I offered to bring in a pie for our office's afternoon coffee break tomorrow.

I'm a little bored with basic apple pie, so I looked through Epicurious recipes for a fresh idea. Now, my friend is not too adventurous, so I didn't want to get too fancy or exotic. I came upon a recipe that I first dismissed, because it included some interesting spices. But I kept coming back to it. All the comments - 4 pages of them - mentioned how delicious it was. Yes, they talked about how much trouble it was to make, and how time-consuming, too, but even so, everyone raved about how delicious it was.


So...I decided to go ahead and make this Country Apple Tart with Spiced Brown Butter.

The recipe recommends using a 10" springform pan. My springform pan is 9", so I figured I would have enough leftovers to make a little tart for [The Man I Love] and I to enjoy at home, too.

Although I've perfected my favorite butter pastry recipe, I decided to follow the directions for the pastry in this recipe, which included sugar and two egg yolks.

And there was the first problem. According to the recipe, first you combine the flour, sugar, salt and butter, then add the two egg yolks and the mixture will come together in moist clumps.

No, it didn't.

Fortunately, I am now pretty confident about working ice-water into pastry flour until it's workable so I just followed that routine by hand and soon had a good dough that hung together and rolled out nicely. I lined my springform pan and a small tart pan with the dough, and blind-baked it for 10 minutes.


The recipe then called for up to 15 apples to be peeled, cored and quartered. 15 apples? That sounded like a lot! My apples were pretty big, so when they were quartered, the pieces seemed pretty big. I cut the quarters in half, making eighths, and then cut those eighths in half crosswise, making chunks.


You toss the apple chunks in butter and lemon juice and then roast them in a 400 degree oven. After they cool a bit, you put them into the tart shells. The irregular chunks of apple hold their shapes and give the tart a rustic, country feel.

Next, you make a brown butter, and infuse it with vanilla bean, star anise, cloves and cinnamon bark.


Brown butter is a wonderful thing. You melt butter over low heat and cook it, carefully, until the milk solids in the butter begin to brown. The result is a rich nutty flavor that adds an extra dimension to your dish. You can infuse the butter with herbs, or - in this case - spices. It takes about 20 minutes to get the butter nicely browned, and you have to be careful, because it can burn in a matter of seconds.

While keeping a close eye on the butter, I whisked two eggs with some flour and sugar to create a custard. No milk or cream was called for. Good for any dairy-phobic friends at the office. I departed from the recipe only in one way - I added the two reserved egg whites leftover from the crust. I cannot bear to throw them away.

The brown butter was strained into the custard (to exclude the chunks of spices), and whisked up to combine. Then the mixture was poured over the apples in the tarts.

As they baked (1 hour at 350 degrees), the kitchen was suffused with the scent of the spices, especially the vanilla bean.


I have to confess, I'm somewhat of a short-cut cook. I generally don't deal with whole spices - I have ground spices and vanilla extract, and figure it all tastes the same. But since I had to buy star anise anyway, and Cost Plus had a buy-two-get-one-free, I bought a packet holding two vanilla beans and tried - for once in my life - to follow the recipe correctly. The scent of fresh vanilla from a bean is pretty awesome.

While the tarts baked - on a foil-lined cookie sheet, as advised in the directions - I noticed butter oozing from the bottoms of the pans. With a stick and a half of butter in the crust and a stick used in the filling (halved, for two tarts), this recipe is all about the butter.


Here's the smaller tart, the one that's staying home.


And here's a slice served with vanilla ice cream. Tasty.


Visit Epicurious.com for the recipe.

Weekly Jack

It's a cold wet night. There's a chill in the air. So I lit the first fire of the season. Jack seemed to like it. It makes him feel cozy.

Have a good weekend

It's gray, it's cold, it's going to rain all weekend.

I spent an hour in traffic, traveling 5 miles. That's the price you pay to live up a two-lane road twisting up into the mountains. This time it was an overturned car on a horseshoe curve, right at rush hour.

But here's the consolation. I had a rare treat, I was able to leave work at 4:00 today.

So instead of going straight home, I went up to Palisades Village and bought some bath soap, that I had run out of, and got a long overdue pedicure. I sat there with my feet in warm water, reading fashion magazines, and relaxed.

Perhaps if I'd gone straight home, I would have landed right in the middle of the accident, which took place around 4:20.

So all that happened to me was that I sat in traffic, listening to "All Things Considered", and I have fresh, pretty, bright new red toenails.

[The Man I Love] is off at a conference. It's just me and Jack. We're going to take a nice long walk this weekend, if the rain will let us. And we'll share it with you.

Sharing

Alfonso's mild salsa

Alfonso made the salsa and the ensalada.

Enrique's girlfriend made the guacamole.

Raul and Tomas brought the marinated chicken and steak.


David manned the grill.

Jose came into the office to invite us to join the feast the guys were cooking back in the loading dock.

Nancy answered phones so Alicia could take a quick break for a meal.

Mike let me cut in line to be served from the grill.

Ricardo warmed a tortilla over the coals for me.

Rashan pulled a chair up to the table next to him for me to sit down with my plate.

Paul showed me where the cans of Coke were on ice.

Alfonso's hot salsa

Thank you, guys, for the lunch.

Girls who wear glasses

I've worn glasses most of my life. I remember being in the third grade, at J.B. Nelson Elementary School, and standing in the hallway looking down at a bulletin board on the wall at the end. I couldn't make out what was on it, but I rationalized to myself - human eyes just weren't meant to be able to see something that far away.

Shortly after that, I had my first eye examination and discovered I was nearsighted - or myopic. I was fitted with glasses. I was amazed at how well I could see.

Me with the real Aunt Snow

I was the only kid in my class with glasses. They were beige-colored plastic, and the lenses were shaped like teardrops on their sides. A couple years later, I had to get stronger ones. This time, I chose a pair of blue frames shaped like cats eyes.

My greatest fear was losing my glasses or breaking my glasses. Sometimes one of the temple pieces would snap off or break. Once I broke the frames in half, at the nose piece and had to tape it together. Every couple of years, I had to get stronger glasses.

No girls on TV or in movies wore glasses. Kids sometimes made fun of me. I was a skinny girl with limp, thin hair who wore glasses.

When I was twelve years old, we moved to a new town and I went to a new school and - best of all - I was fitted for contact lenses. No more glasses.

It wasn't until I was about 50 that - like most people my age - I started having problems seeing things up close. It was hard to thread a needle. I couldn't read fine print.

This is caused because as humans age, our eyes become less agile at making the changes in focus to switch from viewing things at varying distances. The word for age-related farsightedness is presbyopia.

People with perfect vision who become farsighted usually start wearing reading glasses. But if you already have to correct your vistion for myopia, it gets more complicated to treat presbyopia. One method used is to correct one eye for distance vision and the other for near vision. The patient will learn to switch the focus from one eye to the other depending on the task. This is called monovision. My doctor tried this with me, and I was totally unable to deal with it.

So I started wearing glasses again. I'd buy reading glasses - or "cheaters", as some people call them. It was kind of fun. They were an accessory, not a necessity. They came in different colors. You could dangle them off chains around your neck. They were cheap, so you could buy a lot of them. You could wear quirky glasses, modest glasses, conservative glasses, or wild and crazy glasses. You could wear rhinestones, tortoise-shell, or neon red.

Two pairs of glasses in my purse - there's a third one in there somewhere

This solved the problem, and was fun, besides. I carried a pair in my purse, and whipped them out when I needed them.

After a while I started noticing that I needed them not only for fine print, but pretty much for all print. If I didn't have my glasses, it wasn't just that I had trouble reading something - I actually couldn't read it at all. I needed them with me all the time. I had glasses all over the house. I carried glasses in my car, in my purse and in my desk at work. I had spare glasses, and then back-up glasses for those.

It was ridiculous. I would wake up every morning, put two little shells of plastic in my eyes to correct my vision, and then put on a pair of glasses to read the morning newspaper. I'd push my glasses up on the top of my head, or hook them down the front of my shirt, and sometimes I still wondered where the heck were my glasses?

I could no longer put on eye make-up - not that I ever really did much. But if you need cheaters to see details, you certainly can't draw a precise line of eyeliner at your lash line! Now I know why certain elderly ladies have such oddly applied eye make-up. It's because they can't see what they're doing!!

I needed glasses in the car, to read maps. But I had to take them off to see the road!!! I needed glasses to read menus in restaurants. I needed glasses to see the food I was going to eat!

So the other day at my annual eye exam, my doctor suggested I try multi-focal contact lenses.

How do they work, I wondered? Are they like bifocal glasses, with one prescription at the top and the other at the bottom? Not anymore - now multiple prescription lenses come in two designs, one concentric, where the different prescriptions are in concentric rings on the lens, and aspheric, where the lens shape doesn't conform to a spherical shape, but has surface angles and planes that create different refractive areas throughout the lens.

Did you understand that? I don't think I really do myself. My doctor explained it by telling me to think about how you can look through a dirty window - if you are focusing on the things outside the window, your eye simply looks past the smudges. If you're looking at the smudges, your eye focuses there and ignores what's going on in the distance.

I got my new multifocal contact lenses Tuesday, and they are shiny and clean, not a bit smudged. I can't tell you how thrilling it was when the doctor handed me a little card to read after he put them in my eyes. The card had eight or ten short paragraphs of written text, each one in smaller font than the next.

I could read all but the smallest one. Without my "cheaters!"

I went back to work and found that it was much better to look at the computer monitor without glasses, but that I still sometimes needed glasses for reading tiny written print.

And I'm still getting used to it. Sometimes far-away things look blurry until I focus on them, then they pop into sharpness.

But this morning while I was getting ready for work, I was thrilled to realize that now I can read most things without glasses. A few months ago, [The Man I Love] bought me a couple different bottles of cologne by Jo Malone. I love it, but her darn packages are clearly designed for younger people without presbyopia - they have the tiniest fonts you can imagine.

This morning I could easily tell whether I was going to spritz on Wild Fig & Cassis or French Lime Blossom.

Or even read the print on this teensy sample vial.

Not so bad! Next thing I'm going to do is try to put on eyeliner!

What are the challenges you're overcoming as you age gracefully?

The perfect lunch

Rose Avenue in Venice, California. A clear November afternoon, with the sun slanting in low from the autumn sky. Standing on the sidewalk by the Storage building, where La Isla Bonita mariscos truck is parked.

I'm having a ceviche tostada while I'm waiting for my taco order. I'm holding a flimsy paper plate to catch the juice while I lift the thin, gritty-crisp shell up to my mouth. So's everybody else standing on this sidewalk - the construction worker leaning against the fence, the three guys wearing ball caps, eating their food off the hood of a car, the dark-haired girl in Uggs, sipping an orange Jarritos with hers.

The grainy bite of the crisp shell contrasts with the fresh bright tang and minced texture of the tender chopped fish in lime juice. Butter-rich ripe avocado slices meld on the tongue. Shake on a few bright orange drops of El Tapatio and a squeeze of extra lime juice and savor it. Crunch.

Here's another post, showing what it's like to eat a ceviche tostada standing by the truck.

Weekly Jack

Jack isn't exactly camera shy, but he doesn't make it easy to take his picture. Here, he was looking at me so sweetly, then ducked his head the minute I pressed the shutter.

So I tried again, sweetly asking him to look up, smile for the camera.


This is just before he licked my face.

This photo works for Carmi's Thematic Photographic, a weekly photo challenge based on a theme. This week's theme is "Black and White."

Romeo & Juliet

This weekend for a large gathering, we served something that gained rave reviews from our guests. I've written about this before, but I'm always heartened and surprised at how good it is. And it means something to us, because it's about friends and family.

We have dear friends in Seattle - Wazzu alums - who each year at Christmas send us a gift of Washington State University's "Cougar Gold" cheese, which - uniquely - comes in a can.

My mother-in-law, who lives in Tampa, Florida, usually sends us a Christmas care package with local delicacies, including Cuban and Hispanic foods. Almost every year, she sends a can of guava paste.

In South America, I've learned, the combination of cheese and guava paste is called "Romeo and Juliet." I guess it's because they are so opposite, yet combine so wonderfully, as did the tragic couple.

Washington State's Cougar Gold is a sharp white cheddar, while the guava paste sent from Tampa has an unctuous fruity sweetness. It's nice to think how how nice a combination they make, coming from opposite corners of the United States. They combine so nicely, it's a delicious treat on crackers. Our guests thought so.

But first we had to put it together.


The cheese came out of the can OK. The guava paste was more of a challenge.


Here our trusty helper Guy runs a knife around the outside.


First, we tried gravity as a means of getting the guava out of the can. We sat the guava paste can on top of the cheese. No motion.

Impatient, we tried force. It didn't work.

Then after trying the knife routine again, we went back to gravity - this time we left the can upside down over another plate for a few minutes. Time. Patience. It worked. Finally, the disc of guava paste slipped out with a sigh when we lifted the can off.

We carefully transferred it on top of the wheel of cheese.

Here it is. Take a slice of cheese, a slice of guava paste, and enjoy together on a cracker. Perfection.

Power & Light

Electric sign and lighting on the Seattle steam plant, Seattle City Light

While letting my imagination go on last week's Thematic Photographic theme, "Electric," I read a lot about electrical utility companies and their facilities.

America's public utility industry began in the second half of the 19th century, as urban center became more populated and new technological advances brought improvements to modern life. Smart entrepreneurs sprang up to manufacture and supply the fuel for gaslights, which made it possible for factories to operate at night. Others sought to develop electrical systems for powering streetcars, and for an alternate source of lighting. Still others brought water to cities, and used the power of running water to create electricity.

Small companies sprang up and soon combined bought one another out. Competing technologies consolidated, so they could protect and co-market their products. Local governments took over private companies, and big cities co-opted and absorbed smaller ones.

The first real electric utility company was begun by Thomas Alva Edison. Although he didn't invent the light bulb, he developed the first commercially viable one. He also figured out how to get the electricity from the generator to the light bulb safely and efficiently. In 1882, he flipped the switch at a generating station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, and started feeding 110 volts of Direct Current (DC) power to 59 customers.

The names of early utility companies reflect the initial focus of their business, but also illuminates (pun intended) the way people thought about what electricity could mean in their lives.

Edison's company was called the Edison Illuminating Company. Its focus was on making light - that was the product he delivered.

An Edison competitor in lower Manhattan was the Excelsior Steam Power Company. "Excelsior" means "ever higher" - and Excelsior, having begun as a steam generating company, went into the electrical business as well. Its building still stands on Gold Street, proudly bearing its name - without "steam."

In Chicago, an early private company was called the Isolated Lighting Company - its business plan was to sell small generators that would power a single building or a small complex of buildings. It soon merged with Chicago Edison - they had licensed Edison's patented distribution system, giving them the right to use his name.

From the early days, in Los Angeles it was all about water. The early city's greatest priority was bringing water to the dry region. In the 1890s, the city took control over water rights away from a consortium of businessmen, and brought water by building an aqueduct to distant valleys. Power was a side beneft, generated hydroelectric dams at reservoirs. It has always been called the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

In western Washington, with its abundance of rain, Seattle saw it a bit differently. Seattle's early city charter directed the city to take responsibility for lighting the streets during the dark winter nights. Its public utility was first called the Department of Lighting and Waterworks. Since the early part of the 20th century, it has called itself Seattle City Light.

The early seal of City Light used images of fir trees, forest wildflowers, and the Skagit River dam.

Some companies began as gas companies and then added electrical generation to their business model. Pacific Gas and Electric in the Bay area began as a collection of small gas companies. The Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company did as well.

Other companies began as suppliers of power to streetcar systems. The American Light and Traction Company operated streetcars, gas utilities, and electrical utility in Detroit Michigan.

One company in Missouri went through a rebranding as changeable as New Coke - in 1905 calling itself the Excelsior Springs Light Power Heat and Water Company, then changing to the Water Gas and Electric Company in 1917, and then finally North Missouri Power & Light by 1926.

Los Angeles Street Light, North Cahuenga Boulevard, Hollywood.

Some companies saw their product as an elemental thing - "Light." One early magazine describes the miracle of electric incandescent light as

"pure and simple, free from burning and the decompositon of chemical bodies; a light produced by the simple excitation of the ether which is the source of all our light.... Its merits lie in its healthiness, its safety as compared with gas, and its beauty.

Light was the miracle, and many early utility company names reflect this.

Others saw it as a more practical and tangible product - "Lighting."

Unlike gas, electric light didn't gutter, emit fumes that caused headaches. Unlike oil lamps, it didn't drip or spill or smoke. It wasn't dangerous, and it burned a steady clear beam that was easier on the eyes. Electrical companies needed customers, and they recruited them by showing them how easy it was to bring electricity into their lives. Utilities had retail stores to sell appliances, and taught people how to retrofit their homes for electricity. They even sold light bulbs, to make going electric easier. J.D. Ross, director of Seattle City Light, promoted the idea that each household should have a porch light burning at night.


Electricity was easy, not scarey. The Alabama Power Company invented a mascot to help them market electricity. Reddi Kilowatt was soon licensed and promoted electricity all over the country.

Perhaps as a variety of appliances became more popular - radios, washing machines, phonographs and the like - people realized that it wasn't all about lighting.

People became more at ease with electricity. Man had mastered the elements. But how do you market it? By the mid '20s, the emphasis in advertising and print was less about convenience and safety, and more about POWER.

Even though Reddi Kilowatt was a friendly soul, by 1931, the Alabama Power Company was using more imposing eight-foot tall muscular god-like figures to represent Power, Light and Heat on its headquarters building in Birmingham. At the summit of the building, a golden figure of Electra holds a lamp up to the sky.

Other utility buildings, including neighborhood substations like this one in Chicago, depicted electrical power as a giant, astride the city, delivering lightning bolts. This electricity stuff was pretty awesome.

This Seattle City Light year book has a different take on it - here a wild, bestial creature with bolts of electricity zapping from his fingers energizes the Smith Tower and King Street Station.

Modern man had mastered this rough beast.

During the New Deal hydroelectric projects further glamorized the story - Boulder Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Citizens were asked to imagine the grandeur and might of hydroelectric power - man had harnessed the

turbulent Skagit river, tumbling through miles of granite canyons, in the service of the people....[an] inexhaustible resource for the city of Seattle as long as nature continues its water cycle from the sea to the clouds, down to earth and back to the seas.

The Skagit River dam and power generating station in the mountains north of Seattle were marketed as a tourist attraction so that:

Here in an unspoiled setting of lofty grandeur, touring visitors can see a modern achievement of engineering vision and enterprise – water power converted into needed electric power, a river controlled to reduce flood damage, lakes created to open a new recreational area.

No longer a mere convenience, by 1937, electrical power was being characterized in a City Light brochure as "a necessity of life that ranks with water and the very air we breathe.”

City Light's service center, with a big neon sign.

In the '60s, cheap electric power was touted as the key to improving our lives. The magic of nuclear power would change our world. My own Southern California home, was optimistically built to be "all-electric." Today our inefficient windows and laboring electric furnaces make it necessary for us to use sweaters and a wood fireplace to keep us warm in winter.

Electric utilities in the '70s became "Energy" companies. Their names became corporatized or shortened into all-caps acronyms, like PECO, TECO or CLECO. Even longer conventional names became shortened, like ConEd, or DWP or CG&E.

By the '90s, they assumed authoritative names that were made up to sound dynamic and, well, energetic. Entergy, Luminant, Dynergy, Cinergy.

And Enron.

In 1932, a young kid in Waukegan, Illinois wandered into a traveling carnival and stopped off to see a magician act. As Ray Bradbury described his experience:

Mr. Electrico was a fantastic creator of marvels. He sat in his electric chair every night and was electrocuted in front of all the people, young and old, of Waukegan, Illinois. When the electricity surged through his body he raised a sword and knighted all the kids sitting in the front row below his platform. I had been to see Mr. Electrico the night before. When he reached me, he pointed his sword at my head and touched my brow. The electricity rushed down the sword, inside my skull, made my hair stand up and sparks fly out of my ears. He then shouted at me, "Live forever!"

His encounter with Mr. Electrico made him start writing. Read the story here.

Ray's dad was a lineman, and looking for work. In 1934, the family moved to Los Angeles, and Ray's dad got a job with the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light. They lived in a rental house in Venice, right next door to the powerhouse. Electricity features prominently in Bradbury's writing.

Chris Burden's installation "Urban Light" at LACMA

Do you remember when electricity was magical and mysterious? What about the promise of new energy technology - solar and wind? Are we ready to enter a new phase? What do you think new energy companies will call themselves?

And - more importantly - will the new technology inspire a new generator of writers and artists?

Historical photos from the Seattle Municipal Archives, NYC Architectural Archives, the Library of Congress, Wikimedia, and Seattle City Light.