November 25, 2018 Up and down, up and down

What a roller coaster week, here in Iowa City.
We started the week with a little snow. It stuck around for a few days.
Then Thanksgiving came. The weather on that day was about as good as it gets this time of year.  It was sunny, maybe 45 degrees, with no wind.
After dinner (at about 2 pm), we all went for a walk around the Terry Trueblood lake, just south of Iowa City.
I also celebrated the weather by carving a pumpkin and hanging it in the front yard.

On Friday we drove to the Figge museum in Davenport. There were several remarkable artists. Here were some of the pictures.
This first set of sculptures met you right when you came up the stairs to the second floor. It immediately put a smile on our faces.
The artist is Vanessa German.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_German

These animals were done by William Hawkins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Hawkins

I would take the picture and forward it to my grandson Christopher.
We could let him vote among the three animal pictures. Only I am not sure what this second animal is.

I suspect Christopher would vote for this last picture. He has many books about this animal. Do you remember Ping?

But enough culture.
Saturday was time for a little work.
I actually got into the garden.

Yesterday (Saturday) was an even better day in terms of weather. There was not a cloud in the sky for most of the day. The temperature was in the low fifties. It was all the more remarkable since they kept telling us about the blizzard that was coming on Sunday.

But on Saturday...
I was outside working in the garden by 8 o'clock in the morning.
I raked many leaves and even planted a few stray daffodil bulbs.
The ground had warmed with 3 days above freezing.
As I cut down the Japanese anemone foliage I noticed some sprouts of new growth.
We drove down to the greenhouse outside Wellman. Sometimes it is good to just get out of town, and take a ride through the countryside that inspired Grant Wood.
We bought a poinsettia. It is sort of a tradition. We will try to keep it going until Spring, when it would get to go outside. Maybe it will survive until then.
Right now we have one poinsettia from previous Thanksgivings. It is about 3 feet high and is about 6 years old. It is in the dark room now. Well, it gets natural daylight only. We can coax some color out of it before the winter is over.

This warmer weather, staying above freezing, was, however,  not the best for the Halloween pumpkins. They get soft after having frozen solid for a few weeks. This one is hanging on until the cold weather arrives, which will be any time now.

But there is color right now inside.. Here are some of the orchids blooming at the moment.

Yes this last one is an orchid.

How about the winter picture contest?
IT STARTS IN ONE WEEK.
SPREAD THE WORD. TELL YOUR FRIENDS.
VOTING WILL SOON TAKE PLACE.

Christopher is certainly ready.

Actually the selection process is now down to 71 pictures. I will finally select 65. That will be 13 weeks with 5 pictures each week.

There were several great pictures that were in this group, until I looked at last year's finalists. There were several pictures that were just about the same picture as last year. This year I will try to have mostly new flowers.

Julia's recipe

Apple Tart

At Thanksgiving, we make pie. In past years, we often had visitors, and we made 5 or 6 pies: pumpkin (1 with and 1 without crust), apple, pecan, mincemeat (vegetarian), blueberry, raspberry or rhubarb custard or both. Now we are fewer so we make three pies - pumpkin, pecan and an apple tart. The apple tart recipe is a combination of my memory of a recipe from Sara Moulton and a recipe from volume 2 of the Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas. This recipe is not so exact, except for the pie crust part.

As I have said, Philip makes a terrific pie crust (or on Thanksgiving, 3 or more terrific pie crusts). I observed him at work and took notes.

Parts list: all purpose flour, white sugar, salt, butter, ice-water, yellow (Golden Delicious or a relative) apples, lemon juice and cinnamon.


For one single crust (none of the pies at Thanksgiving are two-crust pies, which I generally don't approve of anyway), P. measured 1-1/4 cup of all purpose flour into the bowl of a food processor along with 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1/2 teaspoon of table salt. He pulsed a few times to mix up the dry ingredients.

At that point, he put a couple of ice cubes in a cup with cold water and set it aside.

Then he added 1 stick (8 tablespoons) of cold (straight from the refrigerator) butter (he used salted butter), cut into little cubes. He pulsed enough times so that the mixture had a sandy texture; that is, the butter was thoroughly mixed in. Then he added 2 tablespoons of the ice water and pulsed a few more times.


One is striving for the texture shown - a dough that is coming together but not wet. Sometimes this requires 2 tablespoons of water, sometimes 3, sometimes 4; never more than 4.









Philip plopped the contents of the food processor bowl onto a piece of parchment paper (waxed paper would work).













He mushed it together into a disk. Sometimes he worked from outside the paper-pushing the pieces of dough together but not actually touching the dough with his hands. There may be a few dry bits as shown. Not to worry.

He then folded the parchment around the disk and put it in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes. I turned the oven on to 375 degrees.






When the dough emerged from the refrigerator, it was chilled and workable. Philip pressed it out (with his hands) into a bigger circle, then used a floured rolling pin to roll it out into a circle about 12" across. He rolled from the center out to the edge in all directions, to keep the dough an even thickness. No dawdling. The dough works best a bit chilled.

One can maneuver a pie crust into a pie pan by draping the dough over the rolling pin and then unrolling it into the pan. Or one can pick up the pie crust on the parchment (from underneath) and flip it into the pie plate. Both require a steady hand and steady nerves. Mishaps can be repaired using bits of leftover pie dough.

Here is pie crust in a regular pie pan. I think this one was filled with pumpkin pie filling. This recipe makes a single crust - to fit in a 10" pie pan or anything smaller. For a bigger pie pan, there will not be much dough left over. For smaller pie pans, there will be more.

By the way, after the pie dough is in the pan, you cut the excess off around the edge with a knife. You want a bit - maybe 1/2" - of overhang, which makes the edge. Like the one shown, or with the excess folded under and then crimped with a fork.

Extra pie dough (if not needed for repairs of holes or tears) can be cut into pieces, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and baked at 375 degrees until golden brown: pie crust cookies.


While Philip was rolling out pie dough, I peeled and cored 2 very large yellow apples, the varietal name of which I forget, but they are in the Golden Delicious family. We have some orchards in eastern Iowa, and we get all kinds of nice apples in the fall.

Use a Golden Delicious variant in this recipe. They are neither hard nor soft and they have a nice flavor.

I ended up with about 5 cups of apple slices, about 1/4" thick. I put the slices in a bowl with about 1/2 cup of white sugar and 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon of lemon juice, which I stirred up and set aside.



Here is my pie crust. Same recipe, same pie crust maker, different pan. This is a tart pan which is a two part contraption. You could use a 10" pie pan.










I put the tart pan on a baking sheet for ease in maneuvering and put pie beans in the pie shell.

I keep a little container with a piece of aluminum foil full of little beans. Whenever I bake an empty pie shell, I use the foil full of pie beans to weight down the crust. I baked the crust for 20 minutes. Then I took it out, removed the foil/pie beans, poked the bottom of the crust with a fork (to prevent it from ballooning up in an unhelpful way) and put it back in the oven for another 15 minutes without the pie beans.



When the crust came out, it was light golden brown. All the while the apples had been sitting quietly in their bowl, releasing apple juice and getting a bit pliable.

I overlapped the apple slices in a ring, in a single layer.









I needed to make an inner ring of overlapped apple slices and then filled in the middle with little bi

There were a few little pieces left which were delicious.









Here is the fully assembled tart. There were juices in the bottom of the bowl where the apple slices had been - maybe 1/3 to 1/2 cup. I drizzled the juices over the apples and sprinkled cinnamon sugar over the whole thing.

I have a shaker of cinnamon sugar in my spice cabinet for just such occasions. It's also good on hot buttered toast.





I baked the tart in the 375 degree oven for about 30 - 40 minutes. It's done when a skewer can easily pierce the apple slices. The apples will not break down; they will continue to hold their shapes.

This is an artsy photo. The sunlight was coming in the dining room windows, and the stripes are the shadows of the window mullions.





The thing about a tart pan is that the ring is separate from the bottom. Once the tart is out of the oven and cool, one can hold the tart pan from the bottom and the ring will come off. Then the tart (still on the tart pan bottom) can be put onto an attractive plate. Or as I said, you can make it in the big (10") pie plate.

A piece of tart on a plate with a dab of whipped cream. Ice cream would be nice or some fancy-schmancy creme fraiche.

Odds and Ends

So it is 6 o'clock and it is post time.
The blizzard is still just in the forecast.
Heavy snow is anticipated.
I guess that is part of life in the winter.
You wait to see what the weather will do tomorrow or Thursday, or whenever you have to travel out of town.

Stay warm and safe travels everyone.
Philip