while I worked…

…and my daughter had the day off from school, she baked.

Tomorrow is Pi Day. March 14th. 3-14, if you write it out the proper way to look like the first three digits of the mathematical constant pi, 3.14…

She baked a pie.

It is an apple pie, with ingredients she found stuffed away in various cupboards, pantries, and freezers.

While I worked the smell of fresh apple pie wafted through the house.

Tomorrow is Pi Day.

Tomorrow.

There is a fresh apple pie on my countertop filling the house with lovely apple pie smells, and it must wait until tomorrow.

Apple Harvest

The local radio (yes, I still listen to the radio) was discussing apples this afternoon.

The public broadcaster hosts an afternoon general interest show where a pair or trio of hosts chatter about local news topics, update on weather and traffic, interview local businesses, and generally have a daily topic encouraging people to engage and discuss and drop comments onto their feeds to participate in said chatter.

Today the topic was apples.

I don’t know how it goes in your part of the world, but around here almost everyone has or knows someone who has an apple tree.

Mine is a magnificent fifteen year old baking variety apple. She stands nearly as tall as my two-storey house, and this year dropped roughly two thousand greenish-red orbs of tartly sweet goodness into bowls, pails, dirt, grass, the neighbour’s yard, and even quite nearly onto the dog’s head.

We made some pies.

We froze some sliced samples.

But in reality we just couldn’t keep up.

I posted online with pleas for friends to come pick… but again, everyone has or knows someone who has an apple tree, so no takers.

Next year will likely be a quieter year for fruit in our yard, the tree seeming to be a biannual giver of bounty.

I didn’t call in or participate in the radio program, not by tweet or by text, but I did pause to listen, aligning my own experience participating in the growing of the local crop right in my backyard with countless neighbours around the city. It was a moment almost as sweet as a fresh backyard apple.

Raspberries I Have Loved

It’s probably something to do with the unusual heat, but all my berries are coming ready about two weeks earlier than usual this year.

Our fridge is already full of saskatoon berries (some of which are destined for a fate of pie later this morning) and over the last couple days I’ve spent nearly an hour in the thorny brambles of my raspberry bushes plucking the tasty red berries from their hiding spots.

Weeks, literally weeks, after we moved into our house over sixteen years ago, I dug a small hole into the newly graded soil of our backyard and planted a root-ball of a raspberry cultivar.

All those years later, after ups and downs, good seasons and bad, incidents with wafting herbicides, a sad pruning mistake by my wife many years ago, and many attempts to train and constrain the patch, I have a plot of land that’s roughly, consistently, five square meters in size and densely packed with raspberry plants.

We pick and eat them fresh. We pluck pail-fulls that become pies or other pastry deserts. We drop them into cereal or on ice cream. We share them with th neighbours. We live for a short month on the bounty of garden raspberries that for a brief moment seems endless and plentiful.

Until it’s suddenly gone.

Gone, and we are stuck buying expensive little plastic clamshells of never-quite-the-same farm berries usually imported from California or Mexico, achingly dulled by their long trek to the Canadian prairies.

That trip from the backyard is so much shorter, so much fresher. And always a summer treat, even if it is a couple weeks ahead of schedule this year.

Fail Up Friday: Forked Cream

If you’ve been reading along for the last few days, I posted a comic earlier this week that tried to find a bit of humour in some recent… um… less-than-perfect cooking efforts.

Thinking about funny ideas for future comic strips means I’ve also been thinking of all the fails I’ve had over the years. Not all of them are funny or even comic-strip fodder. But, some of them would make for short anecdotes that could make for some light Friday blog writing. In other words, I might have a new recurring topic on my hands: Fail Up Fridays, because if you don’t learn from your fails you’re doing it wrong.

We had some down time last night, and the YouTube auto-play was flipping through random videos on the tv in the background. One of the chefs I watch on the regular had posted a new video inventorying some of the techniques she applies to her baking.

Half way down her list was how to make whipping cream by hand.

She measured out the cream into an appropriately-sized bowl, she grasped said bowl firmly by the rim in one hand and with the other took up a whisk. Arm extended and bowl down by her hip she expertly demonstrated the long but successful grind of beating some air into the cream to form lovely stiff peaks and create tasty whipped cream.

Simple, right? Well…

Rewind Twenty-five Years

I lived with my younger brother in university. We shared a basement suite a few blocks away from campus where various friends would stop by to hang out. We were also both dating young women at the time (the same young women who would both eventually become our wives) and being two young guys eager to impress our girlfriends with our cooking prowess (just like sitcom characters) we tried to teach ourselves some basic culinary skills, something neither of us had picked up much of along the way prior to those years.

The lesson I’ve taken away since is that sometimes it’s better to attempt and succeed magnificently at something simple, than to try something complex and fall flat on your face.

One night we tried something complex.

At least it was complex for two guys who owned four plates, a set of cutlery, and an aluminum frying pan between them both.

We tried to make a lemon pie. Y’know… to impress our girlfriends.

My Kingdom for a Whisk

Into a frozen pie shell we poured a lemon custard (a’la powder-from-a-box) and baked.

Into our one and only plastic mixing bowl we poured a cup of heavy whipping cream.

We did not own a whisk. We certainly did not own a stand mixer with a whisking attachment. We did own a fork… and a fork is exactly how we tried to turn the whipping cream into whipped cream.

Tried.

I remember taking turns. I remember getting frustrated. I remember making a mess.

There was no whipped cream on our pie.

Instead, after an hour of effort, there was a slightly-greyish puddle that we’d defeatedly poured atop our lemon pie filling and that despite our efforts to bake and salvage, was not impressing anyone… especially not our girlfriends.

Many years later when we bought ourselves a magnificent red stand mixer, one of the first things I did was spin up a batch of whipped cream to accompany a batch of breakfast crepes. It took less than ten minutes. No one questioned my choice, least of all my wife, but had she inquired I would have simply replied with… “remember that lemon pie we tried to make?”