03.15.09
Pi(e) Day Party
Pie Makers - Nov 2007
After I was reminded of its existence by a friend who sent along this post on “Nerdigras“, the family decided that on 3/14 at 1:59, we would host a Pi(e) Day Party. This appealed greatly to my math geek 11yo, as well as his party- and sweets-loving brothers. A party all about eating dessert? What’s not to love!
On very short notice, we invited 7 neighbor families and 9 school friend families. More than half came (about 30 people), most bearing pie (including pizza pie and a Serbian meat pie) – but I totally forgot to take pictures!
Great fun was had by all, so we might be making this an annual event! And even though we went to great effort to clean up and clear off the living room coffee table, and put the leaf in the dining room table, all the adults mostly hung out in the kitchen. Good thing we also cleared off flat surfaces in the kitchen! (We’re a family of pilers, so flat surfaces quickly become covered with stuff.) The dining room table did get used by the kids, and the coffee table was used today by a boy consortium playing some paper D&D style game, so it was not all for naught.
I made chocolate chip pie (favorite of T-boy and his mama) using this recipe (and a combo of Trader Joe’s and Spartan chocolate chips – sorry Nestle!), as well as pecan pie (favorite of Jonski Papa, C-boy, and Z-boy) using Grandma P’s recipe and Grandpa P’s pecans. As usual, I used the flaky buttery pastry recipe from The Heritage of Southern Cooking for the crusts.
Vi Perkowski’s Pecan Pie
3 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup corn syrup (e.g. Karo)
1/4 cup melted butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup chopped pecansBeat ingredients together and pour into unbaked pie shell. Bake 45 to 50 minutes. Oven temperature: 375° F.
Had I been truly inspired, I would have made another gooseberry pie using the berries in my freezer, but I wasn’t. Jonski Papa made 2 pizza pies (a cinnamon sugar one and a pepperoni) using his sourdough crusts, and a loaf of chocolate sourdough (not a pie at all, but it was round). As I said, I don’t have pictures of this weekend’s events, but I did take photos when T-boy and Jonski Papa made pecan pie for Thanksgiving 2007, so they will have to do.
pecans, vanilla, sugar, and more sugar...
stirring, stirring, stirring...
03.05.09
Magi(c) Carol
The random poetry challenge: pick 10 words at random from a dictionary (Close your eyes, open a page at random, and place your index finger on the page. Open your eyes and write down the word closest to your fingertip. Repeat this until you have 10 random words written on your list. No cheating!). Using those words and up to 5 more, write a poem. Then create a postcard to illustrate your poem.
I chose my words from my beloved old (© 1968) honkin’ big (weight 5.7 lbs) Reader’s Digest Encyclopedic Dictionary: magic, receiving line, carol, Syria, insanely, corneous, rent, Cyprus, mouchard, unregenerate. (For rent, I chose the separate into parts with force or violence meaning. Mouchard came from the French-English section near the back. It means stool pigeon.) I wrote the poem first, but here’s the postcard:
Magi(c) Carol postcard
Here’s my poem:
Magi(c) Carol
Magi carol, carol magically!
From Syria to Cyprus
the corneous mouchard
insanely rent
the receiving line.
Corneous mouchard?
Unregenerate mouchard!
Cyprus to Syria.
Receiving lines.
All rent.
which shows, if nothing else, that I’m not very good at writing poetry! But it was interesting how all the words managed to come together thematically. Corneous means made of horn or a hornlike substance, but as my luck would have it (when I went googling for corneous pigeons, hoping to find a bird carved from a horn), it also refers to parts of feathers! Also, my unregenerate spy carrier pigeon (standing in for the mouchard) is holding a magic wand with a handle carved from horn (corneous).
I have a book of World War II maps that I got at a thrift store, and this map showing action in Syria also included Cyprus. One of my favorite Christmas carols is We Three Kings, titled Kings of the Orient in the version I printed. Of course they’re also referred to as magi, thus the title. And wasn’t one of them supposed to come from the Middle East, or Turkey maybe? So that fits with the map.
Changes I would have made in retrospect: print the music so it stretched the entire width of the card, put the (classic American wedding) receiving line closer to Cyprus so the pigeon is reaching from Syria to Cyprus, maybe have the music (adhered via packing tape transfer) along the bottom instead of the top. I do love that hand-colored spy pigeon, though. I hope he doesn’t suffer much for his unregenerate ways!
