pameladean

As many of you know, I usually make the pies for our family celebrations of Thanksgiving and Christmas. I also sometimes make a lemon meringue pie for David's birthday, but those are usually well-behaved. The holiday pies have always been a bit dicey since I took over from David's mother in the oughts sometime. They are never beautiful except by accident, but they are tasty.

David must have a mince pie for both holidays if at all possible; fortunately, the canonical mincemeat comes in a jar. If Lydy were here she might have made an apple pie, but she is out of town. I've made an apple pie myself quite frequently, and often I've made a vegan pumpkin pie. This has won cautious approval from the omnivores; the tang of the tofu, they say, makes it more like cheesecake, but often they eat some. Cameron and I like the pie quite a lot.

Thanksgiving's pies were fine, if sporting the usual raggedy, somehow distracted look that appears to be the hallmark of my pie crust. I hadn't been able to get my usual brand of silken tofu (Mori-Nu), so with trepidation I used Nasoya. I've had a lot of trouble with Nasoya, but it goes in the other direction: that is, if Nasoya brand tofu claims to be extra firm you can't be sure it won't fall apart in your hands when you try to take it out of the package. But the silken tofu is always silken. All of it is very soft. To my surprise, the pie was really great. Nasoya is less tangy and it was more like a pumpkin custard and less like a cheesecake. Cam and I liked it very much and the rest of them were less cautious in their approval. The only glitch in the Thanksgiving pie preparation was that I absent-mindedly made two two-crust batches rather than one of each. I put the extra dough in the freezer.

With Lydy gone and the core Christmas group being very small because my mother is 90, is very nervous about COVID19, and gets notions, and with my brother being allergic to pumpkin, I decided not to make a pumpkin pie at all. My brother had expressed interest in a tofu chocolate pie, so I decided to do that.

This required one two-crust pie and one one-crust pie. I had the dough for a one-crust pie in the freezer. So I made the two-crust pie recipe. I used the shortening I'd used at Thanksgiving, which claims to be Best By August 2022. I'd put it in the refrigerator after I made the Thanksgiving pies. When I opened the ziploc bag, I got a whiff of, well, shortening, which seemed weird when it was cold, but I don't usually refrigerate shortening. I made the dough. I chilled it. I rolled it out. It behaved really beautifully. I put the bottom crust in the pie plate and started to fold up the top one. Something seemed off. I picked up a scrap of dough and tasted it. It wasn't dramatically awful, but it was off. A sharp, weird taste, not flour or salt or water or shortening.

After quite a lot of yelling -- Cam was out shopping and David was downstairs, so I could be free with my expressions -- I put all the dough into the organics recycling and went downstairs to see if David and Lydy had any shortening. They had an eight-ounce unopened stick, which smelled harmless and proved to be so. I made and rolled out the dough for the second time, after washing such of the dough-making utensils as I had foolishly put in with other used dishes. That was all yesterday. I put the second batch of mince pie crusts in the refrigerator overnight, with the frozen lump of dough left over from Thanksgiving so it could thaw out.

Today I put the mince pie together and put it in the oven, where nothing bad happened to it. I took the thawed lump of dough from the fridge and rolled it out. It behaved badly, but not monstrously. I coaxed it together and put it in the pie plate and smashed the edges with a fork and pricked it all over the bottom. I tasted a scrap, and it tasted fine. The mince pie had ten minutes to go and the cats were piteously reminding me that they had not been fed for a century, so I put Saffron's thyroid medication into a pill pocket abd gave it to her with some Greenies; Cassie just got the Greenies. Then I sat on the sofa waiting for the timer for the mince pie to go off. Cassie sat next to me in case I had any treats in my pockets.

From the kitchen, I heard a thumping sound. I got up and went in. Saffron was standing on the dishwasher, the main work surface in that kitchen, licking the bottom of the pie dough. The cutting board the pie plate was sitting on is slightly warped, so every vigourous lick made the board thump against the top of the dishwasher. Otherwise, had she jumped down quietly enough, I would never have known. I had put all the other phases of the pie dough into the microwave, which is very capacious, to keep cats from messing with them, but I had honestly thought that if any cat did that, it would be Cassie. Saffron was unconcerned to be discovered and got down resignedly when I said, "Get down from there" in a low tone because Cameron was asleep. I put the defiled pie in the microwave.

I knew I would not do this, but I thought, "Well, hey, ten or twelve minutes at 425 F, surely that would sanitize it." I did some internet searches. Cats have licked a lot of pies, but mostly baked ones. Cats, as I know perfectly well, have a vast array of pathogens in their mouths. Cats lick their butts, for heaven's sake. I threw out the dough, washed the cutting board, the rolling pin, the pastry cutter, the top of the dishwasher, and the pie plate, got the last of the downstairs shortening out of the fridge, tossed a lump of margarine in with it, and made another batch of dough. This behaved middlingly, but by then I really did not care. I smashed the edges with a fork, pricked it all over, and shoved it into the oven, whence it emerged not long ago looking all right to be filled with chocolate tofu mixture when I have made it.

My mother is having a reaction to her booster shot, so I will also be making mashed potatoes and two kinds of roasted vegetables. But none of them are likely to cause anything like this amount of trouble, as long as I don't leave anything with olive oil on it sitting where Saffron can find it.

When Cam got up I went into her office, where Saffron was sleeping peacefully in the chair she considers her own, and said, "I'd like to introduce you to your new cat. This is your new cat. I have no cat."

I hope you have no tribulations at all, but that if you do, they are no worse than these.

Pamela

First! The ebook version of Points of Departure, Pat Wrede's and my collection of all our original Liavek stories plus a new story by Pat and a new collaboration by both of us, telling the often-crossing stories of Granny Carry and the Benedicti family, is on sale for $2.99 from the following vendors:

Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/zppqh9d

ibooks: http://tinyurl.com/jpca42t

Kobo: http://tinyurl.com/jr7adpw

Paperback copies vary wildly in price, but I always encourage people to support their local independent bookstore if they are lucky enough to have one.

Second!

This is what actually impelled me to post. You may recall a cat-related saga earlier in the year when I lost most of our 2014 tax information and then rediscovered it. I'm afraid that I did not, in gratitude, immediately finish preparing the taxes. Sadly, I finished preparing the taxes the week before Thanksgiving, impelled by the realization that one is not eligible to apply for health insurance subsidies on the individual market if one has not filed one's taxes, but upheld by the knowledge that our accountants just last year went to all-electronic filing, so that once things were done the filing part would be instantaneous.

Well, it would have been, but, not really amazingly, there's a deadline for e-filing, and it's in October. So yesterday, after a horrified look at the calendar and a quick call to the accountant's office, I waylaid David as he was heading innocently out the door to take a thumb drive containing a concert video to friends. We went to the accountants' office and had a nice chat with the accountant while the taxes were being photocopied. Then we went to the nearest post office, helpfully pointed out by the accountant's getting me to stand behind a plant in a far corner of his office and peer out the window. We signed the taxes in the car and then, having stood in line for a while, I paid various amounts of money to get the tax forms to St. Paul and Fresno as quickly as possible.

I want to pause to extol the extreme kindness, sympathy, knowledegability, and helpfulness of the Post Office employees, not only to me, but to the many equally infuriating people ahead of me in line who didn't know what they wanted, complained when it cost money, had not packed up their boxes adequately or had forgotten the slips for the packages they wanted to pick up. Every single one of those Post Office employees deserves to be paid twice as much as they get, whatever it is.

Then we took the thumb drive along to our friends and had a lovely chat with them as well.

I was figuring that I would not be able to sign up for health insurance in time to get coverage by January 1, and would need to get some kind of interim coverage for that month. However, I got an email this morning saying that MNSure had extended the deadline to December 28th, which provides a much better chance that things will work out.

Third.

Thanksgiving went off pretty well, given how many people we had and the curious attrition that had occurred in our supply of dishes and flatware. David and I had Lund's sushi for lunch; the rice had suffered in storage, but it was still tasty and prevented sudden blood-sugar drops later on. I did not manage to make my small casserole, which is just as well, because the new-to-me mock cheese I'd been planning to use is really not up to snuff and would not have worked properly. I did make the roasted vegetables, and they were delicious. My youngest brother was a delight, and did cook the salmon for non-eaters of turkey. He called up recipes on his phone, and when informed sadly that no, we did not actually have any parsley or almonds, he just kept looking until he lit upon a reduction of mustard and balsamic vinegar with garlic and olive oil, which was so tasty that my other brother ate the extra salmon filet I'd had plans for. This continued a theme: arkuat had brought vinho verde because he knows that I like it, but I was too busy running around during the appetizer phase, and everybody else drank it all. Next year I am going to manage better.

My mother brought mashed potatoes, including a non-dairy version just for me; she also brought braised celery and leeks, which is about a dozen times as delicious as you think it will be, even if you think highly of the idea. fgh's cranberry sauce with ginger was excellent with salmon. Both her daughters came along this year, which was extremely pleasant, and they brought a very nice spread of appetizers. And my mother and local brother and I were very glad to see our youngest, even though he'd arrived at 2 am on Wednesday and was expecting the band's bus to collect him again around midnight on Thanksgiving. My family accordingly left around nine, and lydy kindly gave Eric a ride home so he wouldn't have to cope with the holiday bus schedule; but Felicia, Rachel, and Judy stuck around to keep us company while David carved the rest of the turkey and reduced the carcass into a form suitable for soup. The house smelled of turkey soup for the next day or two. I can't eat it, but it still smells lovely to me.

Fourth.

International Bad Cat Day, pastry version. So I went to a monthly gathering of fellow writers at a bakery that sometimes has olive-oil pastries flavored with orange and fennel. I don't know if there is egg in them, but they don't do me any harm, so there can't be much. They had the pastries, so I got half a dozen and ate one while socializing and drinking tea with all the lovely people. Then I met Eric for a date and gave him one. Then I gave Raphael one. The following day, I ate the fourth, and reminded Raphael that there were two left. We had a late dinner that night. If it's just the two of us, we often eat dinner in Raphael's office, with the door shut. My office has no door. If you eat where the cats can see you there are various behaviors that make finishing your food difficult, let alone reading or watching TV or even conversing while consuming it. So we had our dinner and watched whatever we were watching at that point (Dr. Who or Parks and Rec, probably). When we came out, it was time for the cats' own supper. Ordinarily the two of them pour into the office with the appearance of about a dozen, tails upright, voices proclaiming starvation.

No cats. "WHERE ARE THEY?" I said. "WHAT HAVE THEY DONE?"

There was no depredation in the kitchen. In my office, however, the brown paper bag containing the last two pastries -- which I had carefully set on a tall filing cabinet that Cassie couldn't get onto in one jump, and that I believed Saffron could not, less because of the height than because she couldn't get a good run or a good view of the top first -- was on the office floor with the bottom torn out, and both cats were feasting on the pastries. Raphael took the bag away from them and then I cleaned up the crumbs, to much feline protest. They had had quite enough to be going on with. Next time I am just eating everything at once. Possibly with some nice vinho verde.

I wish I had five things, but I don't seem to.

I wish you light in this season of darkness.

Pamela