apple bag pie

Another one from my MIL. She is, you have surmised by the point, an intimidatingly skilled baker. One of the high points of my life was the day I made a pie and Peter said my crust had reached the level of his mother's. A ray of light broke through the clouds to shine upon my head, and Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" could be heard.

Where was I? Oh, yes. This is in the oven as I type, making me gleeful and glad.

Apple Bag Pie

8 c. peeled, sliced apples (my MIL insists on Cortland apples if they are at all available; I have found that Granny Smiths work fine if Cortlands are unavailable)
1/2 c. sugar
2 T. flour
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. nutmeg
9 inch unbaked pie shell
2 T. lemon juice

Crumble Topping

1/2 c. flour
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. butter

Preheat oven to 425F.

Combine apples, 1/2 c. sugar, 2 T. flour and spices; toss well to mix. Turn into pie shell (they will pile up pretty high; it helps if you have built up a pretty high fluting around the edge of your pie crust) and sprinkle with the 2 T. lemon juice.

Combine the topping ingredients, mixing until crumbly (I find a pastry cutter helps with this). Sprinkle over apples. Place pie into a large paper grocery bag. Fold end over twice and fasten with paper clips. Place on cookie sheet. Slide carefully into the oven, making sure that the bag isn't touching your oven coils; you may have to lower the rack. Bake for 1 hour.

When you remove the pie from the oven, cut open the bag to remove the pie, but do so CAREFULLY; there may be steam and also hot caramelized sugar oozing out all over the place.

This is fantastic with ice cream. Or for breakfast. Or with ice cream, for breakfast.

spinach squares

This is my MIL's recipe. I am not sure where she got it. She always has these out for something to nibble on while Giant Holiday Feasts are cooking. If I'm not careful, I nibble these until I'm full and then have a terrible dilemma when I sit down to the Feast. Ooh, these are good. I am making them this morning to freeze and then have out for nibbles on Thanksgiving Day. Some of these might not make it into the freezer, though.

Spinach Squares

1/2 c. butter
3 eggs
1 c. flour
1 c. milk
1 t. salt
1 t. baking powder
1 lb. grated cheddar (about 4 cups)
4 c. chopped spinach (4 of the frozen boxes, thawed and squeezed dry)

Preheat oven to 350F. Melt butter in a 9x13 pan. Beat together the eggs, milk, salt, baking powder and flour. Add the cheese and spinach and mix well. Pour into the pan and bake for 35 minutes. Let cool 30 minutes before serving. Cut into squares 1.5-2 inches on a side. If frozen, can be reheated in a 325F oven for 12-15 minutes. Or you can just microwave 'em for a few seconds.

I have been known to just eat a plate of these for breakfast.

Just for the record, I HATE squeezing spinach dry. It is my least favorite cooking task. I have been known to reject recipes based on the fact that I'd have to do it. However, I tasted these and became addicted before I saw the recipe, so for these I'm willing to do it. That's how good they are.

a really tasty breakfast sammich

This is my approximation of the Vienna Sunrise, a popular sandwich at Cafe Vienna, a now-defunct cafe near my graduate school. I was on my way to Cafe Vienna for one of these when my mom called me on the morning of September 11, 2001 to tell me something crazy was going on in New York City. I went and got my sandwich and took it back to my apartment and watched the horror with my roommate and ATE the sandwich while we watched. I am not a monster. It was just a really good sandwich.

For a Vienna Sunrise you will need:

-a bagel of your choice, toasted (I advise using plain the first time and then figuring out what will complement the flavors best from there)

-sun-dried tomato mayonnaise (if you, like my husband, are a Crazy Person Who Does Not Like Sun-Dried Tomatoes, you may use regular mayo or just butter instead, but then it will not be a Vienna Sunrise, just a regular ham and egg and cheese breakfast sandwich, although still plenty good)

-one egg

-ham (I am normally a sweet ham kind of girl-- maple, honey, brown sugar, etc-- but I find more savory smoked ham works better in this application)

-sliced provolone cheese

For the sun-dried tomato mayo, chop up a few-- say, four-- sun-dried tomatoes (the soft or oil-packed kind, not the super dry hard kind) and mix them in a bowl with a big spoonful of mayo. This will make enough for several sandwiches.

Next, melt some butter in your favorite egg pan. Crack the egg into one side of the pan, and on the other side plop down your ham so it frizzles a bit in the butter and gets nice and hot.

While the egg and ham are doing their thing, toast your bagel. As soon as it comes out of the toaster, shmear both sides with sun-dried tomato mayo.

When the egg is just about done, transfer the hot ham to the bottom half of the bagel. Place the cheese on top of the ham. Place the hot fried egg on top of the cheese. Season to taste with salt and pepper, then top with the other half of the bagel.

Oh, so good.

tolerance

Tolerance is not indifference, but a generous regard and even provision for those who differ from us on points we deeply care about. To support tolerance-- which is not the same thing as lacking intolerance-- more is required than just a lack of certainty concerning differences at issue. We must also care about people. Genuine tolerance itself must be based upon assured knowledge of what is real and what is right. And it always is. It is not a "leap of faith." Tolerance is not the lack of something, but the expression of a positive vision of what is good and right, a vision taken to be solidly grounded in knowledge of how things really are. It has often been considered knowledge that all human beings are equally loved by God, and the call to tolerance was based on that knowledge. It was this type of vision, regarded as knowledge, that led to the abolition of slavery and legal segregation, for example. Such a vision, held as knowledge of how things really are, undergirds the possibility of a neighbor love that comes from the heart and reaches across all human differences. --Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today

I have been musing over this definition of tolerance since I first read it several weeks ago. It is a lofty one.

Do you consider yourself a tolerant person? Do you cultivate "a generous regard and even provision for those who differ from us on points we deeply care about?" Do you, really?

If-- like me-- you don't always, but wish you did, how would your speech, actions and habits of thought change?

a nice comforting sort of cookie

I made these today when Colin asked for vanilla cookies. They are easy, sweet, comforting and homey. If you like evaporated milk, you will like these cookies. If you don't, you won't. I like evaporated milk, and I'm quite fond of the cookies.

Caramel Jumbles (from The Art of Making Good Cookies, Plain and Fancy)

I don't know why they are called "Caramel Jumbles" when there is no caramel in them. Nevertheless, they are tasty.

1/2 c. butter
1 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. white sugar
2 eggs
1 c. evaporated milk
1 tsp. vanilla (I recommend doubling this amount)
2 3/4 c. flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. raisins or chopped dates (optional)

Cream butter and sugars. Beat in eggs. Add evaporated milk and vanilla. Sift together dry ingredients and stir in (well, that's what the book says but I didn't bother with sifting together; I just tossed them into the running Kitchen Aid as I measured them out), then add fruit. Drop on lightly greased baking sheet (or lined with parchment). Bake at 400 degrees for bout 10 minutes. When cool, spread with Caramel Jumble Glaze (or not; they're quite eatable plain, but the glaze is yummy, too).

Caramel Jumble Glaze

2 T. melted butter
1/4 c. brown sugar
2 c. sifted powdered sugar
1/2 c. evaporated milk

Stir brown sugar into melted butter until dissolved. Add sugar and milk (unless you want a very thin glaze, I would add the milk a bit at a time until I achieved the consistency I wanted); beat until fluffy. Spread over cooled cookies.

These freeze very well.

the new spanking

Did you know that Shouting is the New Spanking? Indeed it is. The New York Times Fashion & Style section (?!?) tells me so.

I am so very tired of articles like this.

So very, very tired.

“My name is Francesca Castagnoli and I am a screamer,” began a post on Motherblogger.net earlier this year. “Admitting I’m a mom that screams, shouts and loses it in front her kids feels like I’m revealing a dark family secret.”

“It’s not kind,” said Ms. Klein in Oregon. “When I’m done I feel awful.”

To research their book “Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most, and Raise Happier Kids,” the three authors, Devra Renner, Aviva Pflock and Julie Bort, commissioned a survey of 1,300 parents across the country to determine sources of parental guilt. Two-thirds of respondents named yelling — not working or spanking or missing a school event — as their biggest guilt inducer.

And later:

“We are so accustomed to this that we just think parents get carried away and that it’s not harmful,” said one of the study’s lead authors, Murray A. Straus, a sociologist who is a director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. “But it affects a child. If someone yelled at you at work, you’d find that pretty jarring. We don’t apply that standard to children.”

Psychologists and psychiatrists generally say yelling should be avoided. It’s at best ineffective (the more you do it the more the child tunes it out) and at worse damaging to a child’s sense of well-being and self-esteem.

Here is a clue, O child development experts: we get it. If we feel guilty for yelling, that's a strong indicator that we already know it's not okay. You don't have to keep harping on it.

Now, I am highly unlikely to complain about all the things that make me, as a mom, feel guilty. Guess what? This article does not make me feel guilty; my conscience does that. Other people's condemnation and judgment may make me feel irritated or defensive or sad, but the guilt is aaaaaaaall mine. So I dislike it when moms whine about all the sources of guilt out there. I just don't buy it.

That being said, what I detest about articles of this nature is the implicit message that parenting is a perfectible task: if we just stop spanking and stop yelling and educate them in just the right way and give them just the right mix of parent time and organized social interaction and free time and feed them ideally nutritious meals and do everything just so, we will have reared perfect children! Or if we haven't, it won't be our fault.

What a crock. The fact is, I am imperfect, and I will, no matter how hard I try, fail my children. They are also imperfect, and will fail me at some point, as I have failed my own parents.

That's not a statement of fatalism, since I believe in a good God who can redeem our failures, who is strong where I am weak, who loves us and gives us abundant grace.

Relying on ourselves alone to parent our children perfectly is foolishness. This is not to say we shouldn't try our best and beg grace for the work, but that to try for an unreachable goal will set us up for a debilitating, paralyzing sense of failure, and I can't think of any surer way to really screw things up for me and my children.

footsteps

The following account may or may not be true.

James and Cammie are good friends of mine from college. They got married right after graduation and had three kids-- two boys and a girl-- before James decided to go to seminary in the middle of nowhere. So they packed up the kids and rented an old farmhouse three miles from the seminary campus and much farther than that from anything else. They are crunchy types who home school the kids and do things like order their wheat in bulk and grind flour with a little electric mill in their kitchen, so they do okay out there.

The farmhouse is a great house-- the kitchen is enormous, there are two fireplaces-- one of them in the LIBRARY, and there's a porch with a swing that can fit all five of them. The water comes from a well, and the owners have even supplied them with a backup gasoline-powered generator in case the electricity goes out. Cammie's only real complaints about the house are that the hardwood floors, while easy to clean, turn the whole house into an echo chamber, and that the only staircase to the second floor, where all the bedrooms are, is ridiculously steep. Even though their youngest is three now, they still have a baby gate at the top.

One evening last summer, after a fun and exhausting family trip to a local peach orchard, Cammie and James got the kids to bed and then Cammie took a hot bath and went to bed herself. James stayed down in the library for some time, reading some Bonhoeffer until he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. So he headed upstairs himself, carefully latching the baby gate behind him and taking a second to poke his head into the kids' bedroom and pray over them briefly before tiptoeing across the hall and into the master bedroom.

He had just snuggled in beside Cammie and switched off his bedside lamp when he heard several thudding footsteps in the hall outside the bedroom door. He waited a minute to see which child was going to try to sneak in with mom & dad, but instead of hearing the door open he heard the snap and sproing! of the latch on the baby gate, followed by more footsteps thudding down the staircase. Sighing, James rolled out of bed-- quietly, so as not to wake Cammie-- put his glasses on, and stepped softly back out into the hall. Sure enough, the baby gate was swinging open. He peeked into the kids' bedroom to see which one of them had gone tromping downstairs in the middle of the night like that.

They were all still asleep in their beds.