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A Writer’s Room

by Molly on March 23, 2013 in Molly's Blog, Uncategorized

When I was twenty four and a chef in Provincetown, Scott and Robin, architects from New York City, asked me to draw a picture of my dream kitchen. I drew it in the sand at Herring Cove. They built it in one of the small, corner lofts in a former button factory that there were converting to residences in Manhattan. Ten years later I moved into that loft.

It wasn’t a big place, only a third of the size of Scott’s, which occupied the floor directly above and resembled the set for 9 1/2 Weeks. My loft, on the other hand, was washed with filtered, bright light. It was mostly kitchen with miles of white Formica. It was home. Hints of the homes that had proceeded it converged there.

In the decade between the beach and the loft, I’d lived in a big old house in Cambridge where I’d written a novel while staring out toward Julia Child’s front door. I’d lived in a parlor flat on Beacon Hill, learning to write about food and beginning to publish articles. I’d lived in a corner apartment in a former welfare hotel where I wrote my first published book.

The Writer’s Room Boston

The loft was the sort of place I fantasized, but it also shared things, primarily the light and a sense of remove, with every other place I’d called home. I wrote four books and at least a thousand articles in the little cubicle that abutted the little sleeping area on the back wall of the loft. I was at my desk early and wrote until the light changed from lemon to apricot. When the sun began to dip toward the Hudson, I’d head to the kitchen and start testing recipes.

Several hours later, Scott and Robin would wander in, sit on the counters and pick herbs, pit olives and peel garlic as I cooked. Dinner was usually a couple hours of yak-and-snack. After Robin died, Scott arrived alone. There were husbands and others in between, but basically, it went on this way for 23 years.I underestimated how seismic it would be when that loft became a casualty of a marriage-gone-wrong. It seemed like real estate, the sort of loss you shrug off and eventually replace. In fact, the tether frayed was one that stretched back to an era when we, Scott and I, were young and still test-driving selves; prepping dinner was a constant between incarnations. As our selfness-es each calcified into out-sized careers as well as other partnerships and marriages, our yak-n-snack connected us to the lives we might as easily have chosen, the ones we left on the beach.

Cooking together stopped time. It also gave a shape to urban days. In nearly a decade of divorce Diaspora, I haven’t been able to imagine another New York City.

MFK Fisher at her writer’s desk

I lived and wrote in my house upstate, an 1802 row house in a tiny town where my books and desk and kitchen reside. There, my desk is larger, the views spectacular, the light is filtered through pines and tall oak, the silence is profound.

But the solitude I’d lusted after like a stolen dessert when it was life-away-from-life didn’t taste as sweet when it was a way of life. Inevitably, after the summer community decamped and the weekenders’ visits became less frequent, my solitude smacked of solitary confinement.

Every winter, I tried on different New Yorks. The West Village, the Lower East Side, Harlem, Washington Heights — all wonderful, but none was my next New York. In fact, I couldn’t imagine any New York other than Manhattan, preferably Hell’s Kitchen.

Friends urged me to test-drive Brooklyn. No way! I’ve been a subway-phobe since first whiff in 1979. Besides, Brooklyn is not Manhattan. Then a friend who owns a row house not unlike mine upstate offered me a big room overlooking a garden and said: “bring the dogs.” Anything but “thank you” would have seemed more than surly. I left the upstate tundra a couple weeks ago with a suitcase, a laptop, a lot of books and two Bearded Collies who seemed bent on expressing every anxiety I was doing my best to ignore.

The subway! Living with other people! A brownstone instead of a loft!

The dogs slept on top of me the first night in Park Slope, panting, pawing, whining. They were, as my mother used to say “beside” themselves. As a child I would see a second her, jumped from her skin, hopping around in the midst of her six children, wringing her hands when she cried: “I am simply BESIDE myself.”

Ernest Hemingway’s Writing Room

In recent years, the phrase has bubbled up from time to time. It seemed to ask for new meaning, but I didn’t hear it clearly until my first night in Brooklyn. Attempting to lull myself to sleep under 110 pounds of panting fur, I read Alfonzo Reye’s poem of exile, Ifigina Cruel and a line leapt from the page:

“I was another, being myself”

Reyes, a Mexican diplomat in the 1920′s, wrote poems in an effort to unravel the influence of the conquistadors on Mexican identity. Based on the play by Euripides, Ifiginia, who was about to be sacrificed by her father to Artemis when the Goddess pulled a fast one and carried Ifigenia off to her headquarters on Tauris, where she made her a priestess in charge of human sacrifice.

In a twist, Reyes’ heroine had lost her memory and spent her life yearning to go home. She knows that Tauris is not her home, but she can’t remember where home is. She is, therefore, neither here nor there. She is “beside” herself.

Carolos Fuentes quotes the poem in his essay, “How I Started to Write”and meditates on the importance of national and cultural identity in shaping a writer. Like Reyes, Fuentes lived for years in exile. In a way, one sees a place more clearly from a distance. Yet an essential part of the self is cleaved by separation from the familiar.At its best, personal narrative connects the there-and-then with the here-and-now and describes not just a life, but every life. Contextualizing is a particularly important stitch in food writing, where memory so often devolves into nostaglia.

I could, for instance, ride the nostalgia train to a poignant kicker right here simply by gesturing back to Hell’s Kitchen and cooking dinner with Scott. But it wasn’t merely dinner. It was dinner during the time in life when ambition and the appetite for recognition made street drugs seem dull. It was also the unlikely setting — the cheerful, June Lockhart kitchen perched ten stories above grimy Ninth Avenue with its diesel fumes and transvestite hookers and crack pipes. Taken together, the place and its rhythm made the solitude of writing feel like a constant choice, a wondrous stroke of good fortune.

Virginia Wolf’s Writing Room

In print we may ache to return, in fact we don’t go back. We move on, changing the place we’ve left merely by leaving, being changed in turn by the act of departure. We carry places inside us and are delighted when various elements — a particular veiled light, the scale of buildings against sky, the rise of a window or wall, the ambient noise and smells — conspire to make us feel familiar to ourselves.

I know who I am in Brooklyn. My room is every room I’ve ever written in, bathed in filtered light with a sense of remove from the throbbing energy of the street below. Through the tall windows, the muted city sound reminds me that I’ve chosen to be alone with ideas and words.The wild, loopy creativity of Brooklyn’s food scene and small businesses hearken back to Cambridge in the mid-70′s, to the Village in the late ’70′s, times when the culture was rabid for proof of purity as well for as the reassurance that life can be made by one’s own two hands.

There are, as well, little bits of my upstate in the way brownstones march up the quiet streets in Park Slope, in the way people amble along the sidewalks, in the potlucks and food coop, the baby strollers and reading groups, the dogs barking in the back yard. I needed rural exile in order to see and hear these things. Ambition, the freight train blazing toward a glorious future, needed to be turned into something closer to human, alive in the here and now.

Julia and Paul Child at their desk

You start by writing to be noticed. You end by writing in order to notice. Because the more you notice, the more you are alive, the less you are afraid of what you left behind or what may lay around the next bend, the greater your chances of giving voice to something larger than yourself when you reach back into your memory and latch onto, say, the golden moment that was your grandmother’s apple pie.

Additional resources:

The Guardian did a wonderful series on writers’ rooms and the images below are a few from that series.
Charles Darwin’s Writing Room

Colm Toibin’s Writing Room

LongHouse Food Revival Austin

by Molly on February 5, 2013 in LongHouse Writers Revival, Uncategorized

Our LongHouse Food Revival in Austin, TX on February 1st was a feast for the mind and the body! Check out some of our hot-off-the-press photos from the event, and stay tuned for more reaction coming soon to the LongHouse Blog!

For captions, please click “Show Info” in the top right corner.

A Letter from Dan “The Pig Man”: Say No to Fear and Keep Marching!

by Molly on January 14, 2013 in Uncategorized

Dan “The Pig Man” on the cross

The new year brings new contractions in daily newspapers across the nation. Food and lifestyle writers are early and consistent casualties of downsizing. This strategy is fueled by several assumptions:

1. Heck, everybody eats anybody can write about it (wrong).

2. There’s plenty of freelancers who can knock this shit out cheaper (right, particularly the “shit” part).

In addition to these, there is a tacit sexism at work. Traditionally, food was girls’ stuff, more women than men wrote about it, et voila: anybody can do it!

Dan Huntley, a long-time columnist for the Charlotte Observer and the author of Extreme Barbecue, was not a food writer when he was down-sized from his staff position. He was a police reporter and a columnist — and he was dazed when his twenty-odd year run was cut short. He became an itinerate barbecue guy, wrote a book, and reinvented himself. Today, five years later, he is Dan “The Pig Man” — and he is one happy guy. Recently, he got a mail from a friend who is terrified of losing her job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The paper is shrinking and the layoffs have begun. Having gone through the same thing shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Dan “The Pig Man,” sent along this account of his own experience — and his own reinvention. His message — say no to FEAR and keep marching — is something every freelancer should have emblazoned like stigmata on their palms.

Dan LIVE from Fox And Friends national broadcast at the Democratic National Convention

Dan “The Pig Man” Writes:

Hey,

I’m the last guy on earth to be giving a pep talk to anyone, but I wish I could have found someone to assure me there was a meaningful, creative life on the other side of daily journalism five years ago when my newspaper was downsizing and it was only a matter of time before my number came up.

The weeks of anticipation and not-knowing was the worst part. After 20 odd years as a reporter and columnist at the Charlotte Observer, the fear of getting “laid off” was akin to contracting crotch cancer. Hell, I was so dumb and blindly loyal, I believed I’d be banging out cop briefs until I croaked at my keyboard.

But like scores of others, I was summoned to Human Relations one fine afternoon for the typical adieu. “Shrinking business,” “cutting costs,” “thank you for loyal service,” “in these times…you must understand…how sorry…” I walked out of the office, out of my paper and experienced vertigo for the first and only time in my life.

I was blinded by the daylight, city bus fumes and construction noise – that beeping from heavy equipment backing up. I’ve been through wars and worked crime scenes that paralyze the most seasoned soliders and cops, but after I lost my job everyday life was overwhelming. Everything was too vivid, too immense, impossible to categorize. I realized now that I’d lost the frame of reference that had served me for over two decades as a working writer.

A couple days later, on my official “Termination Day,” my work email was locked down at 6 a.m. and my company ID card no longer worked when I pulled into the parking lot. I was notified at the front door that I’d been barred from the newsroom unless accompanied by a security escort. From shining star to potential perp.

That day, I walked out of the paper and onto the dark side of the Earth. I was as panicked as a little kid who got separated from his mom in a mall.

For months, I was a hot mess, struggling to find my “sea legs” on a shifting deck. The only thing I knew for sure was there was no bridge back. I had to stop imagining that my editors would, at any moment, call and tearfully beg me to return. Much to my amazement, the paper continued to be published every day. I had to edit my assumption about croaking at my desk. I had to reinvent myself.

But first, I had to stand in the unemployment line. The same one whose director had, formerly, ushered me — a media VIP ! — immediately back to her office. When I stood in line, she ignored me. I was just another one of those hollow-eyed dudes doing that slow-mo shuffle jonesin’ for my $127 weekly fix.

As I was standing there, I thought, “I’m an open-minded liberal but JesusChristMotherofGod, these people really do stink – of cigarettes, stale beer, Big Mac-breath, piss-stained pants and kerosene heaters. What the hell am I doing here with this pitiful band of toothless geezers and pregnant tattoo artistes?

Dan making an offering to the Grill Gods

And then BOOM, I looked down at my lard-stained running shoes and realized I hadn’t showered in two days, and had been butchering bloody pork all morning. It was ME that was stinking.

It took time, but my eyes adjusted to the subdued light of my new environment. I developed a little barbecue business. I built myself a rig and a ‘cue house. I wrote when I could, finished a book, got a fancy grant. I pieced it together — thank god my wife is a school teacher and the checks come in like clockwork.

It took time to remember who I am.

Daily journalism was a great ride. You had your skills, you had the daily high of recording, publishing, being read, you had your regular paycheck. But it only expressed a part of my imagination and creativity. The irregular pay thing makes the dark side pretty scary, but the imagination and grit it takes to reinvent when you are shuffling up against 60 is a blast — if you choose to engage the adventure and put down the poor-me’s and the fear.

Journalists live by their wits, but after a few decades, the security of a full time job in a paper dims your wits. You make a lot of assumptions, you go on rote. When you are pushed out into the bright street, it’s blinding. But after a while, you feel more alive, you work your tail off and you’re living like you just graduated from college and anything is possible. Except now your kids are grown and you have grandchildren.

It’s not really that bad on the dark side. It’s like hitting an old bar you used to frequent – the faces are new but it ain’t much changed. And you begin to remember why you had ever hung in such a dark and smokey shit hole – it was where you had once felt safe. In your own skin, by your own wits, headed back to the light.

Dan “The Pig Man”

Write What Scares You

by Molly on January 5, 2013 in Uncategorized

I’ve been writing around a book for a year, amassing scenes and studies whose sole connection is that that they share a folder in my laptop that is labeled NEXT. I decided to allow the piece, or book, or series of essays — whatever the heck it is — to find itself.

Usually I know where I am going and I almost always write against a deadline — generally one that has passed. Fear is one of my favorite motivators. But for the past year, I’ve been writing without preconception and without an editor holding a loaded gun close to my head. It’s been scary.

Over time, writers develop little tricks — the ironic twist, a wink of sly humor, a nostalgic curlicue — that serve as a bridge between thoughts, the kicker to a piece or even, in short essays, an organizing principle. External pressure is a great excuse for dipping into that trusty bag of tricks. In the absence of that pressure, it’s not as easy to justify hiding behind prose. There is no easy way out, I have to keep typing.

NEXT has taught me to highlight spots where I am stuck and to just keep typing forward. When I return to the pages weeks or months later, it’s easy to see the briar patch of my own fear, the marsh of resistance, or the black hole of not-knowing, beneath those highlights. Often, I’ve brushed up against something that, like twenty extra pounds, I’d rather ignore. I’d rather write around it — do these words make me look fat?

But some of the most powerful prose lurks in those gnarly spots. The things I skirt, the things I cover up, the things I fear, the things that shame me are, each of them, a hairball of knotted energy. Each snarl limits a little chord of memory, restricts some imagination, clogs inspiration. You get used to it, you only notice it was there when it is gone.

I was a restaurant critic when I moved to New York City thousands of years ago, so long in fact that dinosaurs still roamed the island of Manhattan in pursuit of nouvelle cuisine. It was a time when people, at least the ones I aspired to resemble, lived in restaurants and that, along with a significant expense account, was convenient. At the time, my salary at one of the City’s newspapers afforded me a little squat in a former welfare hotel at the corner of 55th and Broadway. It had a neon sign that read: Hot’l Wood’ard.

Soirees de la dump were not, I felt, in the best interest of my emerging public persona. When I wanted to entertain I reserved a table in a restaurant. I thought about restaurants, wrote about restaurants, talked about restaurants, read about restaurants, ate in restaurants, hung out with our restaurant geeks.

When I wasn’t tucked up to some high-thread count table linen I was hunched over a white Formica desktop that was supported by two under-the-counter-refrigerators and served as my kitchen counter at the Hot’l. I was learning the difference between writing poems and writing restaurant criticism, learning how to report stories, leaning how to write on a typewriter instead of with a quill pen and then just as quickly, learning to compose on the keyboard of a Tandy from Radio Shack. Like I said, dinosaurs still roamed Broadway ten stories below my window.

On that Formica desktop, I worked with Lillian Hellman on the final book of her life, a culinary memoir that she co-authored with Peter Feibleman. I ghost wrote a book about wine. I began writing my first cookbook. I cooked my way through Paula’ Wolfert’s masterpiece, “Cooking of the Southwest of France” and, not long after, began to cook from appetite and heart, instead of ambition and recipes.

But I couldn’t write from the center of my non-restaurant life without writing about where I was, without writing about the Senegalese umbrella vendors whose headquarters were in the apartment next door and who squatted in the hallway scooping tripe from bowls with bread at lunchtime. To write about my life in the old Hot’l, I’d have to write about the palsied folk artist who wheeled her shopping cart full of paint to the elevator each day and pushed it to the park or the sidewalk. I’d have to write about the women who swished past my door in Kimono and sucked Lucky Strikes as they waited for their gentlemen callers at the elevator, the cellist who practiced in the stairwell, the cockroaches, the mice, the Hot’l's owner, a holocaust collaborator who had a fondness for red-flocked wall-paper.

Most worrying, I couldn’t write from the center of my life without writing about the gypsy who, before dying there, lived next door, studied my palm and informed me that my lifeline was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

“Kahn-Flected” she said, “many lives at once.” I’d settled my “conflict,” pushed the dreamy poet to one side, shoved the risky, voice-of-the-street, Girl Jimmy Breslin down deep, and suited up for what seemed like a path to a non-breadline future.

The Hot’l with its creaking dumpster of an elevator, worn floral carpets and air that smelled of boiled goat, tripe and salt cod, of dime store perfume, unwashed laundry, aging flesh, dashed ambition and persistent hope was at odds with the life I’d decided upon. I wore trim little Calvin Klein suites when stepping out to the citadels of cuisine. I peered through the peephole before making the dash from my door. To linger in the hallway, or on a page, might cause me reconsider. No pair of Prada pumps has scurried faster from an apartment to an elevator than mine.

In those years I was apprenticing myself to established forms — the critique, the food feature, the news story. My work was derivative, therefore flat as a crepe in a pan. Occasionally, a little whiff from the Hot’l would sneak into a story. It was the only time that my prose bubbled and spit. Writing from what scares you is a lot like unbuttoning the Calvin Klein and pulling on the sweatpants. You exhale. You give thanks to the inventors of elastic waistbands.

In addition to the imagination that can fizz from a close brush with something you’d rather avoid, writing what’s true — as opposed to what you thought was so, or wished were so — also humanizes. One of the reasons I love Smitten Kitchen is that its creator, Deb Perelman, writes from where she is: a tablespoon-size kitchen that is as familiar to me as the tiny Magic Chef at the old Hot’l. Cara Eisenpress and Phoebe Lapine chronicle a similar challenge in www.BigGirlsSmallKitchen.com.

I read them in part to revisit my past, in part to marvel at how the zeitgeist has shifted — its cool to be under-square-footaged today — in part to be grateful for the six burner Viking, the yards of counters, the four wall ovens that surround me today as I type at my kitchen table.

I also read them because these writers ring true. Their wee kitchens may not be the embarrassment cooking closets were when dinosaurs roamed, but what they are writing about is not, in the end, spatial or generational. It’s about how to Houdini big dreams into small spaces. It’s about what writers do every day.

We sit. We type. We avoid typing. We type some more. On good days, we sit in scary places and give them voice. On really good days, the voice we summon transcends the worrying self and touches something universal, like hope.

Last year, when she was about to post a piece about the financial terrors of writing for a living, Monica Bhide hesitated.

“It felt like a huge risk to reveal,” she said, “I had to convince myself that the piece showed strength, not weakness.” In the end, outing her shame allowed her readers to name their own.

Writing the piece also convinced Bhide to expand a series of interviews she’d done with women who had been galvanized by adversity into a book, Conversations with Exceptional Women: Seeds of Inspiration to Help you Bloom Where You are Planted. The book, indeed Bhide’s ouvre, suggests a practical, self-hope approach to the sitting with the things that scare you.

Talking to Bhide made me aware of the habits I’ve developed by trial and, more often, error, that help keep my spine straight and give a little alloy to my nerve. Embarrassingly, my approach is right out of the Apple-a-Day school.

You can’t summon inspiration, you can’t command courage. You can’t hurry prose. The writing life is an endless pursuit of patience, persistence, productivity and nerve. There is a particular internal homeostasis that supports that long-distance run. That same condition — which I call equanimity — seems to attract inspiration and imagination.

Reading is the best vitamin a writer can take. I read to be moved, to be jealous, to be motivated, to be distracted, to be absorbed, to be changed, to be awed. I read more than I write. Shortly after I began sifting through the files inside the folder labeled NEXT, I started re-reading the late Judith Moore.

In her collection of essays, Never Eat Your Heart Out and her memoir Fat Girl: a True Story, Moore dove into a fathomless cistern of shame to write about her relationship with food. The essays transcend the food writing genre, and endure, now more than a decade after her death, as literature. I can’t imagine the courage it took to dive into that water, skinless, without oxygen or tether. But reading her make me think twice when I start ferreting around for an easy way out. Reading her makes me want to write.

Happy New Year.

14 Tips on How to Live Like a Writer from Molly O’Neill

by Molly on January 4, 2013 in Uncategorized

Living like a writer requires writing often, keeping your focus, and a few other things — not the least of which is a sharp pencil. Here are Molly O’Neill’s 14 tips to live like a a writer. WRITE ON!

Click image to enlarge.

Thinking Cookbooks: The Perfect Flaky Pie Crust

by Molly on November 28, 2012 in Thinking Cookbooks, Uncategorized

by Julie Grice

The perfect pie crust — and there are many — is an American obsession, and there have been a bevy of pie cookbooks introduced to the market lately. Like most things, the perfect crust is a result of art and science and, like the scientist I was trained to be, I took the year’s best pie books to the kitchen and put them to the test, looking for the most fool-proof flaky crust.

Some bakers swear by all-butter crusts, while others stand behind shortening, lard, or even cream cheese. In my testing, I focused on butter and shortening crusts, and found that a combination of the two is ideal, especially for piecrust novices. Butter may provide the flavor, but it is notoriously difficult to use in a piecrust on its own. It melts quickly, and has a relatively high water content.

This is where the shortening comes in. It is stable at a much higher temperature than butter, so it helps the crust hold its shape as it bakes and provides flakiness. Use too much, and you’ll have a greasy and flavorless crust. But use just a little, and you’ll have malleable dough that is easy to roll out.

To me, the ideal piecrust is composed of countless layers of fat and flour that flake and dissolve into a buttery richness on your tongue. To get such a flaky crust, the dough needs to be filled with large, visible chunks of fat. The fat traps the steam from the water as the crust cooks, effectively separating the layers of flour and water, giving the final crust those layers. If the pieces are too small, they will melt in the oven before the steam can “puff” up the layers, leaving you with a too dense crust. To keep the fat from melting too quickly, the assembled pie should also be chilled before baking.

Photo by Persnickity Palate

For a flaky crust, the dough must be handled as little as possible. If it is overworked, too much gluten (the protein in wheat flour) develops and leaves the crust tough and chewy. For this same reason, the dough must rest in the refrigerator before it is rolled out. This rechills the fat so it doesn’t melt during rolling and relaxes the gluten so that the crust doesn’t shrink back as you roll it.

To keep myself from being lured in one direction or another by the filling instead of the crust in my taste testing, I used the same filling recipe for every pie: Brown Sugar Apple from Ken Haedrich’s Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pies.As I baked, I judged each crust recipe on how easy it was to manage and roll, as well as how large the visible chunks of butter and shortening were in the resting dough. Once they were baked, I looked for clear layers that shattered and flaked apart when I cut into the pie. I tested each crust recipe at least twice, just to be sure the results were consistent.

I started with the most voluminous book, Ken Haedrich’s Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pies (Harvard Common Press, 2011). Haedrich, a self-taught-cook-turned-cooking-teacher-and-food-writer, is the “Dean” of The Pie Academy. With over twenty pages of “Required Reading: What It Takes to Make The Perfect Pie,” his book seemed a logical place to start. The book thoroughly details how to make a crust by hand, with a food processor, and with an electric mixer. But while the rolling, filling and cooling instructions seem scientifically sound and full of helpful tips, the crust recipe gives you more of a shortbread-like crust than a flaky one. While this is an excellent crust that certainly has its place, it didn’t make the cut for my flaky pie crust mission.

The reason for this shortbread-like texture is that Haedrich’s methods create too-small pieces of fat. He indicates that they should be “pea-sized.” Though this is a commonly used phrase, I found in my experiments that crusts are flakiest when the chunks of butter and shortening were more the size of a thumbprint.

Whatever my quibbles may be with the author’s shortcrust preference, the breadth and imagination of his fillings make this the volume I will consult when I want 50 pages of possibilities for apple pie, or 136 pages of ideas for berry and other summer pies.

Next, I turned to the trendiest pie cookbook: Handheld Pies: Dozens of Pint Size Sweets and Savories by Sarah Billingsley and Rachel Wharton (Chronicle, 2011). Wharton is a James Beard Award–winning writer and editor, while Sarah Billingsley is a cookbook editor and co-author of Whoopie Pies, another popular “mini treats” cookbook. As a rule, the authors refuse to use shortening in their crust, saying, “We do not use shortening. We know this is an affront to many of you – especially to Southerners who grew up loving the easy-to-handle dough it yields and its smooth taste in flaky baked crusts. But we simply don’t think it tastes anywhere near as good as butter, lard or cream cheese. Yes, it yields malleable dough and flaky crusts, but flaky yet flavorless is not what we enjoy.”

Their crust recipe does work, despite the lack of shortening: it rolls out nicely, is easy to handle and has a reasonable level of flakiness. This book’s true draw, however, comes from its forming and baking methods. Mini desserts are all the rage right now, and Handheld Pies hits on every permutation out there: free-form “pop tarts,” pies made in Mason jars and pies made in muffin tins. Those who prefer more filling than crust will love the structured pies, which are made in a muffin tin, while crust lovers will be drawn to the free-formed pies. As a crust fanatic, I was thrilled to serve a variety of pie “pop tarts” on Thanksgiving.

A Year of Pies: A Seasonal Tour of Home Baked Pies (Lark Crafts, 2012) is Ashley English’s, the author of the Homemade Living Series, latest venture. Her Basic Pie Dough (Shortening and Butter Version) was by far the easiest dough to handle. It rolled out smoothly, and held its shape well when I cut shapes out of the top crust and crimped the edges. However, it had so much shortening that the crust itself was a little bland and greasy. Just a touch more butter and little less shortening would have made this piecrust the winner.

I ended my quest for a foolproof flaky piecrust with Gesine Bullock-Prado’s Pie It Forward: Pies, Tarts, Tortes, Galettes and Other Pastries Reinvented (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2012), which was the focus of my final pie experiments. Bullock-Prado, author and commercial bakery owner, is known for her beautiful, vibrant pastries. The part-shortening variation of her “easy pie dough” uses nearly the same proportions of fat, flour and water as Handheld Pies with the key exceptions that hers includes a little shortening and a teaspoon of lemon juice. Adding a bit of acid, like vinegar or lemon juice, inhibits gluten formation, so even if you accidentally overwork your dough a bit, you will still come out with a flaky, instead of tough, crust.

The dough was easy to handle and roll out, and the baked crust was flaky and buttery and flavorful. While this is an excellent crust recipe, it doesn’t appear to be used in many of the pie recipes within the book. The bulk of those use the tart doughs and puff pastry dough she also details in “The Basics” chapter. Regardless, I found her crust recipes to be as detailed and as filled with helpful tips as I did the recipes in her first book, Sugar Baby, though the lack of a table of contents is a bit disorienting.

From now on, I’ll rely on a combination of two pie cookbooks: Pie by Haedrich for its filling recipes and techniques, and Pie It Forward by Bullock-Prado for its perfectly flaky, fool-proof crust.

Part-Butter/Part-Shortening Easy Pie Dough

Recipe from Pie It Forward: Pies, Tarts, Tortes, Galettes & Other Pastries Reinvented by Gesine Bullock-Prado
Makes enough dough for 1 (9-inch/23-cm) double-crust pie

2 cups all-purpose flour, cold
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
12 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small pieces and chilled in the freezer for 10 minutes
4 tablespoons shortening, chilled in the freezer for 10 minutes
½ cup ice water (don’t add the ice to the pie dough, just the water)
1 teaspoon lemon juice

1. In the bowl of a food processor fitted with the blade attachment, pulse together the flour, salt, sugar, and butter until the mixture resembles cornmeal.

2. In a small bowl, stir together the ice water and the lemon juice. Slowly add the liquid to the flour mixture, pulsing, until the dough just comes together. Squeeze a small piece of dough between your thumb and index finger to make sure it holds its shape.

3. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and divide it in half. Gently turn over each piece of dough a few times so that any dry bits are incorporated. Form each piece into a loose disk, cover the dough with plastic wrap, and let it rest in the refrigerator for at least 20 minutes.

Julie Grice writes the blog SavvyEat.com, where she uses her food science and engineering background to teach readers about the science behind our food and the best way to store food. She also writes about her favorite recipes, creative meal planning, and appreciating the little things in life. When she isn’t blogging, Julie is designing sites for Savvy Blog Services and serving as an administrator for the Healthy Living Blogs community website.

Green-Eyed Gratitude

by Molly on November 20, 2012 in Uncategorized

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had. -Erica Jong

When you write, you are alone. It’s like being born or dying, and generally it feels like one or the other. You’re either bursting forth in a new exclamation of life, you are Fats Waller, Thelonius Monk, Chick Corea — you are invincible! — and your keyboard will never stop, or you are sure that you will never write another meaningful, melodic, potentially Pulitzer Prize-winning word.

Monsters lurk in that dark space. They are homeless, has-been, never-quite-weres. They are could-have-beens, should-have-beens, the overlooked, the under-appreciated, the scary destiny of the unwritten word. The monsters are you and one of the scariest of all is the one with green eyes. Why does she get….How could he have won….You know the tune. I don’t know a writer who has not suffered at least a shudder, if not a crippling case of the Why Not Me’s.

Raised by a one-time minor league baseball player, I was marinated from birth to believe that envy is for losers. Therefore, thankfully, my relationship with Literary Envy is neither close nor constant. I brush up against it, a smelly groper on a crowded train who tends to strike when I notice a banner ad for a best seller that I wish I’d written.

Writing from my kitchen table, Thanksgiving 2012, Rensselaerville, NY. Now who’s the luckiest girl?

Almost as quickly as the grope, one of my father’s constant refrains takes over the inside of my head.

“The fastest way to take your eye off the ball is to think about how somebody else is hitting it,” he said.”You didn’t win MVP this year because you are gonna win it next year,” he said.

“It comes and goes. You can’t beat a wave, all you can do it ride it,” he said.

Depending on which refrain sounds, my jealousy is trumped by A. being reminded that I can’t afford distraction, or B. blind optimism, or C. a reminder that the muse is one powerful and unpredictable lady who will always have it her way.
Wooing the Muse is a lifelong sport. She is as expansive as she is imperious, she can be counted on to take a powder at the first glint of green eye. Jealousy constricts imagination, knots energy like a nasty cramped muscle. The Muse is no nursemaid.

Some writers have outed their own jealousies and provided everything from checklists to natural histories of getting to the other side. When I Googled “writers” and “jealousy” I got: “About 9,880,000 results (0.30 seconds).” Most focus on intervention. They address post-onset-jealousy, and offer techniques that can minimize its distraction. These are useful techniques, but it’s even better to take a preventative approach to the green-eyed monster.

At its first wince, after all, The Muse is vamoose. She does not like being squeezed and contorted. She does not linger in climates of recrimination and regret. She likes the wide-open, endless desserts in which a single green thing is always possible, never owed and never wholly deserved.

Hope springs eternal

Gratitude is the most potent anti-envy quality that a writer can cull. When you are solidly planted in your own good fortune, possibility pulses like the steady beat of the heart. You can see the page, empty and bright, but in proper scale: it’s a page. You are aware of yourself as a sentient being, bearing witness and making sense of the world, doing what you were born to do. Gratitude is to jealousy what garlic is to vampires.

Which brings me, quite conveniently, to Thanksgiving and the farm stand that surrounds me on the kitchen table as I type, and the feast that will be cooked and the friends who will gather and the ghost of my father who supported his six children by digging ditches and never failed to marvel at his good fortune.”Aren’t we just the luckiest kids?” he’d say. “We got to do a little of what we love today!”

(He also said, at least once a week: “It’s all about luck, Honey,” paused for two beats and then added, “Have you ever noticed that the more you play the luckier you get?”)

Happy Thanksgiving.

When you riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. -Bob Marley

SOME USEFUL LINKS FOR POST ONSET WRITERS’ ENVY INTERVENTION

The Review Review

Absolute Write

The Rumpus

Alumni Notes: Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture at the American Museum of Natural History

by Molly on November 19, 2012 in Our Crowd, Uncategorized

Sara Franklin, who interned and wrote prodigiously at CooknNScribble’s Author’s Retreat this past June, was on hand the other night as the American Museum of Natural History premiered Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture, an exhibition that celebrates cultures and cooking, as well as historic meals, markets, farming and the science of taste.

Sara, a doctoral candidate in Food Studies at NYU who also writes book reviews for CookNScribble, served as a research associate for the exhibition, which opened officially November 17th and runs through August 11th.

Dinner at the Diorama? See you there.

Alumni Notes: The Bengali Five Spice Chronicles

by Molly on November 17, 2012 in Our Crowd

Rinku Bhattacharya, a Food Blog U and Master Class member at CooknScribble, published her first cookbook THE BENGALI FIVE SPICE CHRONICLES just a few days ago. Rinku teaches cooking in her home in Westchester and the book contains 180 recipes inspired by her grandmother’s East Indian kitchen, all of which she has adapted, cooking class by cooking class, to seasonal American ingredients.

Rinku, has a doctorate in business, or perhaps it is Busyness. In addition to her at-home cooking classes,

How does Rinku have time to take food writing classes? Is it that magic Bengali Spice mixture recipe in her first cookbook? Spread the word! Support an Alum!she has a husband, two children, a foodie cat, teaches at a community college, blogs at www.cookinginwestchester.com and contributes a weekly column, Spices and Seasons, to the Westchester News’ website.

Order Rinku’s book today!

See Me, Hear Me, Touch Me, Read Me

by Molly on November 5, 2012 in Molly's Blog

The images in this post are from the British painter, John Williams Waterhouse (1849-1917), the so-called “modern Pre-Raphaelite,” whose painting was influenced both by the Pre-Raphaelites and the emerging Impressionists. His interpretations from Greek mythology and Arthurian legend tend to capture a single moment that tells the story, often through evoking a trance-like immersion in the senses.

Food writers have a unique opportunity to deploy sensory images. We inhabit, and seek to bear witness to, moments that smell and taste uniquely of themselves and gesture (or not) toward the wider world.

We have, as well, an exceptionally high occurrence of savantism, hyper-sensitivity to matters of nose and mouth, all but oblivious to what we see, hear, or feel against the skin. Unless, of course, its sugar, dangerously darkening over a high flame, sweetness gone acrid, the angry hiss of scorched caramel spackling the hand like tiny, angry chicken pox.

For any writer, writing with dulled senses is playing with less than a full deck. Any sensation can be a powerful ally in creating ambience, building character, gesturing toward backstory, evoking place and time. The senses are also immediate, delivering the writer raw and alive to the page.

In The Practical Heart, Allan Gurganus uses sensory description to accomplish each of these. Below are descriptions of the writer’s Aunt Muriel, the daughter of a dispossessed minor Scottish lord who moved his family to Chicago in the early twentieth century. Sight, sound, feel, smell and taste work hand-in-hand to create the world of a complicated eighty-one year old woman and her enthralled eight-year old nephew.

Emanating from the senses, these descriptions reveal the author as well. By following a whiff, a glance, or a touch back through memory, or out beyond the frame of the apparent story, Gurganus creates both a vivid world, and a compelling worldview.

SEE ME

Leaving her own office, the young Aunt Muriel encounters not just rush hour, but an ethos, the Chicago stockyard era evoked by a single visual image: a blue-black trough filled with a gigantic ant.

“The great male working force came pouring into Chicago’s streets; unnumbered black bowler hats made an antlike carapace of bent advancing heads. Here came featureless husband and bachelors blindly seeking some profitable use of the little energy not squeezed from them all day at office desks, counters, stools — such warrens, a kind of human stock yard. The far end of the street showed the great clear lake; the shadowed buildings made a blue-black trough, and down it, in this direction, poured the mass of ruddy faces, tonsured moustaches, white celluloid collars, in their buoyant voices — joking about beer and sporting wagers — Muriel heard a closing-hour longing she well knew….”

Decades later, her young nephew observes:

“Her sketchy, unassuming body seemed furled and inwardly spiraling as the habitual umbrella.”

“Muriel’s preparations seemed so elaborate — the umbrella, maps of the city and all major museums — her purse a-bulge with thermoses, three spare hankies for us each — these must have reassured my folks, “Your purse, Muriel,” Dad once joked, “could’ve saved the Donner party.”

“Her dark tailored suit was downright postal in its many pockets that buttoned; these contained coins, breath sweeteners, a pen-flash-light, one silver mechanical pencil, lilac sachet the size of tumors. She always carried a British halfpenny brought over when she was a girl…”

HEAR ME

“Only her laughter preserved what Muriel might’ve become if left in state at Sunnyside in Scotland: her chortle lurched out raucous, starling and indolent, selfish.”

“Muriel gave off her spoilt, cruel laugh that hinted at some unknown former beauty.”

TOUCH ME

Observing a painting of his aunt, the author notes:

“And the slight pressure of her pianist’s hand caused the petals of the lowest peony to drop, with a half a humid sigh, around her tensed white forefinger and thumb on which all weight now pivoted.”

Walking with her decades later, however, the author experienced the same hand in a different way

“Muriel’s right hand — the one ungloved, kept bare for me — was day and hard around my own. Mine sweated as with stage fright. Her felt very callused. Fearing my disloyalty, I could shut my eyes and pretend I walked beside a pet, an animal, but something like a chimpanzee, trained up as nearly human.”

SMELL ME

“I recall Aunt Muriel’s always smelling clean yet clerical. It was a minty, neutral scent, like the glue on a good business envelope. If she was agitated, her aroma could upgrade to that of Twinning’s English Breakfast Tea steeping after being violently at boil.”

KNOW ME

By drawing on sight, temperature, sound and touch, the author creates a moment that captures a hidden society and allows the reader to feel what it is like to be on the outside, ever observed, never quite understood.

“Muriel always seemed calmer in the dessert parts of a museum. here red-fire extinguishers hung undisguised and seemed part of the the pre-Cambrian detail. Fire Hatchets were framed behind “Break Glass Only for Emergency,” Sunlight swarmed with specimens of dust motes spelt out in tweedy, milky blocks. In such still vaulted afternoon chambers, the day itself seemed trapped, and then capaciously exhibited. Radiators clanged with a zoo’s fitful pounding. In the late and silent sunlight, on glass case, one clear side of it, would bring into focus all the sun’s off-color energy. At the far end, beyond the Hall of Birds, a single pane of brightness burned, and soon that winning pane, with its Latin Label on the lifted tail of some stuffed extinct rodent, was so attended by stray spectator brilliance, it seemed about to burst, most wonderful, to flame.

The only other people you ever saw here were either lost of scary, hidden by choice. You heard their rubber soles long before they appeared, and there was often something wrong with them. (How must Aunt and I have looked to them?) They’d come past carrying too much luggage or hiding birthmarked faces or walking with brave rectitude on a squeaky built-up shoe. They were other avoiders, seeking contact with a world made just a little safer by the art of taxidermy, by glass, by frame, by art.”

I imagine Gurganus, sitting in a little-traveled room in a museum on an afternoon, noticing the light through the windows, the sounds in the halls, the expressions on faces. Did his observations feed a setting already chosen? Or did the experience form an irresistible tableau that informed the novella? Either is possible, both require being quiet enough to notice, the patience to allow sensation to register, percolate, stretch into metaphor and restraint.

To use the senses, you have to become aware of them. For years, I sat in a small dump of a place, the original Cupcake Cafe, on 9th Avenue in New York City for half an hour every morning and wrote down everything I noticed. Carrying a notebook and using the molecules of time otherwise known as “unforeseen delays” to record what you see, hear, feel, smell and taste is a good way to increase your awareness of the world around you (and lower your blood pressure).

Once your observations are as steady as breathing, you can begin to play with them in writing. Less is always more when recording a physical sensation. Avoid adjectives. Be specific.

A soup can boil. But if said soup “sighs globules of beef fat” you begin to taste it, as well as the weather, the ambience of the kitchen, the mood of the cook. A bookshelf can be “wooden” but when it is ebony, or weathered barn board, Regency veneer or burled oak it is a bookshelf that bespeaks a world.

Think of a keenly observed, plainly rendered sensation as a perfectly cut diamond. The simplest setting shows the stone to its best advantage. The overwrought distracts, it undermines, it equivocates, it apologizes. Sort of like a woman who can’t decide on a single perfume.