Cooking Blues and Elders (Berries, that is)

Since I promised that I would make another blue­berry dessert for MJ and the J-Man, I ended up mak­ing the last one of the sea­son. For next year (or if you can still get your hands on the last of this summer’s extra­or­di­nary crop), now you too can make my favourite old recipe for dessert, Blue­berry Buckle:

Blue­berry Buckle

(From “Amer­i­can Clas­sics” cook­book, part of the Cook’s Mag­a­zine Series)

4 table­spoons unsalted but­ter
3/4 cup (3 3/4 oz. ) unbleached all-purpose flour
3/4 cup (5 1/4 oz.) plus 1 table­spoon sugar (I pre­fer organic sugar, if you can find it. It has a cleaner flavour and crunchier tex­ture for the bit on top.)
1 tea­spoon bak­ing pow­der
1/4 tea­spoon salt
3/4 cup milk
2 cups blue­ber­ries, picked over and rinsed

Adjust oven rack to lower-middle posi­tion and heat oven to 350°. Put but­ter in an 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan (I get away with a 9-inch rec­tan­gu­lar pan) and place pan in the oven to melt the butter.

Mean­while, whisk the flour, 3/4 cup sugar, bak­ing pow­der, and salt together in a bowl. Add the milk and whisk until just incor­po­rated into the dry ingredients.

When the but­ter has melted, remove the pan from the oven. Pour the bat­ter into the pan with­out stir­ring it into the but­ter. Arrange the blue­ber­ries over the bat­ter. Sprin­kle with the remain­ing table­spoon of sugar.

Bake until the sur­face is golden brown and the edges begin to pull away from the sides of the pan, about 40 or 50 min­utes. Serve warm, with vanilla ice cream, if you like (we’ve had it within noth­ing added plenty of times).

This is so ridicu­lously easy a recipe, that you can do it on a whim. I made it at least 4 times this sum­mer, and look for­ward to mak­ing it again sev­eral times next sum­mer. Who said a baked fruit dessert has to take much time or effort?

Other berries…

The other night, we took a bag of Elder­ber­ries home from Granville Mar­ket. Louis, the Mush­room Guru, who we fre­quently chat with and get advice about what’s in sea­son, what’s grow­ing, how to pre­pare things, etc. had them and told us what to do. We boiled them down with a lit­tle water, sugar, and apple slices (for the pectin), fil­tered what it reduced to through some cheese­cloth, and we got a thick, pur­ple syrup. Here are a few pho­tos of the process:

Pam tried some of this final cup or so of syrup on vanilla ice cream tonight and said it tasted a lot like blue­ber­ries. I’m going to try it in sparkling water to see if it makes good ‘Elder­berry Soda’. No, we have no plans of mak­ing Elder­berry Wine, but we’ve cer­tainly heard about that very old-fashioned potent potable.

Nine Times

I took this screen­shot of my menu bar (I use Menu­Cal­en­dar­Clock, an appli­ca­tion that offers more flex­i­bil­ity in terms of what it dis­plays, along with a drop-down mini-calendar that syncs with iCal).

Yes, that was a pic­ture taken at 9:09 on 9–9-09. Next year I get to take one a month and a day and an hour and a minute later to match.

Oh, and the title refers to a line from the movie Fer­ris Bueller’s Day Off. If you don’t know it, you’ll just have to see it.

Blueberry Custard Pie with Ginger Nut Crumb Crust

I think I’ve prob­a­bly men­tioned at some point or other that while I like to cook (a lot!), the one kind of food that I rarely make is dessert. It’s a com­bi­na­tion of sev­eral rea­sons; I don’t have a par­tic­u­lar sweet tooth, and in fact, usu­ally crave salty, crunchy things (My weak­ness is crunchy, salty, melted cheesy things, like nachos, pizza or raclette). In a fine restau­rant, you’ll often see me order­ing the cheese plate for dessert. I also don’t have a lot of faith in my abil­ity to get the exact mea­sure­ments that cake bak­ing requires (I tend to work on esti­mates, a dash of this, a splash of that, a hand­ful of the other…). Finally, my mother admit­ted that she could never bake a pie. For all of us in our fam­ily, pie-making was a black art, a skill that my mother had never been able to gain, being a Euro­pean immi­grant from a place where they made strudel, tortes and palatschinken, but rarely tarts and never pies. Since I learned most of my early cook­ing from her, I also lacked the abil­ity to make a pie.
So tonight, at the end of the sum­mer, I decided that instead of the usual way that I’ve been deal­ing with the abun­dance blue­ber­ries this sum­mer, due to the area’s bumper crop, I would throw together a lit­tle orig­i­nal dessert cre­ation, which I’m going to call: Blue­berry Cus­tard Pie with Gin­ger Nut Crumb Crust. It’s dead easy, and if you also have some of those blue­ber­ries (or straw­ber­ries, bananas or other fruit that goes well with cus­tard), this might be a good way to use them.

Blue­berry Cus­tard Pie with Gin­ger Nut Crumb Crust

For the crust:
1 package/roll of McVitie’s Gin­ger Nuts (their ver­sion of Gin­ger Snaps)
3 table­spoons unsalted but­ter, chilled and cut into small pieces

For the fill­ing:
3 table­spoons Bird’s Cus­tard Pow­der
3 table­spoons sugar
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup water
2 cups fresh blueberries

Instruc­tions:
Pre­heat the oven to 350° . Crush the cook­ies in a food proces­sor (or put them in a bag and hit them with ham­mer, if you haven’t got one).  After most of the big­ger pieces have got­ten bro­ken down (about 10–12 pulses), add the but­ter, and process for another 15 sec­onds or so. But­ter a pie plate and dump the crumbs onto it. Press it down on all sides so that it’s even. Bake in the oven for about 15–20 min­utes, but be care­ful not to burn the crumbs.Let cool.

Make the cus­tard: Put sugar and cus­tard mix in a pan, and slowly wisk in milk and water. Bring to a full boil while stir­ring nearly con­tin­u­ously (cus­tard will thicken as you cook it. This is essen­tially the recipe from the side of the can.). Let cool, cov­ered, to just over room temperature.

Pour the cus­tard over the crust, and top with the fruit. Serve after chilled. Resist the urge to eat it right away or the cus­tard won’t let you cut nice neat slices. Which may or may not mat­ter to you.

The Fin­ished (and par­tially devoured) Pie

This is about as homely and ready-made as I ever get (Cus­tard from a mix!? Cookie crumb crust!?) and has a 1950s-English-household feel to it (not sur­pris­ing, given that 2 of the ingre­di­ents in it are British). How­ever, I have to admit that it does taste awfully good, since the molasses and but­ter in the crust taste a bit like tof­fee, and the cus­tard and blue­ber­ries go well together. While I don’t plan on mak­ing it for com­pany, it is prob­a­bly going to show up on the din­ner table next sum­mer, espe­cially if we are get­ting as good a blue­berry crop as this year’s.

Things Only a Republican Could Believe

I haven’t blogged much about US pol­i­tics in a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been fol­low­ing the farce that is the cur­rent debate about ‘Death Pan­els’, Obama’s birth cer­tifi­cate, Con­spir­a­cies about the sub­ver­sive art­work around Rock­e­feller Cen­ter and other inanities.

I saw this on reddit.com, and would nor­mally merely link to it, but it’s so spot-on that I just had to include it here. Sure, it’s got some rude words and is a bit angry, but these days, so are a lot of us:

So, y’all remem­ber that email that went around years ago called “Things Only a Repub­li­can Could Believe”? I’m pretty sure there was a Demo­c­ra­tic vari­ant as well. Well, I’ve put together a new and updated list and wanted to run it by you. Please feel free to add to it or offer corrections\comments. If you like it — email it out to your spam­ming list. I’m hop­ing for a bit of a viral effect to get it cir­cu­lat­ing. Satire is an effec­tive weapon against craziness!

I make no apolo­gies if you con­sider your­self a Repub­li­can. I am a reg­is­tered Inde­pen­dent and have voted Repub­li­can at var­i­ous lev­els of gov­ern­ment, but the cur­rent crop of Repub­li­cans at the national level are off the reser­va­tion. To call them bat shit crazy would be an insult to bat shit.

• Par­ents who don’t want their chil­dren to pray in school are Anti-American zealots — par­ents who don’t want their chil­dren to lis­ten to a speech by the Pres­i­dent of the United States telling them to work hard and get good grades are noble patriots.
• Peace­fully demon­strat­ing against the coun­try start­ing an inter­na­tional war is trea­son — show­ing up with auto­matic weapons to protest health­care reform is democ­racy at its finest.
• Any gov­ern­ment offi­cial with a desk job should have every action scru­ti­nized — any gov­ern­ment offi­cial with a badge and a gun should never be ques­tioned or dis­re­spected. At all. Ever.
• Ques­tion­ing the legit­i­macy of an elec­tion because the “win­ner” was selected by the Supreme Court is sour grapes — ques­tion­ing the legit­i­macy of an elec­tion because the win­ner (by the largest num­ber of votes in Amer­i­can his­tory) is really a Kenyan born Mus­lim despite all evi­dence to the con­trary is being a vig­i­lant American.
• Lying about a blowjob is an impeach­able offense — lying about a war is no big deal, really.
• Inves­ti­gat­ing a shady land deal involv­ing the First Lady is a mat­ter of National Iden­tity — inves­ti­gat­ing the use of tor­ture at the direc­tion of the Exec­u­tive Branch is a par­ti­san witch hunt.
• Exe­cut­ing Japan­ese offi­cers for water­board­ing pris­on­ers dur­ing WWII shows that we have the moral high-ground on human rights — water­board­ing (our own) pris­on­ers of our shows that we have the moral high ground on human rights.
• Sit­ting two rows in front of Jane Fonda in a 1970 anti-war rally is an OUTRAGE!  Shak­ing Saddam’s hand in 1983…meh, not so much.
• Any­one who ques­tions the pres­i­dent dur­ing a time of war is giv­ing aide and com­fort to the enemy and should be deported…unless the pres­i­dent in ques­tion has a (D) next to their name in which case you should under­mine them at every turn even if you have to rou­tinely make shit up to do it.
• Social­ism, Marx­ism, Com­mu­nism and Fas­cism are all inter­change­able words that mean pretty much the same thing.
• Any­one who abuses drugs should be locked up indefinitely…unless they are a pop­u­lar Repub­li­can radio host in which case they need your prayers as they recover from the ill­ness of addiction.
• Health Insur­ance com­pa­nies have your best inter­ests in mind and any­one who thinks oth­er­wise is try­ing to turn Amer­ica into the God­less hea­then nation of Swe­den where every­one in the coun­try dies (eventually).
• Obama is an athe­ist com­mu­nist mus­lim who attended a rad­i­cal chris­t­ian church.
• Believ­ing that human activ­ity could impact the global envi­ron­ment is crazy talk — believ­ing that an invis­i­ble man in the sky per­son­ally told George Bush to invade Iraq to ful­fill Bib­li­cal prophecy is log­i­cally sound.
• The ver­dict is still out on evo­lu­tion — but Jesus Christ return­ing in our life­times is a pretty much a given.
• The media are unques­tion­ably biased against Repub­li­cans — Talk Radio, The Wash­ing­ton Times, The Weekly Stan­dard, The Wall Street Jour­nal, Rightwing Blogs, Fox News and News­Corp are not part of the media.
• The gov­ern­ment should have no part in reg­u­lat­ing multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions as they make deci­sions that impact the lives of mil­lions of peo­ple — gov­ern­ment should reg­u­late indi­vid­u­als by deter­min­ing who they can marry, what kind of inter­course they can have, what they can smoke, how to man­age their preg­nancy and how to pro­ceed with end of life decisions.
• Com­mu­ni­cat­ing with hos­tile nations is a stab in the back to our great nation — Rea­gan com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the USSR dur­ing the Cold War was Polit­i­cal Genius.
• Iran is a mor­tal threat to our nation and any­one who attempts to talk to them is trai­tor­ous scum — sell­ing weapons to Iran and then fun­nel­ing the money to start wars in South Amer­ica is clearly in our National interest.
• George Bush kept the nation safe after 9–11 (NOTE: the Anthrax attacks, the DC Sniper and Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina don’t count. Also, the fact that 9–11 hap­pened on his watch despite receiv­ing a secu­rity brief­ing specif­i­cally warn­ing of the attack doesn’t count either.)
• Social Secu­rity, Mei­d­care, pub­lic school­ing, pub­lic libraries, fire depart­ments, police depart­ments and the US Mil­i­tary are as Amer­i­can as Apple Pie — uni­ver­sal health­care is ZOMGDEATHPANELSOCIALISM!!
• George W Bush is a reg­u­lar ‘ole Texas rancher just like you and me despite the fact that he was born in Con­necti­cut, attended two Ivy League schools, bought the Craw­ford ranch just before run­ning for pres­i­dent, sold it imme­di­ate after leav­ing office and is ter­ri­fied of horses.
• The two guys at the cen­ter of the Water­gate and Iran-Contra scan­dals are trust­wor­thy voices in dis­cus­sions of cur­rent national pol­icy and should be taken at face-value.

…and my addi­tion that I heard some time back on twit­ter and still quote to this day:

Fol­low up:
I loved this bit of video from MSNBC that sums up how I’m feel­ing about a great deal of Amer­ica these days:

Cold Season and Another Try with FontKit

I haven’t had a cold in quite a while, so the one I have now feels par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing. It’s not as if I’ve for­got­ten what a cold is like, but I think you can get used to them, when you get them more often (and I’m sure I did suf­fer from fre­quent colds– nearly every few months or so when we lived in Boston). It’s a rainy day, and this is Cold: Day 2 ( which means, runny nose, sneezes and a lit­tle less energy), Cold: Day 2 is always eas­ier for me than Cold: Day 1 (sore throat, runny nose, feel­ing like crap). Hope­fully, this cold will progress at the usual rate, or maybe even faster.

It’s Labour Day week­end, and although I do have a con­tract I’m work­ing on, I do have the lux­ury of not hav­ing to work very much this 3-day week­end. This hol­i­day falls on the last week­end of sum­mer and ush­ers in School, Work, and gen­eral ‘Lets-Get-Down-To-It’ sort of things that we asso­ciate with the Fall sea­son. We’ve had a spec­tac­u­larly sunny sum­mer, and it really was extra­or­di­nary, with months and months of sun­shine, sun­shine and more sun­shine. That was unfor­tu­nate for those peo­ple who had to deal with wild­fires to the East of us, but for those of us in the city or near the water, July and August have been a rarely inter­rupted suc­ces­sion of one beau­ti­ful day after another. Does this mean we are in for some weather come­up­pance?  Will we see a Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary mon­soon, or worse, lots of snow, like last year? Time will tell, I sup­pose. What I can say for sure is that for the first time in ages, the rain that we have (and there has been a lit­tle of it), is falling on a week­end. Rainy week­ends hold their own charm for me; you don’t have to feel guilty about indoor pur­suits like movies, TV, blog­ging, lis­ten­ing to iTunes or even clean­ing up the place. I’m not miss­ing any pre­cious hours of vit­a­min D har­vest, and it can be nice to be cozy, wrapped in a blan­ket, snooz­ing through some of those sniffles.

The end of the Sum­mer really began a cou­ple of weeks ago when Pam and I once again went to the PNE, which is in its last week­end right now. While we missed Dal Richards, (Canada’s answer to Guy Lom­bardo and Glen Miller and a liv­ing leg­end, still per­form­ing well into his 90’s), we did make it to see many of the ani­mals (and on Open­ing Day, there are many of them):

The Open­ing Day crowds, brought out by the per­fect weather were large:

We chat­ted with an old friend at the Home Improve­ment Pavil­ion, ate some of those famous lit­tle donuts:

and Pam got a bar­gain of 4 ears of roasted corn for the price of 1 (the line was so long, they were get­ting behind and she got a plate of not-quite-good-enough-for-1-serving ears):

We also went to the ‘Mar­ket­place’ where you see all of those demon­stra­tions of every­thing from Sham­mies to Blenders and ended up get­ting a Smart Liv­ing Steam Mop. We’ve since put it through it’s paces on our car­pets, wood and tile at home and while it does not per­form mir­a­cles, it does work pretty well, and we hope it will help us keep the place a lit­tle cleaner. We still do need new car­pet, but that will hope­fully come in the next few months or so.

So, with the sea­son now clearly com­ing to an end, it’s time to return my atten­tion back to this blog, which I’ve been giv­ing a bit less atten­tion this sum­mer. With that, I’m try­ing to once again look at the new Font tech­nol­ogy that will be com­ing soon to a web page on your screen…

Squishy Fonts?

I’ve tried some dif­fer­ent Type­kit fonts, and it seems as if the body text is always look­ing a bit squished. I’m con­vinced it’s not the fonts them­selves, but the met­rics I’ve spec­i­fied on the orig­i­nal Geor­gia font (which is what older browsers see when they view my pages). I’ll keep at it, but for ref­er­ence, here are the fonts as they appear on the Type­Kit Edi­tor page:

As you can see, the new font, Luxi (Sans and Serif) are not sup­posed to be that squishy, so I’ll have to work on the orig­i­nal CSS (and do so with­out ruin­ing the look of the page for older browsers. Back­ward com­pat­i­bil­ity with­out mess­ing up the new fonts is going to be one of the chal­lenges for us using these new fonts, I guess.