Bye Bye Pie O My

I'm retiring. No more spending my weekends planning and cooking and plating and styling. No more fretting and fuming over pots and pans and whisks and spoons. No more shopping and buying and searching for ingredients. No more pictures and writing and editing and posting.

This blog has been so interesting to create. I started nearly five years ago in May 2008 on a whim and it morphed into at times, an all consuming project.  I've posted 348 entries; an average of seven posts a month. Some recipes turned out great. Others were a complete fiasco. But I learned something with every dish cooked, every photo taken, and every post written.

Over the years I've been doing this I've made a little (and I mean a little!) money which I most often used to buy cookbooks for my ever growing collection.  I have received an amazing array of sample food products and gadgets from companies all over the country. It was always fun to come home to boxes on the front porch and open them up to see what kind of goodies were sent my way.  My blog also generated some press with two mentions on Bon Appetit's website; once for Christmas cookies and another time for shrimp and grits. Locally, a weekly newspaper reporter interviewed me for my take as a hometown food blogger. That was certainly fun to see in print.

But the best part of doing this blog was hearing from readers and enjoying their comments, especially from my dear friends. Such generous words were always motivating. Yum! Of course my in-home fan club, The Husband, was another great motivator. I love cooking for him and he is always most grateful.  He also contributed to my recipes by year after year producing fantastic vegetables in the garden for me to put to good use.

I am going to retire my blog now and move on to some other hobbies.  Who knows, maybe someday I'll work up the energy to compile all of these posts into a cookbook. It's been fun, and through this experience I hope I have become a better cook, a better photographer, and a better writer. GOOD BYE and thanks to all of you who have followed Pie O My!

Happy Birthday To Me

I threw a birthday party for myself yesterday.  No particular reason this year. I just wanted to celebrate me.  So I invited my best friends over and with The Husband, we ate, drank and were merry.  We had a simple but yummy dinner starting with shrimp cocktails, followed by Caeser Salad and Fettucini Alfredo.  There was crusty French bread that was dipped in the most amazing fruity olive oil pressed from arbequinia olives. Find some and try it.  You'll be glad you did. We drank Lemon Drops and giggled.

For dessert I opted to purchase a cake from a renowned local bakery called Konditerei's.  The proprietor, Gerry Frank,  is a fixture in our town. He comes from a family who owned a famous department store in our state and he was the right hand man for Mark Hatfield, one of the state's long time senators. 

What Gerry Frank is probably best known for though, is his bakery and his cakes, particularly chocolate cakes.  Every year at the state fair there is a chocolate cake contest judged by Mr. Frank.  The annual winner receives not only a blue ribbon, but lots of publicity and accolades.  I purchased the Gerry's Chocolate Cake to celebrate my birthday and it was the perfect ending to a wonderful day.

Merry Chistmas

Wishing all of you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year!

Holiday Traditions

My brothers and sisters and I, Christmas circa 1959

Most family have traditions around the holidays that they carry on year after year and even generation after generation.  In my family growing up we had quite a number of them.  I don't know how many, if any, were passed on from my grandparents to my parents though. 

As Christmas approaches I have been thinking about some of those uniquely ours traditions.  On Christmas Eve we always had tuna noodle casserole.  Now some might think "How mundane."  But we all loved it. Particularly because my mother served it in chafing dish with a small candle lit underneath to keep the food warm. It seemed so elegant and to the best of my knowledge that chafing dish was only used on that one night a year.

Posing for a Christmas Card, circa 1965ish

Christmas dinner was a very traditional English dinner including roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roasted potatoes, the ubiquitous trifle and Christmas pudding to be lit afire and brought to the table flaming away.  It rarely flamed and no one ever ate it but my mother, but we went through the ritual anyway.  We also always had English Christmas crackers we would open, share the riddles, and then wear the goofy hats included in the cracker throughout our meal.  Inevitably getting through this process meant the meal would be nearly cold but it never mattered.

My father's favorite cookie, the Snowball

Another tradition was cookies.  Lots and lots of cookies. We would start baking Christmas cookies the weekend after Thanksgiving and they would go into the freezer to be pulled out by the plateful during the holiday season. My 80 year old mother is still baking lots and lots of cookies to share with her ever growing family.  And the most special cookies of them all were the angel cutouts for each of us. Always decorated in a light blue frosting dresses, blonde hair, food color drawn faces, and our names written down the cookie.  Of course there were many other holiday shaped cut out cookies but the angels always tasted the best.  Then there were a large variety of other cookies, some tried and true favorites with  few new recipes each year, some hits, some misses.

Another always present cookie at Christmas, Orange Slice Bars

The Christmas trees in our home had ever-changing decorations.  Early on as seen in photos, my parents had the traditional green fir tree with lots of colored ornaments and copious amounts of tinsel hanging from the boughs.  As we grew older they experimented with flocked trees decorated with different shaped gold ornaments or a green tree with red velvet ornaments and ornate red velvet birds.  When we were young we would also have a tree in our basement "rumpus" room that was left to the whim of my sibs and myself to decorate. As my younger sister and I got older we often had our own little tree and decorated our bedroom as festively as we could.

Christmas decorations also always included a nativity scene set up on top of the big stereo which was usually playing Christmas carol records (any one remember Sing Along With Mitch?), a mistletoe ball hanging between the dining room and living room, the tree topper angel I made when I was a Campfire girl, and all the stockings hung on the mantle.  There were lights hung on the outside of the house and wonderful smelling candles and fir boughs on the fireplace mantle top and Christmas china and the good silverware was brought out for our holiday feasting. 

I think back on all of this with great fondness and appreciation for all the work it must have been for my parents. I recall no complaining from either of them as they made Christmas a magical time of year for all of us.  For that I am forever grateful.

A Change of Season

Fall has never been my favorite time of year, but after the most wonderful walk recently, I've had a change of heart. 

I started off early on a Sunday morning walk and I turned right instead of left.  Being a creature of habit, I always turn left on my neighborhood walks. That morning something pulled me to the right and what a delightful change of pace and walk of discovery it turned out to be.

It was cool and there was a light fog shrouding the tree tops. The sidewalks were covered with the last of the falling leaves still holding on to their vibrant colors.  The air was filled with the earthy, musty smells of decaying vegetation and wood smoke from house chimneys.  Overhead flock after flock of honking geese flew by, making their amazing annual migration south to warmer climes.

I found myself walking down one of my favorite streets in town.  It is in a well-established neighborhood and nearly every home is unique and charming. The flower gardens were put away until Spring, and all of the yards were neat and tidy.

On my way home I meandered through a city park which is one of my favorites.  It is called Englewood Park and it's the last of what was known as the Englewood Forest.  In our back yard we have a huge, beautiful cedar tree that is part of this old forest.  The park has paths covered with fallen pine needles and the scent of the pine trees lining the path was intoxicating. The grey squirrels appeared to be on hyperdrive as they scampered up and down the trees getting ready for the cold weather ahead.

As I came home and walked in my front door, I felt relaxed and peaceful with a new found awareness of the beauty that is Fall.

A Tale of Two Pianos

I have two pianos in my home. The first one, pictured above, is an antique inherited from my two English great aunties who resided in Vancouver, B.C. This piano was made in England by a London company, Chappell and Company. Amazingly the company is still in existence today and located at the same address as is listed on my piano. Using the serial numbers found inside the piano, I was able to e-mail the company and found that the piano was built between 1880-1890. 

My sister Linda at the piano at the great aunties house

It is not playable due to stuck keys and grossly out of tune strings but I love it nonetheless.  I love that it has been a part of our family for many, many years. I love that it came from England, a country for which I feel such an affinity. And lastly, I love how it looks in my living room.

The second piano I obtained as a total impulse on an Easter Sunday, eight or nine years ago. I attended an estate sale in the neighborhood late in the afternoon when the sellers were anxious to close up the house.  There was this perfect Howard spinet and its matching bench with a charming embroidered seat cover, marked from $600 to $350.  On a whim I said "Would you take $300?" They said yes and it was mine, much to The Husband's chagrin.  For it was he, with the help of our friends, who had to transport said piano from that house into our house. He claims it is the heaviest piano in the world, a claim I quesion.  His efforts are still appreciated to this day.

The piano is my first musical love.  Though I spent many more years playing the flute, I first learned to appreciate and play music on the piano. As a very young girl, I would listen to my mother playing magnificently moving pieces by Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and Chopin. I was in awe of her talent.  Her music books were a mystery to me, with page after page filled with lines of black notes I didn't understand.

I soon began taking piano lessons given by Sister Amy, a quiet, serious nun at the church we attended.  She gently taught me to read music and play songs and I have fond memories of her. These memories come to a screeching halt with recollections of the recitals that were inevitable.  Being a shy, introverted child, it was more than I could cope with, so the piano lessons came to an end. A year later in the fourth grade I started playing the flute and never looked back at the piano. Until I brought home the estate sale find. 

I immediately went to a music store and purchased some books and started playing again. It is one of the most relaxing and enjoyable pastimes I now have.  I practiced one piece enough that I even felt confident enough to play it for a group of friends one evening when we had "An Evening of Enlightenment" where we all had to bring something cultural to share with each other.

I know I will never play the piano like my mother, but I have returned to my first musical love and hope to continue tickling the ivories for years to come.

A Change Of Pace

I have been giving a lot of thought to this blog which is now four years old.  I have decided that I need to make some changes, both to energize my creative juices and to energize my desire to lose some weight.  One of the problems with having a food blog is that there is always something to cook and then in turn, there is always something that needs to be eaten. 

As much as I enjoy trying new recipes, my leaning has not been toward the most healthy, low cal foods.  What fun is it to blog about celery sticks??? Well, my waist line has paid the price and it's time to pay attention.  I will still be blogging recipes from time to time, but I am going to use this blog to post photos and writings of whatever strikes my fancy.  I'm not going to feel tied to the kitchen every weekend cooking, but instead I am hoping to get myself outside and moving again. 

Those of you who follow me on a regular basis are much appreciated and I hope I will still keep you as an audience as I venture on to new arenas, as I have subtitled my blog, A Slice of Life.  Above is a picture I took last Saturday on a sidewalk on my block as I started off on a walk in between rain showers, with the sun peeking through the clouds.