push-a-push-a-push-pop!

I haven’t had a Push Pop in a long time.  I don’t think I even ate them much when I was little.  But somehow I know their theme song will be stuck in my head forever!

Sadly, I can’t find the one I’m dreaming of on the web.  In its place, I offer you this slightly disturbing French commercial:

 

 

Those candy folks sure knew how to market, too, judging by the fact that this Blow Pops commercial is also firmly etched in my brain.

 

pie extravaganza

Andy isn’t crazy about cake; he much prefers pie.  So, on his birthday, I am happy to oblige with some homemade goodness.  However, he isn’t happy with regular ol’ apple or cherry like most red-blooded Americans – no, his tastes are a bit more random.  He mentioned (somewhat off-the-cuff, I’ll admit), that grape sounded good.  My immediate reaction was to laugh. After all, there’s no such thing as grape pie…or is there?  A quick search of that wonderful invention, the internet, proved me wrong.

There are actually quite a few recipes out there for a New York state favorite made with Concord grapes.  However, those are a bit tricky to find in Kansas, especially this time of year.  Not to worry, there were comments from various cooks indicating a pie could be made from seedless grapes as well.  That settled it – I had to try my hand at making grape pie.

Knowing that I would also be bringing this to Andy’s family birthday party, I was a bit too nervous to rely solely on the goodness of the grape when it came to other people’s taste buds. So, I decided to make another one of the more normal flavors from his list: banana cream pie.

I selected the Concord Grape Pie III recipe from allrecipes.com (one of my favorite sites!) and the Banana Cream Pie from my pink Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (one of my favorite books!), ran to the grocery store, and got to work.

Neither of these recipes required a lot of exotic ingredients, which was a huge plus in my book.  I selected black seedless grapes for my masterpiece, and I didn’t bother trying to make crust from scratch – I just didn’t have the energy to resist refrigerated dough.

I let the crust for the banana pie cook while I prepped the grapes. And oh my, how not fun that was!

The recipe says “Squeeze the pulp out of the skins into a saucepan, saving the skins in a bowl.”  This sounds deceptively simple.  The problem is, if you just squeeze the grape, well, you just end up with a squished grape, still in the skin.  To do it “right”, you have to work a lot harder, and your thumbs will be majorly sore before you ever get a bite of that darn pie.

Let me preface this by saying that perhaps it is a necessary step if you are working with seeded grapes.  I wasn’t, and if I ever make this pie again, I’m going to bypass this step and just mash the pulp and skins up together.  But if you want to try it the other way, here’s my advice.

Cut that little guy in half width-wise.

Then, use your thumb and forefingers to “smoosh” around the cut edges of the grape.  It’s sort of hard to explain this part, but the purpose of it is break up the filaments connecting the skin to the pulp and thus make it easier to peel.  Use your other hand to sort of cup the grape and keep it from slip-sliding away.

When you’ve squeezed all the way around the edge, you should be able to use your thumb against the dome part of the grape to “pop” the pulp out.  Of course, a few pieces are still going to stick but overall it is a fairly effective method.

You’ll have a pretty pile of peels at the end.

I made a video to help explain this process but really you’ll just need to feel it out for yourself.  (Trust me that you don’t want to do it one-handed, as I lamely attempted to demonstrate while consistently squirting juice in both my eyes and the camera lens.)

After this point, the recipe is as easy as…well, you know.

Let the grapes get all warm and congealed and shmooshy…

…then mix with the remaining ingredients…

…and pour into the pie crust.

Lastly, top with a lattice crust (easier than it looks) and pop it into the oven.

Mine looks a little sad because there wasn’t quite enough filling to round it out, and I probably should have let a bit more of the juice boil off.  Whoops.

Then I moved back to the banana cream pie.  It took no time at all in comparison to that last monstrosity!

A lil cornstarch, sugar, half and half, and egg yolks.  Yup, I can handle that.

Pour it in the crust over a mound of sliced bananas, bake, top with whipped cream, and you’re set!  (I could have made meringue, but I was shooting for “insanely easy” at this point.)

Ready for the final result?

Ta da!

More than half eaten banana cream pie:

(Perhaps not exactly a thing of beauty at this point, but still yummy.)

 

And for the grand finale…

…grape pie!

Who’d a thunk it?

Fall Clearance 2009

Even though Halloween is not my favorite time of year, I’d still like to have up a few spooky decorations and some festive autumn garlands in October/November.  Unfortunately, I was somewhat disappointed in the clearance selection when I finally went post-holiday shopping.  But I did make two purchases of which I am proud:

1) Fall florals at Michael’s for 80% off!

and

2) Light-up plastic jack-o-lantern’s from Target for (squeal!) 90% off!!!!

In related news, I have to say, I don’t have a problem with seeing Christmas merchandise all over the place (in fact, it makes me warm and tingly inside), but I am totally perplexed by the lack of respect for Thanksgiving.  I mean, seriously, are a couple of goofy-looking turkeys and a cornucopia too much to ask for?

the end of an age in middle earth

The Return of the King, book three of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is absolutely wonderful.  But if you read it, be prepared to be depressed. Overwhelming hopelessness is a not-so-subtle theme throughout the whole thing.  The beauty of it is that, for the most part, the characters keep striving on even when they know exactly how impossible are the tasks that they face.  It’s nice to read about straightforward heroes – and villains – in modern literature.

I enjoyed reading about the plight of Eowyn – at last, a female who actually does something! 

Although apparently the actions she takes are mostly of the suicidal variety, and Tolkien seems to indicate that her place is at home, doing “women’s work”, not out at battle.  I’m torn on that one.  On one hand, she did indeed have a responsibility to shepherd the people while the king was away, but personally, I wouldn’t have liked being patronized and told to go hide in a cave while all the cool people ran off to do heroic deeds, either.  Still, I appreciate the fact that all the men involved in this decision (Theoden King, Eomer, and Aragorn) truly wished only for her safety.

I was torn again when it came to her love story.  My first inclination was to delight in a happy, romantic ending.  However, angst makes for more interesting reading, generally.  I felt a lot more for her character while she was moping around like Eeyore than I did when she, in two pages, transformed into that la-di-dah Princess Sunbeam type character.  The ends got tied up just a bit too neatly for my taste.

I don’t feel the need to say much about the battles, other than that they were enthralling.

My heart was breaking for Sam and Frodo while they trudged through Mordor.  It was interesting to see Sam become more and more the hero of the story.  We have no way of knowing if Frodo could have succeeded without him in the end, but it certainly seems unlikely.  Gollum played his part well, too.  You have to pity the creature but always despise him at the same time.  I was a little disappointed that Frodo couldn’t destroy the ring of his own free will (guess hobbits aren’t quite as tough as they say!) but it absolutely worked out for the best to have Gollum give up his life for it.

All in all, it was an excellect conclusion to an excellent epic tale.

Trees Are Terriffic!

I’m going to try to make Fridays even better by posting each week about a piece of pop culture that makes me smile.  They’ll all go under the category “Reminisce.”

To start off, when I was trying to come up with a clever recycling-related title for an earlier post, the phrase “Trees are terriffic!” occurred to me.  It definitely made me smile (most things which can be described as “corny” or “cheesy” tend to do that).  The only problem was, I couldn’t remember where I had first heard it.  It took some sleuthing, but at last I found Carly the Cardinal, one-time spokesman for the National Arbor Day Foundation.

I bet you’re feeling all inspired to go replant the rain forest or something now, am I right?  No?  Darn.  Well, at least I tried.

If you’re bored, you can check out some more public service announcements from the Arbor Day Foundation here, but I think you’ll agree that Carly is in a class all his own!