Orange, yellow, and red, with the scattered pine in between is the current motif.  As is the reminder to self to simply create a bit more leisure in the day. Meanwhile the summer addiction to peach pie has been translated, amidst this inspired thought, to a classic apple indulgence.

Apple Pie

Preheat oven to 45o

Crust (2, bottom and top)

6 oz. cream cheese (cold)

1/2 lb butter (2 sticks, cold)

2 cups of flour

1 egg white

Mix first three ingredients by hand until blended. Divide in half, chill for another 10-15 minutes if needed (if it’s too sticky), then roll out bottom half on floured board. Line 9 inch pan with this crust then brush with egg white. Chill along with the other half of the dough.

Filling

6 cups of apples, sliced

3/4 cup of sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

2+ Tb flour

1/4 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

1+ Tb lemon juice

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 Tb butter

Mix lemon juice and vanilla with sliced apples. Stir together sugar, cinnamon, flour, and nutmeg. Mix  well with apple slices. Fill prepared pie crust. Add chopped pieces of butter on top of apple mix.

Roll out second ball of pie crust dough and cut into 1/2-3/4 inch strips (a cleaver works well for this.) Weave over pie and crimp edges (for images of this process, see the Peach Pie recipe here.) Brush egg white over top of crust.

Bake at 450 degrees for 10 minutes, then cover edges with tin foil and reduce heat to 350 degrees. Bake 40 minutes more.

Cool and enjoy…

Image Credit: EssjayNZ

David Filipov at the Boston Globe has a story on the rising demand for farmer’s goods at local farmer’s markets. He offers good data regarding the rising number of farmer’s markets in the state over the past few years, as well as the growing diversification of crops that folks are growing for the markets. See here for more…

Image Credit: Barbara L. Hanson

Just caught up with an Op-Ed in the New York Times by Dan Barber on the issue of this season’s rampant tomato blight. Like others, it’s pointing to the problems of big-box retail (Home Depot, Lowe’s, K-Mart and Wal-Mart) in spreading the scourge…  It’s worth a read and can be found here.

Today’s reward for a roller coaster of a week? Peach pie. Cathartic, sensual, decadent. What else is there?

The recipe follows…

Pie Shell (already doubled for two crusts, bottom and top)

6 oz. cream cheese
1/2 lb (2 sticks) butter (cold from the fridge)
2 cups flour

1 egg (or egg white), beaten

1. Mix cream cheese, butter, and flour with fingers til blended. Divide in half and roll one half out on floured board. Line a 9 inch pie pan with this first crust and crimp the edges. Brush inside with a beaten egg (to avoid soggy crust) and place in the fridge for the time being.

Filling

5+ cups peaches (peeled and sliced) [roughly 10-12 small-to-medium peaches]
2 T. lime juice
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup white sugar
1/2 tsp. ground cinammon
1/4 tsp. (or slightly less) ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. salt
2 T butter

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

2. Place sliced peaches in a large bowl (big enough to hold a colander inside it.) Pour 2 T of lime juice over peaches and gently mix. Pour peaches and lime juice mix into colander and place the colander w/ peaches back into the large bowl to drain off excess liquid.

3. In another good-sized bowl, mix flour, sugar, cinammon, nutmeg, and salt. Add peaches to this mix and toss together gently to combine. Pour into pie crust. Cut up butter into small pieces and sprinkle over the peaches.

4. Roll out second ball of pie crust dough and cut into 1/2-3/4 inch strips (a cleaver works well for this.) Weave over pie as shown in images below and crimp edges. Brush egg over top of crust.

5. Bake for 10 minutes at 450 degrees, then reduce heat to 350 degrees. Cover pie edges with tin foil to prevent burning, then continue to cook for approximately 35 minutes, until crust is brown and juice is bubbling.

Let pie cool (or cool from hot to warm) before serving…

I ran out of yellow peaches and mixed in some white ones that were also on hand…

And then…

Next? Vanilla ice cream…

Summer distractions? There have been many (as the dearth of posts on this blog does indeed attest)…

June brought a visit to the blueberry farms of New Jersey. We spent a good time out in the muddy paths of the field pulling the best blueberries off the branch, taking home a good number for cereal and a bit of baking (I’ve been adding them to the strawberry Obsttorte that is one of my standard summer treats). We also froze a good number to have in the coming weeks – and months, if they last that long…

My main distraction this summer, though, has been baking. While the rainy spring has switched to a very dry and sunny summer, it seems to have left me in the habit of working indoors this season. I’ve also been following the crowd that’s working through the recipes in the Bread Baker’s Challenge (all participants trying out, in order,  each of the recipes in Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, with many then blogging their results… Eggs on Sunday offers a good look at the recipes’ process, see also this Flickr site for images.) Bagels have been the hit of the summer at home, especially as there isn’t a good, New York style bagel to be found anywhere nearby. It takes more than a two hour drive to get to a shop that does them properly, to be precise. Reinhart’s recipe is quite good and highly recommended. While the two-day preparation may seem like overwhelming logistics, the second day’s routine is actually quite simple and the recipe is well worth the effort. Not only are the bagels great for toasting, but they make a wonderful sandwich too…

And then there’s the garden. Certain plants are flourishing (basil, nasturtium, sage and other herbs… with eggplant and tomatoes coming along, the latter a bit better than the former, though I’ve also got my eye out for the blight that is plaguing so many this summer). Others, particularly the scallions, seem to be under-achievers this season…

Another project I’ve toyed with over the years, but only from a distance, has been bee-keeping. I have a great-aunt who is a seasoned practicioner of the craft. Yet life in the over-built ‘burbs (along with an instinctive fear of the sting, perhaps) has kept me from giving it a try. So I was happily surprised today to find an article on urban bee-keeping in today’s Washington Post.  I never would have thought this a possibility, always assuming the hives had to be kept by folks living near country fields beyond the rapidly paved ex-burbs… But like the increasing amount of green space being reclaimed in the urban realm it seems there may also be room for beekeeping on the roofs of our city blocks and houses. Nice to see, especially amidst the growing concern over vanishing bees.

Image credit: SacredSights

Today, our good friend Nae, who is now five-and-a-half, returns to write a new entry for our site. She writes,

We looked at lots of kinds of flowers, and we couldn’t figure out what one was. We smelled three kinds and they all smelled very good. We smelled some herbs named Rosemary and Lavender.

Susan returns here to comment that these herbs, grown by Nae and her mother, do indeed have a wonderful scent.

Nae notes that she had a peat pot but she lost it. There was a sunflower in it. It had already started growing. She looked for it and knows that it is still in her house somewhere, unless her mom planted it, but Nae doesn’t think she did as she did not know where it was.

Susan returns to note that there are some wonderful flowers growing in Nae’s garden, especially a set of orange flowers that are blooming ever so colorfully with the warm weather in May. Nae likes all the flowers.

The End

Image credit: **Mary**

Finally made it out to one of my favorite local (or not so local) garden centers, a fair drive away but well worth it for their good selection of herbs and vegetables.  As always, I overbought and some will go to friends…

Here’s the list of today’s haul:

Rosemary (Blue Spire)

Basil

Sage

Lavender

Eggplant (Ichiban)

French Thyme

Hot Pepper Plant (Kung Pao for me, Garden Salsa for a friend)

and tomatoes, including Matt’s Wild Cherry, Better Boy, New Girl, and Yellow Ping Pong…

Growing up in a suburban space meant that most animals kept were of certain varieties: dogs, cats, guinea pigs (owned by family or by the third grade class), gerbils and hamsters, goldfish, parakeets, and, perhaps, indoor hermit crabs.  For some, all of the the above. But chickens were only kept by one neighbor, an elderly couple, who kept their own yard as a long garden (no lawn here, not even in the front), and, at the top of a small hill behind it, kept a chicken coop. This yard seemed an anachronism already in the 1970s and has been long since converted into the usual over-stacked crowd of McMansions on a lot.  At the time though, for a young child as a visitor, it was a glorious place to visit — a perfect combination of the novel (chickens in a backyard!) and the practical (eggs!).

The Washington Post recently offered coverage of the more recent trend, or return to a trend, of keeping chickens in urban and suburban spaces.  See here for Adrian Higgins’ article as well as his own narration of a photo essay on the topic. A run-down of the local regulations for the greater DC area can be also found here for anyone who’s thinking of getting started…  See also Henbogle for an excellent blog on hen-keeping and gardening, live from the great state of Maine.

Image credit: ilja

Kojo Nnamdi hosted an interesting discussion of gardening on his WAMU radio show today with guests Adrian Higgins (Washington Post) and Holly Shimizu (U.S. Botanical Gardens). I only caught part of it, but there seemed to be some very good discussion of the ever-rising number of vegetable gardens going these days, the ways in which lawns are giving way to alternate (and healthier) kinds of growing spaces, and more… A link to the show is available here.