Happy Hallowe'en

If fall is my favorite season, then Halloween is my favorite holiday.

I think a lot of this has to do with my last name formerly being a variation of bat. When you're named after icon of a holiday, there are certain expectations to live up to, as I'm sure any Noelles or Hollys can attest to. And so, throughout my childhood I dove into decorating our house with cobwebs and cutouts of pumpkins, haunted houses and my mother's windsock collection.  I am also blessed with a mother who sews, so I always had really awesome costumes, which corresponds nicely with that theatrical bent of mine.

Throughout  college, I continued to dress up in interesting, if less elaborate, costumes and would throw halloween parties with my housemates, where we would borrow the theatre department's fog machine, cover all the furniture in white sheets to look like a haunted house, mull cider and I would try to get people to bob for apples (no one would).

This year, between getting married and boo.scream.thump and life, I haven't had time to pull anything crazy together, so the Charlie Brown shirt makes yet another appearance and a single small white mini pumpkin decorates the top of the tv. 

All of this is not to say that I'm not going to enjoy the day, because there is yet another reason that I love Halloween. For it was on this lovely holiday two years ago that I met my Mr. Cleaver.

Actually, that's not entirely true. We had met briefly twice before at bar trivia (shh.. don't tell my mother!), but we both consider this the night we truly met. I was interning in Maine and his housemate, my coworker, was throwing a party.

I came as Charlie Brown (I had a couple of lazy years in there, so sue me) and he, in the manner of most last-minute male costumes, was Hugh Hefner. About ten minutes into the party we started chatting and continued to do so for the next four hours or so. Or as a friend later said: "you guys were thisclose for four hours!"

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Booze Cake

Friday afternoon I received a call asking me to provide treats for this Sunday's coffee hour at my local Methodist Church. Now I'm not actually a Methodist, but I never turn down an excuse to bake, so naturally upon acceptance my first thought of what to make for the Methodists was "booze cake," specifically Sherry Nut Bundt Cake, henceforth known as SNBC.

My mother is a complete teetotaler and as a result there the only alcohol that ever made it into my mother's house was an occasional and random light beer that came home with my dad after a night out with some college friends and the cooking sherry for this cake.

The SNBC is a hand me-down from my Grandmother Leota and is a classic 50's recipe. The base of this almost-coffee cake/ rather bread like dessert is yellow cake mix and Jello pudding in a Bundt® Pan. If that doesn't scream post-war packaged food frenzy I don't know what does.

(an ingredient still life inspired by Pioneer Woman Cooks)

Sherry Nut Bundt Cake

1 pkg. yellow cake mix (no pudding in the mix!) 2 small packs of instant vanilla pudding 4 eggs 1 cup cream sherry ¾ cup oil ¼ cup sugar 2 tsp. cinnamon ½ cup coarsely chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a Bundt® pan. Mix first five ingredients, adding oil last. In a separate bowl - mix sugar, cinnnamon and nuts together.

Pour about ¼ of the batter in the pan and sprinkle half of the nut mixture over the batter (I find this is easier to do uniformly if you use a spoon and not your fingers).

Top with 1/2 of the remaining batter and the remaining nut mixture.

Add the remainder of the batter.

Bake for 45-55 minutes or until a tester (I like to use a piece of spaghetti) comes out clean. Allow to cool before inverting. No need to frost, just give to your favorite Methodist as is and enjoy!

boo.scream.thump in the night

Last night was boo.scream.thump in the night, otherwise known as Greasy Joan & Co.'s fall benefit and first performance of our inaugural reading series.

I've been working for this wonderful, if possibly unfortunately-named, Chicago-based theatre company for a 1¼ years - pretty much the entire time I've lived here - and have served as company manager for little under a year. As part of my expanded responsibilities this year, I've been working with several others on our new reading series, so last night was pretty exciting for me personally.

Since Greasy Joan's mission statement is about doing classic work, we decided to have our October reading focused on literary ghost stories, so I spent a month this summer reading a bunch of public-domain ghost stories by classic authors (thanks Project Gutenberg!) and made a short list. We end up doing three: Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, Mark Twain's A Ghost Story, and Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost.

Above are a few pictures of the event, which went over well as a party, performance, and fundraiser. It was really dark in the space, so the photos all have a blurry/ghostly quality, which seems rather fitting.

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PS - I've been asked to do coffee hour at church tomorrow and consequently did some baking earlier tonight, so I'll be posting a new recipe tomorrow!

Shifting Seasons

Fall, or perhaps Winter, has finally come to Chicago.

The Windy City, it seems, likes its seasons lengthy and sudden - it has little patience for silly intermediaries like Fall and Spring. In other words, in a week's time I have gone from t-shirts and skirts to wool sweaters and winter coats.

Autumn is my favorite of all the seasons, but Fall in Chicago isn't the crisp cooling of California or the vibrant maple reds of New England. It has a mood entirely of it's own. Splashes of yellow intermix with dull reds and brown on civic trees and Lake Michigan grows dirty and cruel in appearance. Choppy waves sends joggers to higher paths, pleasure boats to shrink-wrapped sleep and I pull my coat a tighter as I pass on the bus.

But I like wool sweaters and crisp breezes and snacking on hot cider and popcorn. The shifting seasons give me excuse to hunker down into the hobbies I ignore in friendlier weather, namely knitting.

I'll turn on an oven to 375° in the dead heat of summer to bake a cake, but I won't touch yarn above 65°. I an not a die hard knitter. I have no stash. I've attempted no afghan. But after finally giving in to the knitting bandwagon that over took all eight of my fellow interns in Portland, I have come to love this rather complicated form of weaving.

The thing that I think is amazing about knitting is that I'm making fabric, in the exact shape (hopefully) that I want it to be - no cutting, maybe a seam here or there, but largely a fully-fashioned thing pops off of the needles like Athena from Zeus' head, whether it be a sock, a sweater, or an elephant.

I am currently working on my first "sweater," a shrug really, and I'm very excited by it because it looks so, well sweater-y. It makes me feel like a real knitter or at least a more practical knitter than when I make rotund stuffed animals.

Though I am knitting an animal too... In any case. I'll post both projects as soon as they're done.

An Evening with William Shatner...

Saturday night was the second annual "Evening with William Shatner" with Ms. Kasey. This was a tradition started after a trip to Kuiper's Family Farm last year, enacted when my apartment had one arm chair to sit in. The William Shatner reference was coined by Kasey due to the extreme girth of our two pies.

After another trip to the apple picking farm, we convened to make some more pies, this year trimming down the size of the pies and using the extra apples to make an apple crisp .

Pie making is something that means a lot to me. Not only do I love a good fruit-filled pie, but I learned how to make a pie from father. I felt very grown up when I finally got the pie tutorial and the knowledge and experience my father shared with me is priceless, especially now that he's gone. And though I have yet to figure out how he got the crust to work with only six tablespoons of water, I try to do his gift justice not only by making pies of my own, but by sharing his lesson with any one willing to learn.

And without further ado....

My Dad's Crust Recipe 2 cups flour 1 tsp salt 2/3 cup shortening

Mix together flour and salt then "cut in" shortening with a pastry cutter or knives.

Add 6-10 Tbsps of cold water, until dough holds together. Flour working surface and roll out crusts, using half the dough for each. Makes 1 top and one bottom crust for a 9" pie tin.

The recipe for the filling comes from Myles, a stage manager and excellent baker in Portland, Maine.

Myles' Spicy Apple Pie

2 Tbsp Sugar 1/2 tsp. Cinnamon 1/4 tsp. Nutmeg 6-7 Cups peeled and sliced apples (6-7 apples per pie) 3/4 to 1 Cup Sugar 1 to 2 Tbsp. Flour 1/8 tsp. Salt 2 Tbsp. Butter

Heat oven to 425 degrees. Prepare the pastry for two 9" pie crusts.

Combine 2 Tbsp sugar and the spices in a small bowl.

Brush the bottom pastry with milk or water and sprinkle with 1/2 of the sugar, spice and everything nice mixture.

Combine 3/4 Cup of sugar with flour and salt and mix lightly through the apples.

Heap up the apples in the pie pan.

Dot the top of the apples with the butter.

Cover with top crust and cut slits for the steam to escape.

Seal the sides of the pie crust with a fork's prongs. Brush with milk or water and sprinkle remaining sugar/ spice mixture over the top of the pie.

Cover the edges of the pie crust with foil wrap.

Bake 50-60 minutes or until crust is lightly brown.

Remove the foil 15 minutes before you take the pie out of the oven.

A word of warning! This pie could potentially make a mess in your oven if you do not take precautions. Because there are soooo many apples in it, that while cooking, it has the tendancy to leak, no matter how hard you try to seal the sides of the pie. So,sit the pie inside a larger pan with a lip for cooking so that if any juices escape you only have the pan to clean and not your oven. Also, you can line the second pie plate with foil so you only have to throw that out, instead of scrubbing your larger pan.

Get your husband to make you some homemade vanilla ice cream and serve warm.

Forget about the dishes until at least two servings of pie.

It's Official!

I have to admit I was the tiniest bit worried, since my brother officiated as a minister of the Universal Life Church and got ordained via email, but it looks like the State of Maine thinks I'm okay to be married for real.

Bus Book, Bed Book, Book Club

Sometime back in the spring I decided that I no longer read enough. I also decided that I was wasting my time on public transit with the Red Eye and gave it up for Lent to be replaced by real books. Resolved, I made my way over to the wonderful Harold Washington Library, picked up the Interpreter of Maladies and started a book reading frenzy. Since then, I've rarely been without at least two books checked out - a bed book and a bus book. One for home and one for my hour and a half of daily commute.

About the same time, a friend urned me to the website Goodreads, where I've been keeping track of and reviewing everything I read. Being one of those people who takes joy in lists, it's right up my alley. I'm a little behind on my reviews right now, but I highly recommend the site.

The bus book (currently East of Eden) is largely determined by weight. If it's too heavy it stays home. Books in fragile condition also miss the cut, but mostly, whichever book I want to get through first is the bus book - since it gets solid dedicated time 5 days a week.

The bed book (currently Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute) usually takes me twice as long to get through as the bus book. Except for the Harry Potters I've been stealing from my now husband, which take two days. I also try to to mix it up so I'm reading one fiction and one non-fiction, or at least two different styles. I'm becoming increasingly interesting in pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing, so I'm self-educating in way.

Lastly, one of the books is now a book club. A few weeks before I left for the wedding, my friend Kasey and I met up at an ridiculously cute and francophiliac cafe, The Bourgeois Pig , prior to catching a comped performance of "An Intimate Evening with Lynda Carter." Just as we were about to leave, a small group of twenty-somethings started gathering for a book club. Kasey and I both looked at them wistfully and decided that we too should have a book club and meet in this charming locale to discuss.

Well, she was reading East of Eden and I had just brought my copy back from California, so it seemed a logical first choice - any Oprah book club connections aside. (Speaking of which, half the time her "selections" just seem like things I was required to read in high school -- Night, East of Eden, Anna Karenina, Sound and the Fury -- really? I'm so glad you discovered these for me Oprah, I never would have heard of them without you. )

Anyway, Kasey and I are both about halfway through the book now, so if anyone is a speedy reader, they're welcome to join in. I'm guessing we'll meet up mid-to-late November. After which, I hope this gets to be a reoccurring thing.

Speaking of Kasey, tonight was the second annual "William Shatner" apple pie baking fest -- this time with furniture! Photos and tasty pie recipe to come soon.

Sadie Sadie

I am a married lady.

Marrige is, I think, a little like New Year’s - you get a kiss and a whole new chapter of your life begins.

A new husband, a new family, a new name -- as good a time as any to start new things.

A blog for instance.