An Addition to the Family

Somewhat unexpectedly, a new member of the family has arrived. Brulee (it took all of two minutes for Elly to name her "like creme brulee because she has a burnt sugar look about her, but I'm not thinking of keeping her" "no, of course you aren't, dear") appeared on our doorstep Sunday afternoon indicating she would like to come in and was ready for dinner. We have never seen her before. She is an affectionate and very pretty cat -- possibly how she got herself into a "family way." I posted her picture on our neighborhood egroup, but no one has claimed her. Our theory is that her previous owner didn't want to contend with a pregnant cat and abandoned her in our neighborhood far from home. She is obviously used to being inside, not outside.

We took her to see Dr. Byer at Westwood Animal Hospital for a "well kitty" visit yesterday. Dr. B thinks she is about three years old and will probably deliver kittens in a month. She got a rabies vaccine. The rest of her vaccines (and a few other procedures!) will have to wait until after her kittens are weaned. Two cats is our household limit, and we already had Beatrice before Brulee arrived, so we will be looking for homes for the kittens.

The Union of Actual and Ideal

-- from A Common Faith by John Dewey

"These considerations may be applied to the idea of God, or, to avoid misleading conceptions, to the idea of the divine. This idea is, as I have said, one of ideal possibilities unified through imaginative realization and projection. But this idea of God, or of the divine, is also connected with all the natural forces and conditions -- including man and human association -- that promote the growth of the ideal and that further its realization. We are in the presence of neither of ideals completely embodied in existence nor yet of ideals that are mere rootless ideals, fantasies, utopias. For there are forces in nature and society that generate and support the ideals. They are further unified by the action that gives them coherence and solidity. It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name 'God.' I would not insist that the name must be given. There are those who hold that the associations of the term with the supernatural are so numerous and close that any use of the word 'God' is sure to give rise to misconception and be taken as a concession to traditional ideas.

They may be correct in this view. But the facts to which I have referred are there, and they need to be brought out with all possible clearness and force. There exist concretely and experimentally goods -- the values of art in all its forms, of knowledge, of effort and of rest after striving, of education and fellowship, of friendship and love, of growth in mind and body. Theses goods are there and yet they are relatively embryonic. Many persons are shut out from generous participation in them; there are forces at work that threaten and sap existent goods as well as prevent their expansion. A clear and intense conception of a union of ideal ends with actual conditions is capable of arousing steady emotion. It may be fed by every experience, no matter what its material.

...One reason why personally I think it fitting to use the word 'God' to denote that uniting of the ideal and actual which has been spoken of, lies in the fact that aggressive atheism seems to me to have something in common with traditional supernaturalism. I do not mean merely that the former is mainly so negative that it fails to give positive direction to thought, though that fact is pertinent. What I have in mind especially is the exclusive preoccupation of both militant atheism and supernaturalism with man in isolation. For in spite of supernaturalism's reference to something beyond nature, it conceives of this earth as the moral center of the universe and of man as the apex of the whole scheme of things. It regards the drama of sin and redemption enacted within the isolated and lonely soul of man as the one thing of ultimate importance. Apart from man, nature is held either accursed or negligible. Militant atheism is also affected by lack of natural piety. The ties binding man to nature that poets have always celebrated are passed over lightly. The attitude taken is often that of man living in an indifferent and hostile world and issuing blasts of defiance. A religious attitude, however, needs the sense of a connection of man, in the way of both dependence and support, with the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe. Use of the words 'God' or 'divine' to convey the union of the actual with ideal may protect man from a sense of isolation and from consequent despair or defiance." (pp. 50-53)

-- from River out of Eden by Richard Dawkins

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

How to Crack a Hazelnut

I looked over my 2008 New Year's Resolutions a few days ago. Embarrassing! Still, I have accomplished a few things, among them improving my culinary skills. I can't say I have made great progress in French cuisine, but I definitely learned a thing or two about cracking hazelnuts on Thanksgiving Day. Elly needed hazelnuts for several dishes she wanted to cook. I came home with a bag of unshelled nuts, and she said "Great. Now how are you going to crack them?" "Crack them? Is that my job?"

I started off with the traditional nutcracker, which, frankly was not up to the job. I had a hard time breaking the shell and frequently crushed the nut inside. After a minute of this I thought to myself there has to be a better way and consulted the ultimate authority. Google.

I didn't find that much about how to crack hazelnuts. One source suggested boiling them first, which sounded like a total mess. Another person said, not about hazelnuts in particular, but just nuts in general, that if you didn't have a nut cracker, you could use a pair of pliers or something from the workshop. A light bulb turned on ever my head. Channel lock pliers! They exert considerable force and can be opened to convenient widths -- much wider than regular pliers. After a few experiments, I found that exerting force from top to bottom was the most reliable way to crack the shell without crushing the nut inside. There were a few tough nuts. With these, I found rotating them a bit, putting pressure on from multiple angles, was a good way to open them without exerting too much pressure.

A few broken nuts can be seen in the picture below. These were caused by the traditional nut cracker. Once I started using the channel locks, I had almost no trouble with crushing them. Now, if I could only come up with an easy way to get the skin casing off the roasted nuts. Rubbing them together did't work that well...

The Mystery of the Visible

A response to Will Buckingham's post, Dragons and Levitating Monks.

The first point about Will's post is that his examples are asymmetrical.

Presumably, the Indian restaurant owner and his wife actually believed the monk could levitate. The example provided by Sagan, an atheist and debunker of irrational belief, was created to demonstrate such beliefs can always be placed beyond the reach of empirical proof. The true parallel of the levitating monk, for Western religions such as Christianity, would be things like belief in the ability of saints to perform miracles, divine intervention by God in medical cases as a result of prayer, possibly even a McCain victory in the upcoming U.S. presidential election (surely a subject of much prayer among a certain segment of U.S. Christians).

The second point is that what these examples illustrate is a wide-spread desire for the miraculous, however that might manifest itself. A significant component of such desires is the validation of religious beliefs. This demonstrates a lack of faith, rather than what one might suppose to be a demonstration of it. Faith, after all, requires no proof.

A final point is that we are surrounded by the miraculous. Our very existence is itself a miracle. It is human nature, I suppose, to become accustomed to what we experience constantly and to lose sight of the wonder plainly manifested to us. As Oscar Wilde expressed it: "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

A deeper, more enriched spirituality is available to anyone who wishes to pursue it by rousing themselves from the illusion that our common, every day experiences are nothing special.

Pumpkin Pie

After a somewhat lengthy hiatus, I am finally making an actual blog post (as opposed to a book quote addition, which, in my view, is more or less cheating and shouldn't be counted as a legitimate post!). I've been somewhat inspired by two of my favorite bloggers, who have also taken up the keyboard again in recent weeks -- Diana Sudyka on her Tiny Avery and Eloise by the Book Piles, who I turn to when I feel particularly guilty about adding more books to our already sizable collection that sprawls across every floor of our three story house. Four, if you want to count the basement, my workshop, where my wood working and other shop books go. Eloise's most recent post discusses books she found still in the shopping bags she carried them home in. What an inspiration! :-)

So what about pumpkin pie? On a recent visit to Sunshine Flowers, now our favorite source for plants of all sorts for the yard, I was picking out several pumpkins for Jack O Lanterns when I noticed a box of "pie" pumpkins. Pie pumpkins? A long standing tradition in the Miles family holds that trying to cook real pumpkin for a pie is a total waste of time. This tradition got its start when my mother and grandmother (my grandparents operated a boarding house in midtown Kansas City many years ago) decided to bake a pumpkin pie from real pumpkin. One of their lodgers raved about how delicious pumpkin pies were when made from fresh pumpkin. They spent most of the day doing battle with a fresh pumpkin, made an unholy mess, and finally threw the whole thing in the trash and used canned pumpkin for the pie. Predictably, the fresh pumpkin pie fancier raved about how delicious their pie was, and how much better than it would have been made from a can...

The thought which crossed my mind at Sunshine Flowers was that mother and grandmother, who were not necessarily the most diligent when it came to culinary research, probably used a standard carving pumpkin for their pie. A no-no, as it turns out. I bought two of the pie pumpkins. They are much smaller than pumpkins used for carving, about 8-inches in diameter, and have a much better consistency and taste than their larger cousins. After getting them home, I rooted around in our cookbook collection until I found what I wanted in Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food. I'm pleased to report that cooking pumpkin is every bit as simple as the title of Waters' book suggests and the result truly is far better than canned pumpkin. I must also add I was totally disappointed by Cooks Illustrated: why "America's Test Kitchen" has chosen to cop out on cooking pumpkin is something I find hard to understand. Perhaps they will eventually make amends.

1. Cut the pumpkin in half lengthwise. Be careful when doing this not to let the knife slip. You need a very solid cutting surface. This is actually the trickiest part of the whole process.

2. Scoop out the seeds and stringy pulp with a large spoon. I have read that an ice cream scoop is good for this, but had little success with that approach. A large spoon with its sharper edge proved much more effective. Don't worry about getting every last bit of the stringy pulp out, just get most of it.

3. Spray a rimmed cookie sheet or baking pan with PAM or a similar cooking spray (you might want to line the sheet first with aluminum foil for easier clean-up). Put the pumpkin, cut sides down, on the sheet and bake in a 375 degree oven for around 45 minutes until the pumpkin is soft to the touch. Cooking time can very depending on the pumpkin. Denser, heavier pumpkins take a bit longer but actually have a better flavor -- something to keep in mind when selecting them.

4. Remove the pumpkin from the oven and let cool. Once cooled, flip the pumpkin halves over and scoop the cooked pumpkin out of the shell. This is quite easy to do -- the shells are strong and the cooked pumpkin is soft and easy to scrape out. Toss the shells. (Some people advise saving the seeds for toasting, etc. I tried this once. Life is too short for that sort of headache!)

5. Puree the cooked pumpkin in a food processor until it is smooth.

That's all there is to it. Aside from cooking, the whole process takes minimal time. Maybe a total of fifteen minutes. It is almost absurdly easy, to be honest.

Here is my pie recipe, which I modified somewhat from Alice Waters' version, which has a frighteningly small amount of sugar and actually calls for black pepper. Why do this to a pie???

You'll need one pre-baked pie shell. I feel guilty about not making my own pie pastry (something I intend to experiment with sooner or later), but, honestly, Pillsbury pie dough is SO easy and it tastes great! I got the idea of pre-baking the shell from Waters. Previously, I baked pumpkin pies in an unbaked pie shell. Pre-baked makes for a much better pie.

1 cup of heavy cream
2 tsp flour

Mix the flour with 1/4 cup of the heavy cream and bring to a gentle boil over moderately low heat. When the cream thickens, slowly add the remaining 3/4 cup and bring it back to a gentle boil. Remove from heat and let cool.


1.5 cups of pumpkin (the typical pie pumpkin yields about 3 cups of cooked pumpkin)
3 eggs

Whisk the eggs in a large bowel and then mix in the pumpkin. Mix in the cream.

1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp kosher salt

The salt is VERY important. Waters' recipe doesn't include it, but adding salt really brings out a lot of flavor and adds depth to the pumpkin. Don't use regular table salt, which is iodized. Use kosher. In fact, kosher (or sea) salt should always be used for cooking.

Mix the sugar and spices together in a small bowl, then mix with remaining ingredients.

Add 1.5 tsp of brandy to the pie filling and mix in. This is optional in the Waters recipe, but not in mine. :-)

Bake in a 375 degree oven for about 45 minutes. Check the pie after about 35 minutes. Remove it from the oven when the center is just set. Don't over cook your pie! I like to use foil edge protectors to keep the crust from browning too much. It's best to put these on initially, and then remove after the first 30 minutes.

The result should look something like this.

Literary Labyrinth

Finally, when phonetic writing prevailed, the sounds of words were represented at first in syllables, and later, in a further refinement, by alphabetical symbols or letters standing for the phonemes -- the vowel and consonant sounds -- that make up our words. Now we had a graphic counterpart of speech itself. We could represent and pass on to others in an enduring way the realities that we observed and discovered within and without for their inspection and introspection. To our point, we could express our selves and learn about the selves of others beyond the limits of time and space that constrain the spoken word.

Nancy M. Malone
Walking a Literary Labyrinth:
A Spirituality of Reading

Coming to Our Senses

"I am speaking of accessing the timeless in this very moment--because it is always right under our noses, so to speak--and in so doing, to gain access to those dimensions of possibility that are presently hidden from us because we refuse to be present, because we are seduced, entrained, mesmerized, or frightened into the future and the past, carried along in the stream of events and the weather patterns of our own reactions and numbness, attending to, if not obsessing about what we often unthinkingly dub "urgent," while losing touch at the same time with what is actually important, supremely important, in fact vital for our own well-being, for our sanity, and for our very survival. We have made absorption in the future and in the past such an overriding habit that, much of the time, we have no awareness of the present moment at all. As a consequence, we may feel we have very little, if any, control over the ups and downs of our own lives and of our own minds."

from Coming to Our Senses by Jon Kabat-Zinn (p. 22).