Pear, Mascarpone, and Almond Tart

I tried a new recipe out tonight and ended up surprising myself. I usually don't go in for anything too gourmet, but even though this made up quite easily it felt fancy and somewhat decadent. As usual I went hunting for recipes and then adapting one to suit my own ideas.


This recipe is adapted from one at Cookstr.com.

First, you'll need a baked nine inch pie crust in a tart pan (or I used a steep sided pie pan.

For your filling you'll need the following:

2 pears peeled, cored, and sliced
white wine for poaching (I used some Riesling I had on hand)
1/3c brown sugar/succanat
1t nutmeg
1t cinnamon
2/3c mascarpone
1/4c white sugar (I used zylitol)
1 egg + 1 egg yolk
3T milk or cream
1 1/2T almond paste
slivered almonds

The original recipe called for canned pears, but I used fresh and poached them in a mixture of white wine, nutmeg, cinnamon, and sugar. I used just enough wine to almost cover the pears. Once the pears were tender I removed them from the liquid and reduced the liquid to about half a cup -by which time the liquid resembled a dark caramel. (Warning, the boiling wine smelled pretty foul to me until I added the cinnamon and reduced the liquid. Afterwards it tasted great so don't get scared if it smells weird.)
While the liquid is reducing mix together the remaining ingredients in a food processor.

Here is one place where you might want to play around. I ended up arranging the pears in the bottom on the pie pan, pouring the sugar mixture on top, and pouring the custard mixture over all. You could also put the pears on top. I don't think it really matters that much. Either way reserve a tablespoon or two of the liquid because if you pour it on top of the custard you can swirl it around with a fork or a toothpick, and it looks really pretty. Last of all sprinkle some slivered almonds over the top and bake in an oven at 325 for 30 minutes or until the custard is set. Let cool on a wire rack before serving.


This is hands down the prettiest dessert I've ever made. The custard turns a lovely golden color and the sugars caramelize into interesting little swirls. I was worried about the almonds on the top burning, but they ended up adding a lovely punctuation mark to the whole presentation. I think it's also going to be a fun dessert to play around with. There's proportions to play with for one, but I could also change up the flavors (Lemon zest? Red wine? Pecans?) and presentation (different designs and layering methods). For being fairly rich (all that mascarpone) this tart doesn't feel at all heavy like a cheesecake or some pudding desserts. If you accept my usual caveat that I rarely measure and these amounts are generally estimates I think it's worth a shot.

internet resolutions

Resolved: to stop reading web articles that don't interest me. Far better to put on a timer and just stop and read my book for half an hour than to read things that A. are mere repetitions of things with which I already agree and aren't instructional or edifying or B. lots of words winding down from faulty premises to an unenlightening conclusion. If I want to scroll for information after supper that's fine. There's no reason for me to be wasting my day in this manner. Also, with counseling and such I have plenty of advice and matter for contemplation without worrying about what some person with at least partially ill-conceived ideas has to say about matters of marginal interest.

Now, back to some matters of real worth.

and right into advent

We appear to have slid ride down the Thanksgiving Day slide only to land in the ball pit of Advent. There's no reprieve this year from all the festive food slinging -no week to spend stretching your belts and digging out your loose fitting pants. It's a turkey sandwich in one hand and gingerbread men in the other. Merciful heavens I don't know how exactly this is going to work. I spend so much time getting ready for Thanksgiving, and now I'm already behind on Christmas. It feels that way anyway. So instead of spending a leisurely day tomorrow running the laundry and in general recovering from the Thanksgiving rush I'm going to be rearranging my living room so that we can go get a tree to put up Tuesday. Since I also wanted to have my new bookcase put together by Christmas I'm going to be clearing out room in the living room tomorrow so that when we come home tomorrow with our Christmas tree we can start on that. SO! This week I'm going to put together a bookcase, decorate my Christmas tree, clean up the apartment, finish shopping for Christmas presents, and try to do at least one Christmas-y thing for myself. Oof. I need a nap.

More thoughts before the Feast

This is the part where things start to get sad. Looking on Facebook I see my old pastor "incandescently happy" to have his daughter home to Thanksgiving; I see my younger sister updating her profile as she leaves college herself and then arrives at home, and it hurts. It hurts because I don't know what it means for my dad to love me that much. It hurts because no one is at home waiting for their daughter to come and complete the circle -at least if they are they haven't said anything about it to me. There's a lot of heartache there. And when I mention my old pastor I don't mean to say that I think he's a perfect dad or that my life would have been materially better if I'd been born into a different family. For all their flaws I love my parents a lot. I just know that there's a dad out there on Facebook with the biggest grin I've ever seen on his face just because his daughter came home, and I wish that was me and my dad. This is the part of Thanksgiving that hurts. This is where are the old war wounds start aching and twinging in the sweeping east wind of love seen from afar.

thoughts before the feast

In many ways this upcoming Thanksgiving feels so momentous. It's my first turkey and my first major holiday away from family. It's the first Thanksgiving I've planned and honestly one of the first camping trips I've planned without some major emotional hijinks. I'm starting to enjoy being Natalie -to lose some of the guilt and get back in touch with my desires. It's the night before we leave, and I'm not running around worrying about the unswept floor or the laundry yet to be stowed away. Most of my meal prep is done. I didn't leave a huge pile of dishes in my wake. Allen's pleased, and it looks like the turkey will just fit inside my dutch oven. The vegetables might get the ultra-traditional cooked in an aluminum foil pouch treatment, but but I think it's all going to come together. And no one is crying, yelling, or forcibly losing hair. It's a nice feeling. Tomorrow I'm going to pull together our clothes and personal sundries, prep the turkey, pack the ice chests and freezer bags, and head out to pick up Allen from work before wandering off into the hills. This is probably the least stressed I've been about any trip I've taken this year. Of course this is still the night before. We'll see when I wake up tomorrow morning. Still, I can remember feeling absolutely sick to my stomach the night before a trip from massive amounts of guilt and worry. Yes, and I still wanted to go camping. "The mountains are calling" is a pretty powerful motivator. By God's grace though I've been able to see through much of that guilt and frustration to the larger issues beyond, which has allowed me to reconnect with what's really important. Planning for this Thanksgiving has been so much fun (after the initial bout of homesickness and frustration) because I'm seeing just how far I've come in the past few months. When I look back on the first year Allen and I were married I can't believe just how much of me was buried in a swirling pool of pain, hurt, and denied longing. Sometimes I feel as though I'm only just now waking up after a long hibernation. So like any old bear crawling out of her cave I'm going to wander around in the woods and each a bunch of food.

10 reasons I love smoothies

Here are my top reasons why smoothies are great.

1. Strawberries
2. Blueberries
3. Pineapple
4. Blackberries
5. Bananas
6. Cherries
7. Raspberries
8. Mango
9. Honeydew melon
10. Papaya

Of the fruits on that list there isn't one of them that I ate regularly before I started drinking smoothies once a day. The odd apple was pretty much all the fruit I ate on even a semi-regular basis. Now on any given day I'm getting in multiple servings of fruit, and during any given week I'm eating eight to eleven different fruits along with kefir, orange juice, carrot juice, and powdered greens. It's a meal that's never boring, always surprising, and endlessly fulfilling. It's like your best relationships in a glass :D

creating beauty - resting in beauty

Homemaking is finally, slowly starting to make sense to me. It's not just about getting things done. The list is as important as you make it. No one will die if you don't make the bed or dust the china cabinet. I've heard people say that we should think of housework as a blessing we bestow on others, but I think there's more to it than that. I think housework makes room for blessings. Even more so I think it creates opportunities for rest. Making the bed or scrubbing the sink is work. It can be redeemed work, but it's really work. Walking into your clean kitchen to make bread or pies or breakfast pancakes can be rest, recreation, and hospitality all in one. The clean counters make way for restful occupation.

I think this explains something that has puzzled me about my childhood home. Growing up in that home was at times a confusing and traumatic experience, and yet I experienced moments of great peace and rest while there. I think of the sun shining through my bedroom window, the smell of pancakes and coffee in the morning, the sooty metallic scent of the wood burning stove, and the gleam of hardwood floors in the sun's slanting rays. All those memories involved work -often my work at that. Cleaning and polishing the wood floors, washing dishes, carting armloads of wood up the deck stairs. We went to effort and we basked in the results -shining floors, good smells, and warming fires. This puzzled me though because I very rarely saw my mom content and resting from her work, or perhaps I should say that I very rarely saw her resting to enjoy her work. For that reason I think I saw the good results of work and exulted in them without understand why or how they came about and how I should be enjoying them. Now, it's starting to make more sense to me. I hang curtains in the living room (well actually Allen did), and then I sit back to enjoy the soft, frosty colored light filtering through their white lengths. I clean the kitchen so that I can enjoy the rest and joy of mixing up pies for Thanksgiving. It's not work before you play because work is intrinsically more valuable, it's work before you play because rest is more important and therefore requires more preparation.

I think that's the secret.

satisfactory resolution

Yesterday I had the curtains of doom, and today I had the phone call of despair. Fortunately both situations resolved themselves, but I had a good little time of it until they did. First, the curtains of doom. A while back I bought some lovely cream colored gauzy material to make sheers for the bedroom. Since we live on the ground floor with people walking by during the day it's can feel a bit exposed with the blinds open. It's also dark if you leave the blinds closed. Hence the sheers. Well I finally decided I was going to go ahead and get my bedroom curtains up. So first I sat down and very carefully trimmed the fuzzy edges off the selvage. Then I ran a line of fray check down the side just to make sure. Then I thought about how on earth I was going to get that gauzy stuff to lay flat and square for me to measure it out. Then I thought about trying to roll any sort of hem before the edges unraveled under my fingers. Fortunately I wanted my curtains to pool on the floor just a bit. You serious seamstresses may cringe here, but I plopped my fabric on the ironing board and eyeballed a strip of fusing right across it, trimmed the excess, turned the edge under, and ironed. I measured my length from the hem, ran another strip across to fasten the bottom of the sleeve, then measured again and ran another length across the top to turn the raw edge under. I trimmed and turned the top raw edge, ironed it down, then brought the turned edge down the fusing to make a sleeve. I ran off four panels this way before adjourning to my sewing machine to run a straight stitch down each of my "seams" to hold them in place. Normally I think the fusing would hold the fabric, but the weave on this stuff was so loose it wouldn't hold the fusing very well. Fairly straightforward to tell, but it took me at good 30min per curtain just to get all the ironing and trimming done. However, now I have nice, soft, full, draping sheers in my bedroom. They filter the light beautifully and are a soft, almost delicate counterbalance to all the sturdy wood furniture in there. I'm glad I went to the trouble, but I'm not so sure I would do it again in a hurry.

To my next bit of perplexity - I wrote a while back that Allen and I had made reservations up in redwood country for Thanksgiving weekend. Well today I got a phone call saying that California had decided to close that park for the season or something like that. I can't say I understand myself why they don't just raise their prices and/or run their parks more efficiently. I really don't believe that California's budget problems are due to someone leaving the faucet on at their local campground. Anyway, I got that call this morning. Hours of searching for a suitable campground for naught -and the week before Thanksgiving too when all the parks are either closed for the winter or bang full up with reservations. I was perturbed. To put it mildly. With a tent I'm a little less ambivalent about trying to get a site on busy weekends than I would be with an RV. At least with an RV you can always have pretty good odds of boondocking for the night if you can't get a site. It's harder to do that with a tent. Thank the Lord though when I was searching I came across a private campground in that same area that wasn't full, took reservations, and was close to all the areas we wanted to see. I had a bad hour or two of it wondering if we'd be scrapping our Thanksgiving plans, but it looks like we won't have to now. Thank the Lord.

language: a means of miscommunication

Did a bit of link hopping early today and came upon a list of Groucho Marx quotes translated for the environmentally inclined which I very much hope were intended as a joke for the more humorous members of that community. Alas, I'm afraid they were serious. When you study homo-eroticism in Victorian literature every fop is a queer. When you're convinced the sky is falling every comedian is a planet prophet. I guess. Anyway I thought I'd have some fun with their quotes.

1. "A four-year-old child could understand this report. (pause) Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can't make head or tail of it."

Decoded: The cause and effect of our current eco-crisis is simple but all the bureaucracy and subterfuge swirling around it makes it confusing and disempowering. Maintain a beginner's mind.

Grouch couldn't possibly have been creating humor by taking an idiomatic statement seriously. Nope, he's asserting that discovering apparent subtlety in an issue is "disempowering" and we should endeavor to bring the same child-like self-absorption and indifference we see in classrooms world-wide to bear on our environmental challenges. Side note: if weather and ecology were so simple I think we'd have much fewer consternation about hunting and endangered species. We could just establish safe minimum numbers for all species and have at it. Also, your picnic would never ever be rained out unexpectedly. You know, because this is all so "simple."

2. "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."

Decoded: Firstly of course, he wasn't talking about Planet Green's TV shows. But his point is well-taken. The average American spends 145 hours a month watching television and the net result is a nation mostly unwilling to do the hard work to create social change.

I suppose that to Groucho's apparently intelligent mind television would have little appeal. I would, however, submit that reading a book is rather different from guerrilla gardening or writing indignant letters to Archer Daniels Midland - particularly if it's book written by some right wing nut job intent on drilling oil wells in Alaska. But Groucho didn't mean those kinds of book. Just like he thoughtfully excluded your improving tv shows.

3. "Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms."

Decoded: A not-so-subtle reminder that the U.S. Department of Defense is the planet's worst polluter and biggest gas guzzler.

Yes, because some guy perched on a roof with binoculars and a walkie talkie has a HUGE carbon footprint. Must be the pork rinds he's eating. They'll give him away some day if he doesn't watch out. You can get dna evidence off anything these days.

4. "The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made."

Decoded: Smells like greenwashing to me.

Ok, so it's sort of hard to really misapply that quote.

5. "A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running."

Decoded: The time is long overdue for America to adopt a single payer-style of health care and for each of us to take responsibility for our own health by making greener choices.

A government run taxi paid for by government employees with government issued money is much less expensive because when you run out of money you can just print more. Never mind that children are getting blocks of money for Christmas to use as building blocks because it's cheaper than an apple in the toe of your stocking. Please also note the irony of getting something you're not paying for (my taxes only go to support orphaned whales) as a means of inducing responsibility. We all know that children showered with toys take better care of them than children who carefully hoard pennies and do extra errands to get that new Spider-man action figure.

6. "I could dance till the cows come home. On second thought, I'd rather dance with the cows till you come home."

Decoded: The only human with whom a cow would tango is a vegan.

Actually, you're just ugly and step on my feet a lot.

7. "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies."

Decoded: Two words: Clean coal.

They've got a point here, but they could also make the same argument about the Federal Reserve, the War on Terror, and No Child Left Behind. Actually, most any bill or committee you threw this at would stick. Not a fan of coal myself.

8. "Florida, land of perpetual sunshine. Let's get the auction started before we have a tornado."

Decoded: An eerie preview of today's climate change-created monster storms.

Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the Disney World brochures that fail to tell you about the afternoon thundershowers that sweep through nearly every summer afternoon. Groucho, making fun of marketing schemes? Never. (Ok, so you could convince me that this is eerily apt.)


Disclaimer: this is not to say that I am unsympathetic to conservationists and those who seek to use resources wisely and with due consideration for those who will come after us. I love clean water, clean air, fertile soil, and good food. I also enjoy people who use really bad logic to assure us that we don't have to laugh at humor -far better to use those valuable carbon emissions in deconstruction.