Last night at dinner, we were talking about a friend of mine who opened up an online store for same sex weddings.  The ChickieNob wanted to know why anyone would need a separate store when there were perfectly good bridal shops.  The ChickieNob is a connoisseur of pretty things and likes to visit bridal shops as well as jewelry stores in the same way that other people like to visit art museums or the zoo.  We explained to her the term “discrimination.”

“Actually,” I told her, “something happened just this week on Southwest Airlines.”

The ChickieNob sucked in her breath because Southwest Airlines both disseminates her favourite mini pretzels AND is guilty of kicking the object of her affection, Billie Joe Armstrong, off an airplane a few weeks ago.  When they went for Billie Joe, it shook her, but the mini pretzels had such a grip on her heart that she was willing to accept someone being kicked off for saggy pants.  But when we told her about the Leisha Hailey and Camila Grey, you could see the little wheels turning in her head.  Suddenly she had a hard choice to make — was she going to enjoy the mini pretzels others bring her from their Southwest Airlines trips or was she going to take a stand against discrimination and forgo munching on salty snacks?

Because, when it comes down to the line, in the ChickieNob’s world not only should everyone be allowed to kiss; in fact, everyone should kiss.  More is better in her world: more brides, more grooms, more kissing, more snuzzling, more loving.  I hope she never loses that thought; I hope she never becomes cynical and stops thinking that love is the greatest thing in the world.

“I don’t understand how Southwest Airlines makes such good mini pretzels but then kicks people off their planes,” she told us, hoping for an answer that would allow her to still eat the pretzels while supporting other human beings.

“I know,” Josh said dryly, “you would think that people so skilled at choosing airplane snacks would also be open-minded about all human beings.”

The ChickieNob has decided that she’s going to hold off on consuming Southwest Airline pretzels and see what happens in the future.  How they handle things.  She’s willing to give second chances if it means getting to eat the pretzels again, but for now, she thinks we should take a different airline.  But damn, is that little girl missing her salty snacks.  Please, Southwest Airlines, pull your shit together and prove that part of being a “family airline” is being respectful of ALL families.

The idea for this recipe came to me at the Wilco concert this past weekend.  I’m not a fan of honey cake… or really… honey anything.  I’m also not a fan of apple cake.  So that knocked out two traditional desserts served on Rosh Hashanah (apples because they are round like the year, and honey to wish people a sweet new year).  On the other hand, while I don’t like to eat apple pie (I have this thing about mushy apples), I love to make apple pie, and my brother’s girlfriend gave me this fantastic pie idea recently that I wanted to try out. As Jeff Tweedy sang, I thought about apple pie with vanilla ice cream — my staple side dessert to the main dessert — when suddenly it hit me: honey ice cream.  Apples and honey.

Get it?

So I’m posting these recipes in case other people want to make them for their Rosh Hashanah dinner tomorrow night.

Double Bottom Apple Pie

Ingredients for the Crust

3 3/4 cups of unbleached, all-purpose flour (I like King Arthur)
1 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
3 sticks of butter cut into small bits
1/2 cup of ice water (you may need more, but start with this)

Everyone loves my pies. One man told me that he would choose my pumpkin pie as his last meal if he was about to be executed. So what I’m about to write will horrify all pie makers, but this is what I do…

Put the dry ingredients (flour, salt, and sugar) in the food processor with the metal blade and pulse. Add the dots of butter into the food processor (while it’s off) and toss around a bit with a fork to coat with flour mixture. Turn on the food processor and pulse until the mixture looks like coarse sand. Then sprinkle on the water (yes! While it is in the food processor! Don’t gasp!) and pulse again until the dough pulls together. Make sure you add only enough water to bring the dough together. Too much and the dough will be difficult to work with.

Divide your dough into two circles, wrap in plastic wrap, flatten with your hand, and throw them in the refrigerator. Go write a blog post because you have an hour.

Ingredients for the Pie (modified from Baking Illustrated)

One helping of the pie crust above
7 apples, peeled and sliced thinly (Go for a mixture of types. The only ones I don’t use are golden delicious. I don’t know why I’m biased against them in pies.)
Lemon juice (just enough so the apples don’t discolour)
Scant 1 cup of sugar
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
dash of allspice
2 tbsp all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 500 degrees, with the rack on the lowest setting. I keep the pizza stone in there just because I think it helps conduct heat. Take the first dough out of the refrigerator.

Roll it out by sprinkling some flour on it (not the flour above… just some extra flour) and placing a piece of parchment paper between the dough and the rolling pin. Press the dough into a 9-inch pie plate and cut off the overhang with kitchen scissors. Roll out the leftover dough and make a second circle by placing the bottom of the pie plate over the dough.

You want a circle that fits the exact dimensions of the bottom of the pie plate. Place this dough circle inside the pie plate, creating a double-thick bottom crust. Refrigerate the dough inside the pie plate.

Peel and slice the apples and toss them with lemon juice so they don’t brown. Mix the dry ingredients (sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, flour, and salt) and toss into the apple bowl too (save just a bit of the sugar to use later).

This is going to look like a lot of apples — mostly because it is — but I promise that it will all fit in a 9-inch pie pan. It will mound slightly in the center.

Now roll out the second pie dough to make the top crust. Lift it over the mound of apples and press the edges together with the back of a fork (the top of the pie plate crust to the top crust). Cut off any excess dough. Using the kitchen scissors, snip a few holes in the top of the crust in order to allow the pie to vent. I sometimes put it in the freezer for a few minutes to allow it to firm up again.

If you want to get all fancy, brush the top of the pie with some egg white or water and sprinkle on the remaining sugar.

Place in the oven and lower the temperature to 425 degrees. Bake 25 minutes. Reduce the temperature again to 375 degrees. Bake for another 30 minutes. The pie is ready when the top crust is a golden brown.

Allow it to cool and start work on your ice cream.

Honey Ice Cream

Ingredients for the Ice Cream

2 cups heavy cream
1 cup milk
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup of honey

Make sure your ice cream maker has been in the freezer for 24 hours (you know, the part that goes into the freezer… not the whole damn maker). Place all four ingredients in a pan and gently heat (slow and steady) until the honey is melted and combined. Remove from the heat and allow it to cool slightly. Transfer the mixture to another container and place in the refrigerator for a few hours. Make sure the mixture is COLD before you use it.

Start the ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Mine usually takes about a half hour to freeze into ice cream, so I like to start it at the beginning of dinner so it’s ready when I serve the pie.

Voila — a new take on apples and honey.

Kathy from Four of a Kind is holding a new blog hop/writing exercise, and the nostalgic side of me loves this idea: revisiting an old blog post that fits within the weekly theme and then giving the follow up story.

This week’s theme is “waiting,” so I plugged that term into the search bar on my left sidebar and worked backwards through old posts, starting with 2006 because I figured they would be the most interesting.  I got to read again about my bag of McBlood, trying to find a doctor who would order the thrombophilia testing, and my addiction to pee sticks (and why we can’t keep them — or Oreos — in the house).

And then I found the perfect post for this.

Five years ago, I wrote about my friend’s breakup with her boyfriend of two years, talking about how we can transfer what we know about discussing a breakup with someone brokenhearted to discussing a pregnancy loss.  Not that these two events are synonymous, but people often know the right thing (and the wrong thing) to say when someone tells them about a breakup, and sometimes, it’s very similar to the line of comforting and questioning that can be used during a pregnancy loss.

I wrote,

In relationships and infertility, it’s out of our control. We can only do so much to make it happen. And that’s very frustrating to a woman who has been taught that if she works hard enough, she’ll achieve whatever she wants.

And I still believe that, wondering if we do a disservice to girls by telling them they can achieve anything they want.  We don’t tell boys this because it’s implicit in the world they inhabit.  I can’t think of a time that I’ve heard a bunch of men debate whether or not they can “have it all.”  But we tell girls this, and it’s a rude awakening when we discover that these elements of life that mean so much to us are essentially out of our control.

And I still like the language ideas presented at the end:

But right now she needs to mourn. And the best words we can give in the loss of a relationship: I’m so sorry; talk about it; do you want me to comment or just listen; talk about the good points; what did you learn from this–are also the ones we can use to help a person mourn a pregnancy loss: I’m so sorry; talk about it; do you want me to comment or just listen; tell me about how you felt while you were pregnant; how do you want to remember this loss; what did your RE learn from this. Instead of pushing them. Before they’re ready. To move on and try again.

My friend’s story has a happy continuation.  They broke up and then got back together months later.  They ended up getting married one day before the manuscript for Navigating the Land of If was due to the publisher.  I was a bridesmaid in the wedding and I wore the turkey cutlet.  They have since had a daughter who turned one this summer.  When she was in the throes of that breakup, she would have never believed this blog post, five years later.  But look at how things turned out for her.

Josh and I went to the Wilco concert last night at Merriweather.  Two rows ahead of us, there was a sixty-something-year-old man rocking out on his air guitar.  If you’re familiar with Jeff Tweedy, you know that his music ranges from mellow to slightly harder indie rock.  The singer himself barely moves onstage.  But the man in front of us was dancing as hardcore as Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, except holding an imaginary guitar instead of allowing his arms to flail in every direction. He kept it up for hours — his air guitar playing — and I was absolutely smitten with him.  I think I watched him just as much as I watched the band.

I was going to leave that as my perfect moment — watching air guitar man — but instead, I’ll choose participating in a several thousand person sing along for Jesus, Etc (one hour and three minutes into the NPR recording — can you hear my voice?).  It’s why every once in a while you need to leave your living room and listen to music in a crowd — to be part of thousands of people, all singing the same words, Josh’s hand on my hip, swaying.

Read other perfect moments right here.

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On Saturday, I drove down to Richmond because Lori was at a conference down there.  There are very few people I would brave I-95 South to see. (At one point, I had an 18-wheeler inches from my bumper and two 18-wheelers on either side of me.  It’s a good way to crap your pants.)  We got to have a night of hipster sushi and drinks and watching Lori try to get in lotus position and good cries and crashing on the hotel sofa at 1 am.  It was also quite perfect, but it was closer to a perfect 18 hours vs. a perfect moment.

It is strange to think that I would not know Lori if I hadn’t started writing this blog and she hadn’t started writing hers.  We live on opposite sides of the US; there is little chance that our paths would have crossed in another way.  My life is so much richer since meeting her, and it sometimes gives me pause to think what if I hadn’t started writing one night?  What if she had started her blog and ditched it after a few days?  There would be a Lori-sized hole in my life and I wouldn’t even know it.  Which makes me wonder what other holes exist — people I could have met but by making choices, our paths led away from one another.

And, of course, that goes for all of you.  You make my life so much richer.  I could not imagine living with an ALI blogosphere hole, even if I wasn’t cognizant that it was there.

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While I was away, the ChickieNob informed Josh that she has thought about it further, and she would be happy with a red-eared slider turtle if we can’t get her a clam.

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I am writing this post on my new computer.  I think that people thought I was exaggerating when I told them about my computer, but my father got to experience my old computer in all its glory last night while we were at the concert, and when I got home, he informed me that he was stunned by what a piece of shit my old computer was.  He was incredulous with how he had to restart it (it goes beyond just hitting the restart button on the computer).  What he doesn’t know is that he has barely scratched the surface of life with my old laptop.

It took between 35 and 45 minutes to get it working every morning.  After several restarts, it would finally creak to life.  It took about five minutes to open each program.  Sometimes, I’d get all the programs open and it would freeze, necessitating that I restart it again.  In order to complete two hours of work, I usually needed to restarted it at least two more times.  I wasted at least an hour of work time every day just dealing with the logistics of having the computer on, and tasks themselves took a long time to complete.  I’d have to ask myself whether it was worth answering emails, if I had the emotional wherewithal to deal with the frustration of dealing with the machine.  And beyond that, it only worked if you were using it continuously.  If you paused for longer than two minutes, let’s say, to answer the telephone, it would freeze.  Which meant that I couldn’t answer the phone or pee or cook dinner, OR it meant doing those things and dealing with another few restarts.

And yet I didn’t think I deserved anything else.  It could work, therefore, I felt like I should just deal with the lost work time and frustration.  I felt guilty spending money on this.

This is my first morning using it, and I am already finished checking email and writing a blog post during a time period when I would have still been going through my initial morning restarts in order to get the laptop up and functioning.  I’m going to do an hour of work and actually do an hour of work, vs. have an hour of work to do, but have it take two or more hours to do so.  It is strangely indulgent, a new computer.  Necessary but unnecessary at the same time.

But I love it.

The ChickieNob prepared a thesis statement complete with multiple supports as to why I should buy her a pet clam.  I have no idea how one goes about buying a pet clam, but she argued so passionately that I told her that if I could tape her and post it, I would look into the world of bivalve pets.

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Why-I-Want-a-Clam-mp3.mp3]

Beyond going to the beach and finding one yourself, how does a person buy a live clam?  Um… and how does one know if it’s alive or dead?

By the way, about 8 minutes after this was recorded, I heard the girl muttering in the hallway to herself, “I should have asked for an oyster.”