Too busy

I've been to busy to blog. Good things that have happened:

• I took a nine patch class and at least settled on the fabric. I think I've cut and sewed enough nine patch units for 2 quilts.


• The elections! The House AND the Senate! It gives me hope.


• We have tile on the bathroom floor.


• Tommorrow is Friday

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Pumpkin Cheesecake

I know it is two recipes in a row but it was just so good - and seasonally appropriate!

Pumpkin Cheesecake with Bourbon Spiked Cream
Recipe courtesy Emeril Lagasse, 2000 and Jen W.

1 1/2 cups vanilla wafers, crushed into crumbs
1 cup ground pecan pieces
1 stick melted butter
2 pounds cream cheese, softened and cubed
1 cup light brown sugar
6 eggs
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
Pinch salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups pumpkin puree
2 cups sweetened whipped cream
Dash bourbon
1 cup semisweet chocolate sauce, warm, recipe follows

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Combine the crumbs, ground pecans and the butter together. Mix well and press into a 12-inch spring-form pan. In a food processor, with the metal blade, mix the cream cheese until smooth. Add the brown sugar and blend. Add the eggs 1 at a time to thoroughly incorporate into the cheese mixture. Add the heavy cream. Add the flour, salt, cinnamon and vanilla and blend until smooth. Add the mashed pumpkin and blend until smooth.
Pour into the prepared pan. Bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until the cake is set. Remove from the oven and with a knife loosen the sides from the pan. This will prevent the cake from splitting down the center. Completely cool the cake before cutting.

Combine the whipped cream and bourbon together, blend well. Garnish each piece of cake with the Bourbon Whipped Cream and a drizzle of chocolate sauce.


Chocolate Sauce:
3/4 cup half-and-half
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 pound semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Combine the half-and-half and butter in a small heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Heat the mixture until a thin paper-like skin appears on the top. Do not boil. Add the chocolate and vanilla and stir until the chocolate melts and the mixture is smooth. Remove from the heat and let cool.
Yield: 1 1/2 cups

Butternut Squash Apple Cider Soup from the Culinary Institue of America

This is the best soup I've ever had! Its enough to feed a whole restaurant. Soon I will experiment with reducing the recipe to serve only 6 or 8. I'll probably simplify it also. I don't see myself peeling squash when I can buy lovely frozen squash...

Ingredients:
Butternut Squash 9lbs
Onions 1 lb
Carrots 1 lb
Water to cover by 4 inches
Honey 1/2 cup
Ground Cinnamon 1/2 cup
Whole Butter 3 lbs
Salt to taste

Garnishes

Small diced butternut squash, cooked 2 cups
Pumpkin oil as needed (I have no idea what this is)
Reduced apple cider glaze as needed in a squirt bottle
Toasted pumpkin seeds 1 cup

Directions:
Peel and slice the squash. Reserve. Sweat the onions in a small amount of vegetable oil. Add the squash, carrots and water. Simmer until tender.

Puree in a blender until completely smooth. Add the honey and spices. Mix in the butter. Season with the salt.

Prepare garnishes.

Number Of Servings: many, many

More Hudson Valley Pictures

A view of the river from the Wilderstein property and the house, a wooden Queen Anne Victorian, even more amazing inside.

 

The very romantic ruined carriage house.  www.wilderstein.org

Favorite passage from Sleepy Hollow

His stronghold was situated on the banks of the Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered, fertile nooks, in which the Dutch farmers are so fond of nestling. A great elm-tree spread its broad branches over it; at the foot of which bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest water, in a little well, formed of a barrel; and then stole sparkling away through the grass, to a neighboring brook, that bubbled along among alders and dwarf willows. Hard by the farmhouse was a vast barn, that might have served for a church; every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm; the flail was busily resounding within it from morning to night; swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the eaves; and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as if watching the weather, some with their heads under their wings, or buried in their bosoms, and others swelling, and cooing, and bowing about their dames, were enjoying the sunshine on the roof. Sleek unwieldy porkers were grunting in the repose and abundance of their pens; whence sallied forth, now and then, troops of sucking pigs, as if to snuff the air. A stately squadron of snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond, convoying whole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobbling through the farmyard, and guinea fowls fretting about it, like ill-tempered housewives, with their peevish discontented cry.
www.bartelby.net
www.gutenberg.org

Rhinebeck

DGF and I visited Rhinebeck this past weekend. The weather was exquisite in a manner that made me think of Washington Irving's prose in Sleepy Hollow.

"It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day, the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet."

As a matter of fact it was a weekend devoted largely to history. We walked through houses built by wealthy American families during the Gilded Age and some of the cemetaries in which they now abide. The Vanderbilt home was well preserved but offered only a faint and distance glimpse of the people who had lived there. The tour guide worked hard, and he was sincere, knowledgable and entertaining but in the end it was hard to imagine anyone every living in the building. It was a walk through a memorial.

We also visited Wilderstein, a glorious wooden Queen Anne Victorian in the wilderness as I think the name implies. The last member of the family died about 10 years ago on the eve of her 100th birthday. Apparently the family never threw anything away and the house is filled with a century and a half of clothing, books, art, bric-a-brac, furniture and photos. Of course that made it seem that the occupants had just left the room.

We also looked at several once very grand homes now in ruin. That is something I haven't seen very often excepting some natural disaster.

Medal of Freedom

Tonight we went to see George H. Bush and Bill Clinton accept the Medal of Freedom. I left at about 5 pm. Traffic in Center City was solid, nothing was moving. The plan was to work my way south until I could turn left and cross Broad Street, make my way east and then finally to turn left again and drive as far north as I could go. When more than a half hour after I started I found myself still west of Broad and traveling north and further west still I abandoned any hope of parking near the Convention Center. I inched over to 7th and South, parked the car and walked to 6th and Market. I met my DGF on the corner, we qued up at several security check points and eventually arrived at our standing room location on the front lawn of the Constitution Center.

The lawn was not crowded. There was plenty of room to move off from the group a bit, stroll around or sit on the wall at the edge of the side walk. The whole thing felt a little like a large family gathering or a big outdoor wedding.

The politicians talked. The singers sang. Medals were given. Bush was inarticulate, so was Street (I'm always surprised...). Clinton was thoughtful and skillful. Jon Bon Jovi sang afterwards.

But when it was all over and once we were past the security it was remarkably like any autumn night, in any town center, standing on any patch of green with neighbors marking some event of local significance. Not at all like a a post 9/11, post-terror, neo-conservative world.

Medieval Manuscripts

Last week we deployed the Medieval Manuscripts digitization project we've been working on steadily for the past 18 months. The manuscripts were reproduced so painstakingly with a very precise camera lense attached to a powerful scanner suspended over them. As human-made objects go they are pretty old. I can't help but wonder what this project will have become in 100 years. What will it have become in as many years as the manuscripts are old?

Medieval Manuscripts

The Pirate's Bible

In a small room in the rafters of a big Library rests a Bible that was printed hundreds of years ago in Germantown, Pennsylvania. The type face used was sent from Germany. It came from Martin Luther himself. In gratitude for access to the precious type the printer sent six Bibles back to Germany for Martin Luther. But on the way the ship was waylaid by pirates who ransacked it of all of its treasure and sank it. Over the centuries the Bibles ended up at various royal courts in Europe until, finally, one came back to Pennsylvania, to 1901 Vine Street not to far from where it was printed to live on a shelf in a small room up in the rafters of the big Library.

Posted directly from Picassa. Pretty neat!

More pictures from Pennsylvania Quiltfest. Entire quilt and detail.

Pictures from Pennsylvania Quilt Show

More pictures to come...

Life is too short to read anything that isn't interesting: Great Openers.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
1881

The Ultimate Would-Have-Been Blogger

As I become just a bit obsessed with this blog it occurs to me that if Samuel Pepys were alive today he would have been a natural. With that thought in mind I turned to Goggle and sure enough! -- someone has turned his diaries into a blog! www.pepysdiary.com. Isn't that "most neat and fine!" And so to bed.

Reading

"Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere..." My new favorite first line from Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. I haven't felt compelled to read a serious book in quite a while. I do occasionally read a mystery or a sci fi work from the beginning all the way through to the end but, of late, it seems that I would rather be doing things other than reading. Books don't capture my attention the way they used to. Finding ones I want to read seems like work. At other times in my life I was always on the trail of a good book. I wonder what I'm on the trail of now...

But I did read this one and, like any well-written book, it has found it's way into my view of the world. Now when I see the sun setting hugh and orange I think about the images in Spin of the sun filling the sky, dangerously closer to us. When I drive through desolated areas of the City I speculate about what kind of a civilization would find ours worth going to some lengths to preserve. I also think about the optimism of the story. Its too smart to probably ever have wide appeal but it is richly complex and absorbing.

Surprised by Peaches

You wouldn't think that row houses could have gardens that look this green behind them but the world is full of surprises. Row houses especially are surprising. First, through some odd principle of context and private human scale vs public scale they can be quite spacious inside and yet seem to take up very little space on the street. Second, you often have no real idea of what is behind them. I was walking down a small street yesterday and noticed ripening peaches topping the high wooden palisade fence around someone's side yard. I stopped and peered a bit closer, craning up on my toes to see as far over the fence as I could. I think there are three fruit trees in that yard.
That started me thinking about how it might feel to be in there, among the trees with the solid row of parked cars and the fairly constant stream of foot traffic on the very narrow street outside. Was it quieter in there? Did the tree absorb some of the sound so that the yard felt more hushed than the rest of South Philadelphia? Could garden's keeper smell the peaches ripening in the warm June evening?

School's out. First day of summer.

My cat in the backyard of my house last summer.