Halfway down the Danube

Things to do in the DC area with your kids I

There are of course countless things you can do in the greater DC area with your kids.
You can park them at the Ben & Jerry's Scoop shop on Fairmont Ave in Bethesda while you enjoy your sushi at Sushi Sushi ten meters down the street.
You can hand them off to your relatives and spend the afternoon reading.
You can also take them to the John Cabin Regional Park in Rockville, just off Tuckerman Lane. The playground is great - large, with different installations for various age groups. It's shady and there is a cool breeze most of the times - very vital for DC summers (although so far we had rain, and rain, and thunderstorms). You can ride a miniature train which all kids will love, guaranteed. I like it for many reasons: it's very close to our current quarters -- about ten minutes -- the kids are busy for hours, literally. The picnic areas are nice and clean. Everything is safe. They have bathrooms that stink of urine but aren't actually appalling. Come early because the park quickly fills up. There are plenty of parking spaces, though.

Only the fact that they found a dead bird there today makes me a little uneasy. I'm going to read up on the symptoms of West Nile virus now. Tomorrow, we're going to the zoo. Stay tuned!

So you thought we'd died?

Nope. We survived it all -- the two-day car trip from Romania to Germany with a sick toddler (stomach bug, yuck!) and a baby, the purchase of our new mini-van (yep, we are now officially married with children and van), the flight across the Atlantic with two kids, three days in New York with two jetlagged kids, a seven-hour trip through torrential rain to DC with two bored kids...

We are now relaxing for a bit. More to come soon, or so we hope.

Corruption 101

Via Dragos at argumente, here's a good introduction to corruption in Romania, by a foreigner for foreigners.

Several good bits. For instance:

Gonteanu shared with me fascinating May 2004 OSI research on the public attitudes that result -- 89% of Romanians surveyed think the state should “provide jobs for everyone who wants to work”; 55% think the government should start new state enterprises to boost employment; 58% think the majority of parliamentarians are corrupt; a shocking 51% think that most judges are corrupt … and 14% have themselves paid bribes in court.

And this:

What’s surprising to an outsider like me is how widely and in how much detail all this corruption (and more) are known. This was certainly somewhat a function of my milieu, which trended seriously toward young urban professionals or cultural figures sympathetic to the Liberal Party. But it’s also a measure of the deep and perhaps decisive urban/rural split in the country, which is more pronounced than any country I’ve witnessed, with the possible exception of Milosevic’s rump Yugoslavia.

In Bucharest and the other large cities, there is no shortage of critical newspapers, muckraking revelations, national and international television news, student populations, and what one diplomat called “the most youth-obsessed culture I’ve ever seen.” Not surprisingly, the opposition alliance (composed of the center-right Liberal Party and the center-left Democrats) won nearly all of the major cities, while losing most of the countryside (where plumbing isn’t widely available, let alone cable television or aggressive newspapering). According to OSI research, something like 70% of the rural population doesn’t even venture into the nearest decent-sized town more than once a month...

This is entirely consistent with what I've seen. Bucharest, Timisoara, and to a lesser extent three or four other cities (Galati, Brasov) are already a completely different world from the rest of the country. Rural Romania -- and keep in mind that roughly half of the country's population is rural -- is much poorer and, well, traumatized. They're very little-c conservative out in the countryside. Understandably so; change, for the last three generations, has meant nothing but trouble. Still, they're not going to be out in front pushing the country forward into the future.

I think the Romania-Yugoslavia comparison is also very apropos. The city of Belgrade never much cared for Milosevic -- it was a relatively cosmopolitan place. But Slobo used to overrun it with rent-a-crowds, poor rural Serbs that he'd bring in from the countryside by the busload to attend his rallies and "spontaneous" demonstrations of public support. And while one meets Serb nationalists everywhere in Serbia, it's out in the countryside that one encounters the really overheated conspiracy theories and true, deep paranoia.

Mind, the article doesn't touch on the fascinating topic of private corruption in Romania... how, for instance, the foreign purchase of a Romanian firm may have to fire half the management in the first few months, because so many of them may have various scams going on. But it's a good introduction to the topic generally.

More on this in a bit.

Up the old Olt

You've never heard of the Olt River, have you? (Talking to the non-Romanians here, obviously.)

Well, neither had I. Until Saturday.

Oh, I'd seen it on the map. And I drove across it once, on a business trip to Craiova. "Say, that's a big river there," I thought, and drove on. So I was aware of its existence, in a general sort of way.

What I didn't know was that the central valley of the Olt is one of the great scenic drives of Europe.

Well, it is. It's spectacular. Gorgeous. Breathtaking. And hardly anyone outside of Romania has heard of it.

Why? Well... look at a map of Romania, and you see that the country is sort of an oval, with the Carpathian mountains running across it in a right angle like a backwards "L", and the high plateau of Transylvania in the middle. The Olt drains the southern half of that high plateau. (The northern half is drained by a bunch of rivers that flow into the Tisza, which is another extremely cool river that none of us have ever heard of.) The Olt then runs south to the Danube. But to get there, it first has to get through the southern arm of the Carpathians. It has done this by cutting a very steep, deep and narrow valley.

So as you drive north from Pitesti, you're driving along the river... and the mountains gradually close in around you... and the slope to the side of the road turns into a cliff... and suddenly you realize that there's a sheer drop on the other side of the road, twenty or thirty meters down to the fast-moving river. That's when you sit up, look around, and realize that you're driving through some seriously amazing scenery.

Dark peaks, wrapped in forests, reflected in the water. Ruined castles. Huge raw gouges where the Communists took thousands of tons of stone and gravel to build hydroelectric dams. And mountains, mountains everywhere.

It's actually a series of gorges, separated by wider spots where the river runs more slowly. Some of these wide spots are now filled with lakes -- the aforementioned hydroelectric dams. (The power potential of the Olt must be quite something.) Some, though, have spa towns. The area is slightly volcanic, and there are hot springs. People have been going up the Olt for the natural baths since the days of the Celts and Romans.

A side note here. I haven't encountered a lot of nostalgia for the good old days of the Ceausescus. However, from time to time people have commented on certain things that they do miss. And one that's come up again and again is this business of the spas.

See, under Communism, almost everyone got free trips to spas. It wasn't just if you were sick, but every year or so, free, whether you needed it or not. I think it got started as a populist gesture -- back before the Communist takeover, spas were only for the rich. But after the Revolution, comrades, the doors were thrown open to the peasants and workers!

Well, okay. But I never really understood why people got nostalgic about it. Once a year the government gives you a free hot bath... big deal.

But now I understand it a bit better. The spas are in a region of profound natural beauty, surrounded by places where people would pay good money to ski, swim, and hike. For American readers, it's a bit as if the government was giving away free weekends at Aspen, Vail, and Lake Tahoe.

Which brings us to the other why: why is the Olt Valley still unknown outside Romania? There is some tourism, but not nearly as much as there should be.

Well, I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that tourism marketing for Romania is pretty crappy generally. (European readers: do you have a strong image of Romania as a place to visit? Nope, didn't think so.) Another is that the Olt is rather inconveniently located. There are only three cities in Romania with serious international air connections -- Bucharest, Cluj and Timisoara -- and the Olt Valley is at least three hours' drive away from all of them. Unless you plan to take the the overnight train from Budapest down to Sibiu (about which more anon) it's not that easy for a foreigner to reach this part of Romania.

Which may not be such a bad thing. Aside from the spa towns, with their interesting mix of old French and Swiss style chalets with Communist-era blocks, there's not a lot of development here yet. No billboards, no motels, no fast food outlets or roadside souvenir stands. Just the road and the river.

That will change, sooner or later. Meanwhile, if you're ever in central Romania, don't miss the Olt.

There and Back Again

Well, we did it. 1500 kilometers from Bucharest to central Germany with a two-year-old and a baby.

Claudia is in Germany now; she dropped me off in Budapest, Hungary, and I took the overnight train back over the Carpathians, arriving in Bucharest early this morning. Home, shower, coffee and back to the office. Meanwhile Claude continued on through Hungary, Austria and Bavaria, arriving at the grandparents' late last night.

So we made it.

Details in a bit.

Non-Pie Blogging: Tropical and Tomato Thoughts

Ah, summer is here, a hot, wet, sticky, sultry New York City summer, and inevitably, a young man's thoughts turn to the kitchen.

In response to the New York City Math Teacher's request for a butterscotch-like side dish that wouldn't violate the rules of kosherality when served with meat barbecue, I tried my previous butterscotch recipe with the exotic non-dairy substitution of two 400 mL cans of Goya coconut milk instead of the milk and butter. Worked like a charm! The taste of the islands, mon. This one, you might want to add a splash of rum instead of vanilla. Since I have sworn off pies for the moment, I ate this as a simple dessert pudding.

Lately I have been craving chicken adobo. It's one of the world's great, if relatively unknown, simple chicken dishes, like chicken cacciatore or chicken Marengo. It was originally devised in the Philippines -- also hot, wet, and sticky, but there the whole year around -- but it's slowly infiltrating the mainstream in the United States. And it's pretty easy. You start with a fryer (or chicken legs, or breasts, or whatever), then simmer it in vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic until the meat is tender. Also it usually includes bay leaves and black pepper, but we're talking a very vinegary, salty, garlicky sauce here. You serve the whole shebang with rice.

There are a bunch of tweaks: starch to thicken the sauce, sugar to sweeten it, different sorts of vinegars, more complex spices, et cetera. You can brown the meat initially, or sear it in the vinegar; and you can pan-fry the meat after it simmers (keeping the sauce of course). It works just fine with pork, or even goat. Except for the soy sauce, I don't think there's an ingredient that isn't common to Romania. You don't even have to serve it with rice; mamaliga should work fine. Some American versions even use potatoes.

Measurements when I actually make it.

Question for Romanian readers: What's the tomato cuisine in Romania like? I was thinking about the Romanian climate and agriculture the other day, and it struck me that Romania might actually be better for growing big juicy beefy tomatoes than the Mediterranean proper. In the US, New Jersey (of all places) is known for that sort of tomato, and it's probably from those tomatoes that the great American traditions of ketchup, 'red sauce' restaurants, and the Bloody Mary grew. On the other hand, northern Italian cooking uses the tomato sparingly.

Birthday Boy

Happy 1st Birthday, little boy.

David, July 2003

David, July 7, 2004

He had a great day. We had the playgroup over, he got entirely too many presents and too much cake, and he got bratwurst for dinner. He's a very happy but soundly sleeping baby.

Is the EU just blind, or in fact stupid?

EU enlargement commissioner Guenter Verheugen on Tuesday congratulated Romania for a new law restricting the possibility for foreigners to adopt Romanian children.

Verheugen called for the law, which parliament voted last week, to be strictly applied in order to bring Romania in line with European Union legislation.

"This law is very clear. International adoption is now possible under very strict conditions," Verheugen told a press conference.
Source: EU Business.com

I know. I'm not really one to judge harshly. But I can't find words strong enough for my outrage over this latest development in the adoption law.

Honestly, I do wonder whether the EU has lost its collective mind. Does Verheugen have any idea what this law will actually do - and what not? It seems to me that he doesn't.

If he thinks that the restrictions on international adoption -- namely, it has to be made sure that a child will absolutely not be adopted by a Romanian family before it will be made eligible for international adoption -- if he thinks it will stop child trafficking, then he better think again. The only thing the law will actually do about child trafficking is it will raise the profits of those performing it and the receiving ends will pay much more than they did before. Hello? Romania is a corrupt society. Did someone not pay attention?

What this law will do is to ensure that children, who otherwise could be adopted into families in the EU or the States, and have safe and happy lives, will now stay in the Romanian orphanage system for years before it's clear they will not be adopted nationally. Romanians are very peculiar about adopting, it's not a generally accepted social phenomenon. It's not as if thousands of desperate Romanian families are standing in line for adoption. Plus, Romanian bureaucracy is... slow, if you want to be kind. It really will take years for each child to determine that it isn't wanted in Romania.

What this means for the children is clear to anybody who doesn't have a potato for a brain: the children will suffer neglect and be traumatized for the rest of their lives. Romanian state orphanages are horrible, to say the least.

In particular, this law is bad news for gypsy kids. While they might very well be adopted abroad, hardly any Romanian will give adopting a gyspy kid a second thought. But the system won't release those kids any earlier. Again, the minorities are those who will suffer most.

Is Verheugen aware of this? Is the EU? I can't imagine they aren't because there are a lot of people, including now-Ex Ambassdor Guest from the USA who kept arguing against this law. The facts are on the table.

America's ambassador to Bucharest described the law as a "tragedy", which would bar thousands of childless couples legitimately providing some of Romania's 40,000 orphans with a high standard of living in the US. Source: Deutsche Welle

No, it's not about children only being happy when they are raised in the US. It's about the fact that spending your most important childhood years in a Romanian state orphanage will screw you up for life.

Verheugen and the EU are guilty of child neglect in the worst possible manner. I'm disgusted about the behavior of both the Romanian government and the EU. Shame on you both.

Pie Blogging the Last: E Pluribus Unum, Or, The Spaghetti Pie

Happy Fourth of July! This is the day that Americans all around the world celebrate the founding of their nation by performing its two great ritual pastimes: cooking a lot of meat, and blowing things up.

Since this is not an explosives blog (yet), I'm not going to post any recipes for the latter activity. On the other hand, I have a pie recipe that reflects our national motto, "E pluribus unum" -- "Out of many, one!" -- pretty well, I think. Benjamin Franklin, that glorious rake, lifted the phrase from a work of Virgil's (or Pseudo-Vergilius's) entitled "Moretum", which is your basic elderly peasant hard but good life idyll with a recipe for pesto thrown in. Here are the money lines:

it manus in gyrum, paulatim singula vires
deperdunt proprias, color est e pluribus unus

I'm not Belle Waring (though after the initial period of adjustment I'd bet it'd be pretty cool), so I'm going to quote one John Augustine Wilstach's translation of 1884:

Spins round the stirring hand; lose by degrees
Their separate powers the parts, and comes at last
From many several colors one that rules.

'That rules' is filler, unfortunately making the passage sound like it was inscribed on a ring somewhere. But you get the gist. Stirring, stirring, stirring towards unity! The pie connection is obvious.

Also, spaghetti pie is a meat pie, or at least this version is. So it fits the cooking meat Fourth of July tradition as well.

There are really two recipes here: one for the filling, and one for the crust. For reasons of time management I started with the filling.

The filling for spaghetti pie is basically a really thick meat spaghetti sauce. If you have your own recipe, you can skip this, or maybe read it for comparative purposes. I make no pretense to authenticity or high culinary art or even repeatability with this sauce, but I do know that once I made it, I never stopped nibbling at it.

I started by chopping a medium onion and four cloves of garlic and putting them in a skillet. I drizzled olive oil on top, and cooked the onion down. The pieces were 'translucent' as the cookbooks say, a little see-through, but I go more by volume. There's a lot of water in an onion.

Then I added some sliced white mushrooms, and drizzled some more olive oil on top. This was around eight ounces, or about 250 g worth, and I was seriously thinking about adding more. Mushrooms are also rather watery, so I cooked those down as well, until they were getting brown and tender.

I let the water released by the vegetables cook off a little longer, and then added a pound of ground beef. I knew, by the supermarket that sold it, that this too would release a fair amount of water. So I browned the meat, let the liquid cook off, added some salt and pepper, and let the flavors intermingle. There's a chemical process called the Maillard reaction that plays an important role here in developing the flavors: the carbohydrates given up by the vegetables combine chemically with the amino acids in the meat to produce complexities of flavor that chemists still have difficulty analyzing.

After the meat had browned, and the water released had largely cooked off, I stirred in two 8 ounce cans of nearly generic tomato sauce. Of course, these too were also watery. I stirred in some dried oregano, and let it simmer.

Note: if I had green peppers on hand, I would have added them very early in the process. If I had some olives, I would have added them just after the tomato sauce. That's also when I would have added a little bit of wine to the sauce, not very much at all. But these are all my personal preferences: I like the peppers in my spaghetti sauce mushy, my olives firm, and I'd rather drink my wine than eat it.

After the sauce had reduced even further, I moved it to a burner at one side, set very low, and began work on the crust.

As you may have guessed, the crust of a spaghetti pie is where the spaghetti is. It's rather clever. You cook a little more than half a box, um, call it five or six ounces of spaghetti (150 to 200 g), to edibility. You rinse that with cold water, to cool the noodles down. You pour in two well-beaten eggs, and three tablespoons or so of grated Parmesan cheese.

Then you line a pie plate with it.

Basically, what you're making is a durum starch fiber composite embedded in an albumen-casein matrix. When it cooks, it will be much stronger than either a spaghetti mat or an omelette.

So I did; and by that point, the sauce had thickened considerably, solids held together by thick liquid, combined into a melodious whole.

paulatim singula vires
deperdunt proprias, color est e pluribus unus

I set the oven to 350 F (175 C), poured the hot meat sauce into the crust -- yes, with the raw egg; never fear, it will cook thoroughly -- sprinkled some more Parmesan cheese on top, and put the pie in the oven for about twenty-five minutes.

This is a pie you eat straight from the oven. I already knew it would be good, because I had been picking mushrooms from the sauce (under the pretense of 'adjusting the seasoning') while I was watching the spaghetti cook.

And it was good. Many thanks to Carrie for the suggestion!

PS This may be my last pie for a while. I am suffering a little from pie burn-out. On the other hand, I've lost 3 kg since I started, so maybe I should get a diet book contract.

We're doing the crazy thing

Next Saturday, as the kids rise with the sun, we will quickly dress them, throw something to eat at them and buckle them into the car. Then we will drive for three days until we are in Germany.

Sounds crazy? It sure is, for various reasons. Everybody knows that driving long distances with toddlers is a no-no. It's hot and our car has no air con. The Romanian stretch from Bucharest to Hungary consists almost entirely of country roads with crazy drivers and truck traffic from Turkey to Western Europe. Oh, and Doug can only come as far as Budapest. He has to get back to work on Monday.

I did this trip before, last year. So why am I doing it again? Oh, it saves us a buttload of money in air fares. Plus, the car is registered in Germany and we are buying a new one, so we need to get this one back to its home country in order to get rid of it.

I'm sure it's better this time around. I'm used to Romanian driving, speak some Romanian and the country is not completely strange to me anymore -- so the overall experience should be a bit better. Plus, this time, the quality of the roads will increase as we go, so that's nice (of course, we are driving back as well, but that's for later in August and I decline to think about it just now).

Survival strategies:

- We bought a powered cooler which will supply us with cool drinks and unspoilt fruit and snacks on the road. Always a plus.

- We are going to use Vomacur -- the best thing against carsickness and, as a pleasant side effect, it makes the kids sleepy. To be used only in emergencies, of course. Which will arise, of course.

- We know of a nice outdoor museum in Arad where we can stop and run the kids around. We know of a McDonald's in Pitesti. (You know, only as a parent in transition countries will you learn to appreciate the glory that is McDonald's.) We know the best childfriendly rest stop on the autobahn right after Passau. All important mile stones, as this trip goes.

If I survive, I shall report back around the 12th, or so. In the meantime, I'm trying to get all the essentials together, check oil and water and all that, and get mentally prepared.

If our esteemed readers have suggestions as to where to stop on the road (with kids, so safe and clean is a must), step forward now. Thanks.

Down to the Black Sea

It wasn't black. At least, not when we visited it. A very nice dark blue-green color, and smooth as a duck pond.

The drive there has its interesting points. If you look at a map, you'll see that the Danube, after rolling along in more or less a straight line for 300 km, gradually swings through right angle turn 100 km or so before it reaches the Black Sea. It flows north instead of east for about 150 km. Then, quite suddenly, it turns east again, splits into three or four smaller rivers, and empties into the Black Sea through a vast, soggy delta.

(This delta is supposed to be a birdwatcher's paradise. Unfortunately, it's not easy to reach -- you need a couple of days with nothing better to do -- so I probably won't be visiting any time soon.)

Anyhow: between the river and the sea is a blunt-tipped wedge of land about the size of Connecticut. It's called Dobrogea (in the northern, Romanian part) or Dobrudja (in the southern, Bulgarian part).

It has an interesting history. Colonized by the ancient Greeks. Steppe tribes -- Alans, Bulgars, Khazars, Cumans. Part of the Roman empire, with Roman ruins all over the place. Then it was the Byzantine province of Scythia Minor, a borderland of the Byzantium for many centuries (unlike the rest of Romania, which was influenced by the Byzantine Empire but never really part of it).

Then it was Turkish. And it stayed Turkish right up until 1878; the modern Romanian city of Constanta began life as the Turkish port of Köstence. There's still a large Turkish minority in the region; more than half of Romania's Turks (there are perhaps 150,000 of them altogether) live in Dobrogea.

Anyhow: driving there from Bucharest, one crosses the Danube. And it's quite a crossing. There's a 20 km stretch of "highway" at that point -- you have to stop at a toll booth and pay 40,000 lei (about US$1.25). The "highway" is supposed to have four lanes, but two of them have been closed for construction, so it's really another damn two-lane road. And it's full of potholes.

On the other hand, the Danube crossing is pretty impressive; it's the very last one before the river blows up into delta mode and hits the sea, and there's a spectacular double road/rail bridge. (The rail bridge dates to the 1890s, and was the longest bridge in Europe at the time it was built.)

Then one drives past the Cernavoda nuclear power plant. Cernavoda is of Ceausescu's more memorable accomplishments. He lured the Canadians into building it for him by telling them they'd get to build twenty! new! nuclear power plants! in Romania. Then he gradually re-adjusted the deal -- ten plants, five, three -- until the Canadians were paying to build one plant, and participating in rather a lot of involuntary technology transfer too.

Cernavoda is still running; in fact, it's being expanded. But it's rather controversial, since it's built on an arm of the Danube that doesn't always provide quite enough water for cooling, and is also in an earthquake zone. More about this in a bit, perhaps.

[continued]

Pie Blogging: Satan May Relish Coffee Pie

Have I started making pies for the Prince of Darkness? Well, no. At least, not that I know of.

"Satan may relish coffee pie," was a mnemonic phrase devised by an emigrant French professor living in Brooklyn, New York, one François Fauvel-Gouraud, in 1844. Gouraud had come to the United States in 1839 to promote the new photographic technology of the Daguerrotype, made public earlier that year. Unfortunately, like many first movers in new technologies, Gouraud was unable to make good on his early position.

However, he rapidly bounced back. He quickly mastered American English, and promoted a different sort of technology: mnemotechnology, or the art of memory. He rapidly updated an earlier system then popular in France, and revised it to American tastes. Going on the lucrative public speaking circuit of that era, he made $20K in a single year promoting his method, roughly equivalent to $500K today.

Here's a Baltimore critic, one Edgar Allan Poe, on Gouraud and his method:

It is by no means too much to say that the powers of memory, as aided by his system, are absolutely illimitable. We earnestly advise our readers to procure M. Gouraud's extraordinary work and decide in the premises for themselves.

How did Gouraud's method work? (And what does it have to do with Satan and coffee pie?) Through "conditional associations". In this case, Gouraud associated the phonetic sounds of the consonants in a sentence to numerals. S (or soft C or Z) became 0, T (or D) became 1, N became 2, M became 3, R became 4, L became 5, Sh (or J or Ch) became 6, hard C (or K or hard G) became 7, F (or V) became 8, and P (or B) became 9.

So "SaTaN May ReLiSH CoFFee Pie" simply becomes 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Easy as pie.

In fact, Gouraud came up with a poem for the first hundred fifty-five digits of pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter). It begins:

My deary Dolly, be no chilly
My love I beg you, be my nymph...

Alas, Gouraud's deary dolly predeceased him later that decade, of tuberculosis, and Gouraud soon followed her. Both are buried in Brooklyn's remarkable Green-Wood Cemetery.

Finally, if I am assembling the pieces of the story correctly, Gouraud's son George later served with distinction during the American Civil War, and as Thomas Edison's agent, became the first man ever to record a musical performance, in London's Crystal Palace. As a child, Winston Churchill heard his Civil War stories.

Anyway. Back to pie!

That is, coffee pie. Yes, my two delights have finally converged.

Warning: I was getting a little complacent in my pie-making abilities. But complacency leads to error. So while the pie ultimately turned out well, do not follow what I did verbatim.

I took one cup of white sugar, two tablespoons of flour, and some small fraction of a teaspoon of salt and mixed them together in my old saucepan. I brewed a cup of strong coffee, about two-thirds of a mug, and poured that in, and poured in the same amount of milk, which made the mixture a light brown. I heated it below boiling and stirred, thickening the mixture slightly. It tasted like a really rich latte, the mouthfeel enhanced by the flour.

Error analysis: I should have used more flour here, or added some starch. I saw the filling was not getting much thicker, but I assumed that the next step would take care of the problem.

I let the saucepan cool for a few minutes, and added three egg yolks, keeping the egg whites for later omelette goodness. I broke the yolks and stirred them into the warm coffee mixture, which did not change its color appreciably. Putting the pan back on the burner, I heated it up again, below boiling, occasionally lifting the pan to prevent it from heating too fast, and stirred it while it thickened. A lot of bits of egg white still attached to the yolk coagulated, and I removed them with a fork. But the mixture itself did thicken, to the consistency of a light batter.

I poured the mixture into a pre-fab Pillsbury frozen pie crust, and baked it for 20 minutes at 350 F (175 C).

The filling hadn't set into a custard yet. I baked it for another 5 minutes.

The filling still hadn't set. I baked it for another five.

Still no setting. I figured this opening and closing of the oven door was causing the oven to lose heat, so I leave it in for another 10 minutes, prepared to pull it out if I smell the crust burning.

Nope. The filling was still sloshing in the crust.

The crust itself was still light brown, so I decided to turn the temperature up to 400 F (about 200 C), to see if the extra heat will cause the filling to solidify. It's at this point that I realize I probably should have added more flour.

Ten minutes passed. I opened the oven door to see a boiling pie. The surface of a pie will occasionally rise and fall like bubbles that can't pop, but a custard filling is not supposed to boil.

I pulled the pie out and wondered what to do next. I didn't think it was ruined, though I had grave doubts about the texture of the filling. After a minute of thinking hard, I decided to see if I could extract, thicken, and replace the pie filling without a catastrophic failure mode.

I carefully poured the filling into another saucepan (not having washed the previous one yet). This was a little hazardous, because the pie filling was very hot, perhaps 90 C, and sticky.

Looking in the saucepan, I was dismayed to see that the egg yolks had curdled inside the filling and made it grainy! I pulled out my whisk and began stirring out the curds. Better. I added a tablespoon of cornstarch to the filling, and began whisking again. This time, I could feel the starch thickening the mixture, making it more viscous, resisting the motion of the whisk. The filling at this point was smooth and light brown again. I tasted it, burning the tip of my finger getting a sample. Yes, it was smooth in the mouth as well.

I poured the mixture back in the pie crust. It occupied less volume than it did when I had pulled the pie out. I think the cornstarch, in thickening the viscosity of the filling, made the material more dense. Also, I think I should have added a little milk, to bring the volume of the filling back up. Anyway.

I put the pie back in the oven, and baked it for twelve minutes at 350 F (175 C) again. This time the pie came out with the filling firmly set, though somewhat diminished. I let it cool.

The first slice I approached timidly. To make up for some of the pie's lost volume, I put a dollop of aerosol whipped cream on the slice, good if bizarre stuff, cut the tip off the slice and onto my fork, closed my eyes, and ate it.

My repair job worked. Quite tasty. Good. In fact, real good.

I dunno about that other guy, but I now relish coffee pie.

Instead of pies...

... a quick and dirty but very yummy soup. My soups are always experimental, sweep-the-kitchen-floor style soups. Often, they come out just fine.

Today I tried to recreate a soup from Snack Attack - a zucchini soup. I read the ingredients in the menu and thought it should be pretty straight forward. I forgot I lacked one important ingredient which was sour cream. Well. If you do sweep-the-kitchen-style-cooking, then you have to deal with shortcomings.

First, I chopped up two big onions in generous pieces and cooked them in oil until they were nicely transparent. In went two chopped up zucchinis -- without the skins, they looked nasty, but there isn't a good reason why nice zucchinis shouldn't keep their skins. A leftover stalk of broccoli was added for good measure. I stewed this a little but didn't let it get brown. As soon as this threatened to happen, I added vegetable broth to cover the veggies and let it simmer for about ten minutes. As soon as the veggies are soft, I went through the mixture with my blender and made it nice and smooth.

Now for the fun part: the spices. A little salt, a generous helping of curry. You could use a ready mixture but I made my own of dashes of: coriander, red chili, fenugreek, cinnamon, asafoetida, cumin, caraway seed, ginger, and mace. Teensy amounts of each ingredient (less cinnamon, more cumin -- to taste) made up a reddish and very rich tasting mixture. (For nursing mothers: Fenugreek is the thing to make you produce amounts of milk you never knew you could produce. Really.)

Ahem. Let's get back to the soup.

Lacking the sour cream that the originial recipe called for, I subsituted with coconut milk, and let me tell you, that was quite the stroke of genius. The soup tasted rich and curry-y and just yummy.

I finished it almost all, just kept a tiny bit for Doug to try later today. Heh. Not my fault. I thought he was coming home for lunch but he wasn't. So.