Enough of work and sorrow, time for PIE!

The prune plums are in season now, very good this year, as all the soft fruit has been, and at a terrific price in my Asian market. They are mysteriously labeled as dates, but they're the right thing for my pie.

I think the Chinese speaking management occasionally get a bit baffled as to the English name for some produce, and come out with wonderful spellings or completely nonrelevant names, so you have to know that if you want tomatillos, you go for tamatlos, and dates means prune plums, and prunes means plums and so on.

So I dug out Marian Burros' terrific recipe from years ago, which I expect you can Google on, my not wanting to put in a typo and be responsible for a terrible event in your kitchen. On a website where I'm active, a poster working in metric gave her plum tart recipe, which is what reminded me of Burros, and listed one kilogram of flour. Now I'm not much up on metric, and don't have much in the way of measuring devices which are metric, either, but I am pretty sure that the one cup of flour Burros uses is a whole lot less than a kilo...so I thought I'd go with Burros.



And here it is. Haven't made pie for ages, not since Tiny Pies way back in cold weather -- and I did get a supply of Granny Smiths, which are now peeled and sliced and frozen ready for when the Tiny Pie Muse strikes again.

Meanwhile, this was dessert at lunchtime, with a scoop of butter almond ice cream. This should be eaten to the sound of trumpets with a sunset background, it's that good.

The Greeks named the muses, but I don't remember a Tiny Pie muse. Maybe Pi would do it...

Current reading, speaking of food, is Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I admit resisting for ages because I thought it was yet another of those affluent white middle aged tall blonde New Yorkers finding herself type of book, but I find it's actually pretty good in parts if your energy level can keep up with hers, which is strictly manic. She does make some interesting observations here and there, and I like the structure of the book -- many tiny chapters, each representing a bead, from a significant total number of beads rooted in mythology or somewhere.

And one very cool thought was the One Word idea. Like what one word typifies Rome? she thought sex. Or New York? she thought achievement. Etc. And she goes on to people.

I'm wondering what one word typifies this blogster, and have come up with any number, not all of which are complimentary, but I think for this week anyway, the Word is: Valiant! meaning I fail at a lot of things, and succeed at a lot of things, but either way, I plunge on ahead, and waste no time on regret and whatifs. There's an element of loopiness in valor. It's humbling to remember that Don Quixote, that totally useless warrior, was also valiant, heh.

Commenters and emailers: what's your word? either for yourself or for a city. Just let us know. Just for fun, nobody is analyzing you as a result of your choice, or planning to sell you a car based on what you just said....