Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Good Enough for Me

In a moment of weakness, I bought a pumpkin pie the size of a small flying saucer at Costco. I have been trying to watch what I eat lately, as the pounds seem a little harder to lose these days. After dinner, I offered the pie to the family, stating I'd have a small sliver. Dh took a big slice with a shrug, "It's a vegetable!"

After eating most of his pie, he declared it okay, but not as good as my recipe from a can. From scratch, I clarified? Well, if you call making it from a can, "scratch". I do - you have to add eggs and evaporated milk - more than two steps which qualifies it as homemade.

I remembered him to the time that I really made it from scratch, spending much time cooking a cooking pumpkin (not the same as those you carve) until it was the consistency of canned pumpkin. But - it was not. It was very grainy; Dh said the consistency of spaghetti squash, though I remember it to be not as good, not quite that bad. After slaving over the hot crock pot for what seemed years, I decided that canned pumpkin was good enough. And, Costco's gianormous pie is good enough, too. They're eating it, after all.

News and Notes
The Tractor Supply has opened in town. Yee haw! I don't have to travel 40 minutes to look at horse supplies.

The woman who bought Maggie and Easy, miniature horses and parents to mine own Roxie and Chiron, called the other day. Maggie is again expecting, and her "husband" has taken to polygamy. Seems she bought two miniature donkeys, female both. I asked her how she felt about miniature mules. Glad she lives more than an hour away.

Our farrier was by this week to trim horse hooves, and relayed a story about coyotes and wild dogs. Seems in the next town over, an owner of a cow witnessed wild dogs pulling at the ears of a cow, while the coyotes bit at the back legs. They got the cow down. I don't know the fate of the cow, but I hear coyotes go off at night, and it is an eerie sound.

5 comments:

That Janie Girl said...

Coyotes are not sweet to livestock. Out here, it seems they get closer and closer to civilization daily.

pita-woman said...

Oooh, where is the new Tractor Supply located??
Of all the cooking & baking I do (and have done in the past), I can honestly say I've never attempted to make a pumpkin pie.
And yes, it's from scratch if you have to combine ingredients and stir to mix them up.

debra said...

I've never been much of a pumpkin pie fan---it's the texture more than anything else.....
We have coyotes, too. As their habitat decreases, they, who are pretty shy, come closer to ours. I love the sound of them and of the owls at night.

Unknown said...

A few thoughts....



I recall reading sometime ago that cake and other mixes were originally developed to help the new era of working women to hold onto their traditional roles as homemakers, which of course, included baking from scratch. Adding milk and eggs and being required to stir lent a hint of domesticity to the final product and, I assume, assuaged the guilt of thousands of feminists who had abandoned their rightful places in the bedrooms and kitchens for boardrooms and water coolers. Works for me............



Case in point....not that the TV show The Waltons of the early 1970's was a biographical verity, it was based loosely upon it's creator Earl Hamner, Jr.'s life. Your story reminded me of a later homecoming type episode where all the "children" returned home for the holidays, John-Boy grown and married I think, having morphed from city boy to New York man-about-town, so to speak.



John-Boy goes into the kichen early in the morning, amidst the hustle and bustle of preparing a huge holiday meal, and tells Mama how he would love to have some fresh-churned butter, a memory from his childhood. Mama, of course, decisively tells him her churning days are long over!



In this or another similar episode, Daddy is the first to taste a huge pumpkin pie on the kitchen table. His reaction leads one to believe it is not quite up to Mama's standards; then we learn Mama bought the pie in a store because she no longer has time to bake from scratch what with her now working as a teacher at the elementary school where Erin is the principal.



Kind of took the glow off the show for me, but of course, I idealized the show and claimed it for my own family...........



Perhaps you should try sweet potatoe pie. Much easier to cook sweet potatoes than pumpkin, and the pie is delicious. (You can buy canned sweet potatoes, but it wouldn't be the same.)



Sorry for the long comment. Your story just brought a lot to mind.


whitetr6 said...

our neighborhood's resident swan sleeps out in the middle of the lake which his caretaker surmises is due to the frequent night visits of a local coyote pack. we do hear them often now, but i can't remember them ever being around when we were growing up. can you?

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