"You have a pasty at Mabel's for me, you hear?"

For those of you who aren't on Twitter, for the first time, I think I can sincerely say that you're missing out. There's a new phenomenon called "One Book One Twitter" (or #1b1t) where, during the summer, everyone on Twitter has the option to participate in a twitter-wide book club. It's not exclusive, there's a schedule but you can read at your own pace if you want to, and this year--the FIRST year--one of my all-time favorite books was selected: American Gods by Neil Gaiman. The coolest part of this is that Gaiman uses twitter himself, so occasionally he does an hour of "Ask Neil" and he'll answer anyone's questions, which is AWESOME. If you're not familiar with Gaiman's work and don't mind a little fantasy, surrealism and existentialism in your literature, check out his books--he is a master of the English language. His books pull you in and immerse you in a surreal adventure, pressing you to question the world around you and the validity of pretty much everything. At least, that's how I feel.

I just finished reading this morning, but according to the schedule, this week everyone's on chapters 9-11, in which the main character discovers a delicious meal at a local diner-type restaurant called Mabel's.

"Breakfast for me," said Shadow. "What's good?"
"Everything's good," said Mabel. "I make it But this is the farthest south and east of the yoopie you can get pasites, and they are particularly good. Warm and filling too. My specialty."
Shadow had no idea what a pasty was, but he said that would be fine, and in a few moments Mabel returned with a plate with what looked like a folded-over pie on it. The lower half was wrapped in a paper napkin. Shadow picked it up with the napkin and bit into it: it was warm and filled with meat, potatoes, carrots, onions. "First pasty I've ever had," he said. "It's real good."
-American Gods, p. 266-267 in my edition (chapter 10)

Now, in honor of One Book One Twitter, and because I've read American Gods a million times and always wanted to try these out, I of course searched for a recipe and made them and they are, just as Gaiman says, "a savory delight wrapped in a hot pastry." Ideally, for this recipe, you have minced beef. I didn't have minced beef, nor did I have the patience to mince my own beef, so I used ground beef instead--but if you can get your hands on some good minced beef, then do.

RECIPE: Pasties
Adapted from Recipezaar
Ingredients:
-1 lb minced (or ground) beef
-1 tbsp olive oil
-2 white onions
-3 cloves garlic
-1 15-oz can whole tomatoes
-1 tbsp tomato paste
-1/2 lb carrots
-1 tbsp soy sauce
-1/2 pint beef stock (from bullion cubes)
-1 lb white potato
-a splash of milk
-2 tbsp butter
-a dollop of Worcestershire sauce (I didn't really measure out my additions, so add stuff until it tastes good!)
-Herbs and seasonings (I used marjoram, tarragon, basil, oregano, a little bit of italian seasoning, cinnamon, cumin and cocoa--yeah, it's a lot, but it was tasty. Use your discretion here.)
-pie crust or puff pastry*
-1 egg

Instructions:
0: Cut everything up ('everything' being defined as potatoes, onions, and carrots).
1. Using the potatoes, milk, and butter, make some mashed potatoes. Don't whip them--leave plenty of chunks of potato. Alternatively, you could just boil the potatoes and cut them up into very small pieces--I think this would be the more authentic way to do it.
2. In a very large frying pan or wok, heat the oil and sauté the onion until it softens. Move the onion into a bowl.
3. Add the beef to the frying pan with a little more oil if necessary. Stir constantly as it browns to ensure that all the clumps are broken up (not sure if this is a problem with minced beef but ground beef, especially the leaner varieties, is very sticky).
4. Once the beef is fully cooked, add the canned tomatoes (break them up as you stir them), carrots, soy sauce, tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce and some herbs. (You'll be adding more herbs to taste as it cooks, so don't overdo it here.)
5. Add the beef stock and allow to simmer for a few minutes, then add the onions and potatoes. Stir thoroughly and simmer until it's not really liquid anymore (about 20 minutes?) and you'll be able to scoop it out and it will stay in a lump instead of spreading into a big mess. You want it to have the consistency of slightly watery mashed potatoes. As it's simmering, taste it occasionally and add more seasoning as desired.
6. NOW IS TIME TO PREHEAT THE OVEN! Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F, 220 C. Then prepare the pie crusts: I traced a small plate (7-8 inches) in each rolled-out crust with a knife so that I had 7-8 inch discs of crust to fill.
7. Lay a crust circle on a cookie sheet. Scoop about a cup of the beef mixture (or as much as it seems will fit into the crust when you fold it over, though I overshot a few times and had difficulty folding the crust over) onto one side of the pie crust, then fold the other side over and press all around it to seal it. Continue doing this with each crust circle. (You'll probably fit 2-3 on a cookie sheet.)
8. In a small bowl, beat the egg. Using a pastry brush, brush the beaten egg over each of the pasties. Put them in the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes until golden and shiny.
9. When you remove them from the oven, allow them to cool a bit before eating them--the inside will scald your mouth if you bite into it immediately. After about 10 minutes, they'll still be nice and hot but more edible and you can enjoy your creation!

Step 4.5: after the beef stock is added, before the potatoes and onions.

Once everything was added and simmered down completely. (Actually, this is what we had leftover after filling the crusts--I'd forgotten to photograph it first! But the picture is still accurate.)

Right out of the oven--they looked so pretty! I was quite happy with myself, despite the holes.

Despite the fact that Shadow eats his with his hands, I thought a fork would be more appropriate--I was worried about them falling apart and making a huge mess if I picked them up. Plus, this way I could blow on each forkful to cool it a little more.

Yet again, Mike made a "special" one for himself. He covered it in cinnamon sugar before I put them in the oven. It stuck to the pan more than the others (probably because of the burnt sugar) and therefore fell apart more, but he said it was delicious nonetheless. (Then again, Mike does weird things with food. He just ate a bowl of cereal with coffee grounds on top. So I don't necessarily trust his judgement.)

I doubled this recipe so I'd have plenty to freeze (and because my brother was home and his friends might be around) and ended up with 10 pasties and some leftover filling (also in the freezer, so I can whip up some pie crust and make more). The amount you end up with will depend on the size of your pies and how full you want them.

I expected these to be super filling and heavy--one of those "okay maybe I shouldn't have eaten that whole thing" foods. Surprisingly, they were the perfect amount of food: we were all full, but not completely stuffed. And, if you think about it, each one only has a little bit of meat, a tiny bit of mashed potato, some carrots, etc--it's a pretty well-rounded food! I can't wait to play with this concept a bit more and always have some delicious meal-in-a-pie-crust frozen for emergencies (or nights that I just don't feel like cooking).


*I used my normal pie crust recipe and it came out wonderfully, but it is a post in and of itself--I'll have my pie crust up here soon, keep an eye out for it! **EDIT: Pie crust recipe is up and linked to!**

"Weekend" Reads--Cake Blogs!

I made some delicious food this weekend. And I have pictures. They will be posted as soon as I have time, I promise, but the semester started today and I suddenly realize that my half-semester online class is going to make the courseload pretty intense and I'm not going to have a lot of time for resizing pictures and writing lengthy blog posts about how awesome/weird/traumatizing my latest food experience was. I'll still cook, of course, but the posts might take some time to get up.

ANYWAY.

Weekend reads. I like this idea, and I think I'll stick to it, but I'm a day late--so this "weekend" I'll share with you the reason I'm a day late. I was so busy reading some other awesome food-related blogs that I forgot about my own.

So, for those of you who don't already read it (which is probably all of you, since I know all of you), I give you: Cake Wrecks. This is a blog that is popular enough to have a book out, and to have gone on book tours, and have followers all over the place. It is, as the title suggests, pretty much a lot of pictures of really awful cakes (the subtitle is "When Professional Cakes go Horribly Wrong"). The author is witty, geeky and makes a lot of bad puns, which I can appreciate, though I've never mastered the art myself. The cakes featured had me laughing so hard I couldn't breathe at times. I somehow read through 45 pages of blog (not 45 posts, mind you, 45 pages) in a day--and that's after sleeping until noon, making pretzels, drinking tea, and the many other random things I did. On Sundays, she features pretty cakes, which would be quite nice to look at after a week of horror.

Some examples:

I like plaid a lot, but this was a wedding cake. If I got to my wedding reception and had to look at this...I'd be in tears.

There are a lot of...grammar...and spelling...and punctuation...errors. Yes, errors. In the world of cake decorating. Cake Wrecks finds them and shares them with us, so we can be miserable knowing that somehow people still don't know how to use a comma. (The most common, though, is quotation marks. It's not that hard, people.)

Some, of course, are just plain gross. Like this. Those are a dead person's feet. Note the toe tag for identification. EW. But the pretty ones...

Isn't that gorgeous? I would love to have that cake. Not entirely sure I could ever eat it, but it's adorable.

And that one has to be my favorite. It's a Mario-themed wedding cake. I like it because it actually manages to stick to the idea of 'wedding cake' while having the Mario theme--it's a pretty color with a nice little pattern, and it's got the "flower" design diagonally up the side.

On a related note, I also found this website dedicated entirely to awful wedding cakes. I haven't had time to peruse their archive yet, but after looking at a few, I feel like before I get married I'll be sitting down with the bakery discussing, in detail, EXACTLY what I want. And asking for sketches. I just can't imagine getting married with an awful cake--the food's the important part, right?

So, anyway, go read Cake Wrecks. All the photos in this post came from somewhere in her archives. I promise you'll be entertained.

Weekend Reads: Pratchett's Witches

If you don't know me, I'm a creative writing major with a passion for literature, so if you're reading this frequently, you'll likely be getting weekly reading updates (essentially, what I'm reading and why you should read it too). This is the first of these.

I'm currently enrolled in an intensive half-semester online literature class, which means about 150 pages of heavy reading per week, plus a paper and discussion board postings. It's a lot of fun. I love it. The online thing is sort of confusing (I've never taken an online class before) but I'm getting used to it. However, the huge amount of heavy reading required means that my "for fun" needs to be something light and easy--otherwise I'd end up talking like the characters in old novels and the people who have to spend a lot of time with me would probably kill me.

I like an element of fantasy in my books (yes, I'm a huge nerd). My favorite authors are Neil Gaiman, Roger Zelazny and Terry Pratchett. For those of you who aren't familiar with Pratchett's work, it's always humorous and entertaining, with a little bit of social commentary buried beneath the funny. They're light reads, but they do make one think, at least a little. I love his books about the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, but for the past...week and a half or so, I've been reading his books about the Lancre Witches, and they're great.

These books aren't really about magic; they're about the characters, all of whom are beautifully crafted and resonate with something deep inside us that tells us how old women are supposed to act. Granny Weatherwax is a crotchety old woman who helps people reluctantly, usually by telling them she's helped them in a way that makes them believe it to the extent that their problem goes away. Nanny Ogg is a boisterous, fat, usually drunk old woman with a cat that torments every other creature in the village, though she's convinced he's a real sweetie. And Magrat Garlick, whose parents didn't know how to spell Margaret, is a younger woman who thinks being a witch should be about doing magic instead of knowing when not to do magic; the others consider her a "wet hen."

There are also three "young adult novels" that are just as relevant and entertaining as the others, about a headstrong young girl named Tiffany Aching who is learning to become a witch and dealing with being almost thirteen at the same time.

As fun as Pratchett's books are, they aren't numbered despite the fact that there's a definite order to them. So if you intend to read any of them, check out the Discworld Reading Order Guide first.

One of the stories I read for my class this week, Xingu by Edith Wharton, is a great quick read. It tells the story of a group of women who meet to talk about art, literature, and culture in general, and how their desire to look cultured and knowledgeable eventually makes them all look like idiots. I strongly recommend reading it--I guarantee you know someone like these women. The full text is available on Project Gutenberg, and if you click the underlined "Xingu" up at the top of this paragraph, it'll take you right there.

Lastly, I would like to publicly congratulate Neil Gaiman and one of my favorite musicians, Amanda Palmer, on their engagement. I know they'll never see this, but I love knowing that two people who make such great art are getting married. I hope the best for them--and I hope at least some of their wedding photos end up online.