Pumpkin, pumpkin!

There is no better pie in the world than pumpkin pie.
I've tried many recipes...some are too sweet, some too spicy, some too runny...and some suffer from my worst pumpkin pie pet peeve: they're too pale in color. I mean a pumpkin pie should be really rich in color, a deep dark orange...it should look like a pumpkin! I hate those pies that are a pale tan/gray....YUCK.
Years ago I landed on my favorite recipe, it's from Sara Foster and it's in her Foster's Market Cookbook. Just the right ratio of spice to sweet to pumpkin flavor.
And here's my little secret to get the right color: add about 5 to 6 drops of RED food coloring to the custard batter, it'll give you just the right depth of color.
With all the Autumn decorations adorning the Hamptons right now I had to make my first pie of the season. Sometimes I do a fancier crust edge, but I was a little short on time today. Next time I make a fancier one.
I love that first bite with a tall glass of cold milk...it's what Fall tastes like! YUM.

First pie of the Fall!

One of my prized possessions is my ceramic pumpkin pie holder. The bottom is larger than the normal pie plate so it makes really large pies! And the cover looks like the top of a pumpkin, the handle is the pumpkin stem. It makes a great presentation and is always a hit when I bring it to holiday parties.

Even when it's not holding a pie it looks great on the china hutch, by adding a nice touch of Autumn to the dining area.

Watch the skies!

Sleepy little Sag Harbor made the media headlines this week when an out of control drone crashed on Main Street. Happily no one was seriously injured although it did do some damage to two buildings.
The scary thing is that the sidewalk bench that you see in these pictures IS THE ONE I NORMALLY ALWAYS SIT ON TO WAIT FOR THE JITNEY. Good thing I wasn't present when this happened!

CRASH!

FIRE! 

SMOKE!

EXTINGUISHED!

Read all about it here
and here.

painting: "Schiavoni's IGA, Main Street, Sag Harbor"

Mermaid's tears

I love to beachcomb.
And I love to find beachglass, it's a fun treasure hunt while you get to enjoy the invigorating beauty of the seashore. And what better beaches to comb than those pristine sands of the Hamptons?
Some call it 'beachgrass', some 'seagulls', and some call it by the most romantic of names, 'mermaid's tears'.
Here's how the legend goes:
Mermaids could change the mighty course of nature, but were forbidden to do so by Neptune, the stern watchful god of the sea.
One dark, storm-ravaged night, with sails ripping and masts cracking, a schooner fought to find safety in a rocky cove. The ship was familiar to the mermaid who swam along its side...she had weathered many crossing with the ship and its captain. As the ship heeled in the violent wind, the captain lost his hold on the wheel, tumbling perilously close to the raging sea. In an instant, the mermaid calmed the wind and tamed the waves, changing the course of nature and saving the life of a man she had grown to love from afar.
For her impetuous act, Neptune banished the sobbing mermaid to the ocean's depths, condemning her for eternity never to surface or swim with the ships again. To this day, her gleaming tears wash up on the beaches as sea glass...crystalline treasures in magic sea colors, an eternal reminder of true love.

I've collected beachglass for almost 25 years now, but my collection is still a modest one (I think) because the beaches out here are almost totally void of debris...Hamptonites are too clean! When I used to summer on the Jersey shore and up in Maine in the early and mid-90's I found a lot more. I'm lucky to find one or two pieces a Summer now. I keep it in a shadow box on a shelf with an old picture I love of my sister and myself when we were kids. We're beach combing in early Spring on a beach in Galveston, Texas, this must be from around 1969 or 1970.

I also keep a few pieces in a little jar I dug up in my backyard years ago. It sits on the sill in my bathroom above the sink (that's the outdoor shower thru the window).

It's the color that I find the most attractive, the watery greens and pale blues...the colors of the ocean. Of course one of the rarest finds is the deep blue pieces. I treasure those the most. Each piece is a fond memory of long contemplative walks by the water, waves lapping at your feet, what could be more relaxing?

So much depends...

A couple of summers ago I needed to paint my badly rusted black wheelbarrow.
I had a full can of Benjamin Moore's "Country Redwood", a dark oxblood paint I had used to touch up my front door.
I thought it would be a nice color on the wheelbarrow and then it dawned on me: it would be an image right out of one of my favorite poems by William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow":

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


So simple and imagistic, but so multi-layered, you can read into the poem whatever you think is so important that 'so much depends' on it. I decided to not only paint the thing red, I added a little extra something to make me smile whenever I'm out in the yard with it digging around in the dirt. No chickens but it does get rainwashed every now and then :)