Your Weekly Pie #2

Sorry it's slightly delayed, but I did make your pie. It was actually a trial version, to prepare for the the strawberry glazed which I plan on making this weekend. You know, it will be awesome. Let me tell you some things though.

I got a bike! I call her the Dreamcycle, in honor of that perfect shade of orange. She has high handle bars and white wall tires, and she's the prettiest bike I've ever seen. I've ridden to work all this week, instead of walking. I have so much more energy, which makes me want to do things, and in that spirit...

I made this white peach pie, with a cookie crust and DIM* whipped cream. It tasted better than Reddiwip. I decided to treat this pie as a test run for the strawberry pie on several grounds:

1. I was searching for a viable alternative to gelatin for setting the pie, because I have vegetarian friends, and I like it when they can eat.
2. Graham cracker crust may be classic, but I wanted to try an alternative.
3. I'd never made whipped cream before, and I feared disaster.

It turned out lovely. All of it. It was sweet and delicious, and I got excited to try that other pie tomorrow. I learned important things about how to make the components, and really, pie is about assembly. You need to construct a viable crust and carefully concoct your filling. Beyond that it is a question of letting it sit or heating it up to fuse it. This was a refrigerate and set number, and I have to say, I liked the result. For the strawberry pie I will use actual gelatin, whereas for this pie I used starch to thicken the filling. I think that my only complaint about the pie, other than that white peaches have too delicate a flavor to hold up to cookie crust and whipped cream, would be that the filling was simply too liquid.

Other activities this week included attending a lecture by Scott McCloud, the comics theorist, at my alma mater. It was a really good presentation. A little rehearsed, but not in a bad way. The whole thing ran so fluidly, I guess it could be favorably compared to my peach pie filling. It was fun to be back at Agnes Scott, to see how the student body is much as it always was. Reassuring. While getting him to sign a book, Scott McCloud informed me about the origins of steampunk, a movement I've been joking about recently.

And yesterday, Lou, the Dreamcycle and I took a trip to Manuel's to go to an Amnesty International sponsored event about the death penalty. It's a hot issue everywhere, but especially in Georgia right now. Jack Alderman was executed three days ago, and William Lynd was killed a month or so before that. The Troy Davis case has been garnering attention in the international press- rightly so, I think. The thing about it, besides the fact that state sanctioned killing is kind of messed up, is that since his trial seven of nine witnesses recanted their testimony against the man, and no other evidence has been produced, no weapons, no DNA magic. Yet, Troy Davis has not been able to present any of this in his own defense, and will be executed in less than a week. Regardless of how one may feel about capital punishment, I think it can be agreed that if the state is going to take the life of a citizen, the process leading up to killing that person must necessarily be a precise and public one. This is a terrible farce, occurring on such a gross scale that it embarrasses me as it shocks and horrifies. This case speaks to a kind of disconcerting and unexpected indifference on the part of the criminal justice system to, well, justice. For all that, people around the world are paying attention, some are taking action, and this system must break or change. I hope that happens sooner, rather than later.

Tonight, to counteract all that culture and information I've been imbibing, I watched the Sarah Connor Chronicles and Fringe. Those things were both awesome, though Firefly's River Tam as a robot wins in a fight versus Pacey Witter of Dawson's Creek and the gland eating monsters. I know you were wondering.

* Did It Myself