charlotteann

My mom is getting married on Saturday, hooray! Tomorrow night we’re having a little party so we made two pies for dessert earlier this evening. One is called “bumble berry pie” which involves your standard berries: strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, and blackberry. I made my own pie and dubbed it “bruise pie” because it has blackberries and blueberries, with a squirt of lemon to add insult to injury. Or something like that. Anyway. Here are the photos from tonight’s culinary adventures:

Flour, sugar, and shortening. Some people use butter. We used Crisco, obviously. Then we mashed it up.

Then we added some water and vinegar, which apparently helps with the flakiness. We’ll see about that tomorrow…

Forming the dough into a ball. I know this photo isn’t all that flattering to my mom’s hands, but she has great hands.

These are four balls of dough about to be placed in the refrigerator. They suspect nothing.

This is a rolling pin.

My pie filling with copious amounts of sugar. Nom.

The lemon juice came from an actual lemon.

My mom showed me how to roll out the pie dough. I was obviously paying close attention.

The bruise pie is ready for the oven!

While the pies cooked, my mom and her mom worked on a macaroni salad. The ingredients included Hellman’s mayo, canned tuna, celery, onions, pickles and other stuff all mixed together with tricolor rotini. Though tempting, I abstained from tasting it.

My pie emerges!

So there you have it. Today I baked something.

This Saturday I took a little trip to Oakland to go grocery shopping with a new friend and check out my old friend’s Pro Arts open studio. Grocery shopping brought us to the new Berkeley Bowl. In terms of dodging soccer moms and cantankerous hippies, it was definitely an improvement. Granted, it’s still very new (opened last Thursday, June 4th) but I had a nice time ooohing and aaahing over the exotic and photogenic produce. I also got a tasty sandwich at the deli, which would benefit from one of those handy “Take A Number” systems. My only critique is that the lighting, layout, and size are reminiscent of Costco, but if that’s what it takes to keep the violent cart-wielders away, I’m sold.

After eating my sandwich and washing it down with a lot of cherries, I headed over to neighboring JFK University to check out my friend’s art stuffs. That’s neither here nor there in terms of food blogging, but I was struck by a plate of food left out on one of the tables on the loading dock. The diner wholeheartedly went for “a little bit of everything” but hardly finished anything. While waiting for yet another old friend – I’m really popular – to pick me up, I walked up to Caffe Trieste on San Pablo to kill some time. I ordered a cookies’n'cream gelato and it was delicious. My italian soda was loaded liberally with cherry syrup, a rarity I always appreciate.

Fun, closing fact (via Twitter): Liberals are about twice as likely to prefer arugula to iceberg in their salads, the exact opposite goes for conservatives.