Monday, October 27, 2003

Game 7, Plants & Pies

Well, I guess it's par for the course: the Hanshin Tigers (阪神) fell to the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks (ダイエー) this morning, losing the Japan Series in Game 7. Both teams won handily in their home stadiums, but lost on the road. I just found a bio of Jeff Williams, the Australian who is a closer for the Tigers, and, oddly enough, it turns out he went to university at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, where my parents live.

We had a fairly sedate weekend. Saturday, after Evelin's faculty meeting, we rearranged things in the front garden a bit, moving one azalea and planting two boxwoods we bought earlier in the summer. We also moved the asters to the side yard and put in some pansies. We seem to have good luck with pansies: last year, they lasted into July; the year before that, well into June.

Sunday, Evelin made pies: sienipiirakka (a Finnish mushroom pie) from Sundays at Moosewood and a pear-ginger pie that I've been wanting to try for almost a year now. Evelin made the mushroom pie years ago, and I remember it being super heavy and too rich, but she used light cream cheese and a different crust from the sour cream one the Mooswood recipe includes and it was great. We also think she had a higher mushroom-to-cream cheese ratio in this one. The pear-ginger pie was fantastic. As soon as I saw pears showing up at the farmers market, I've been keeping my eyes open for comice pears and this week there they were: It was worth the wait. The comices have a really creamy flesh (not at all grainy like a lot of other pears) that pretty much melted when cooked and the ginger was a perfect counterpoint to the flavor of the pear.

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