Holiday piecrust: Dough!

In following these steps laid out in Real Simple magazine, I suggest you let your thumbs absorb the experience:

 

How to make crust for holiday pies

Makes one 8- or 9-inch piecrust

Hands-On Time: 10 min.

Total Time: 55 min.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• pinch salt
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
• 2 tablespoons solid vegetable shortening
• 3-5 tablespoons cold water

Directions

1. Combine the flour, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Using your fingertips, rub the butter and shortening into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Get your thumbs into it. Close your eyes. Soak in the sensation: Flour dust combining with scratchy grains of sugar and salt and the coating grease of butter and shortening. Resist the urge to apply it like a cosmetic to your face, or to your dry elbows and knees.
2. Using a fork, blend in just enough water to make the dough come together. Shape into a disk and wrap in plastic. Refrigerate for 45 minutes before rolling. Feel the moist cool of the dough as you grip it both hands, thumbs gently clamping the disk to the fingers that cradle it. You may want to fling it Frisbee-like, just to see how far it’ll fly. Again, resist.

How to roll the dough

1 Flour your rolling surface and rolling pin

Place a well-chilled piece of dough shaped into a disk onto a floured surface. Dust the rolling pin and your fingers with flour to prevent sticking. As you dust, pinch the flour between thumb and tips of  index and middle fingers. Imagine it’s sand in an hourglass, but don’t be in too much of a hurry.

2 Roll out the dough, rotating the dough as you go

Applying even pressure, press your rolling pin into the dough, rolling away from you and back. Rotate the disk as you go, and flip it over occasionally, to create an even circle. When the dough starts to feel sticky, apply a light dusting of flour. When the dough is a little less than a quarter of an inch thick, place your pie plate in the center of the dough, face up, to check that the dough you’ve rolled out is large enough to fit the dish. As you roll, close your eyes. Be conscious of your grip on the pin, the handle pressing into the V between thumb and forefinger. Use the weight of your body to press the pin into the dough so as not to stress your hands. If you do not have flour somewhere on your face, preferably on your nose and above one eyebrow, you should apply some now.

3  Transfer the dough into the pie plate

Flip the rolled dough in half toward you, creating a half-moon shape, and lift it over the plate. Set it down so that it covers half the plate; then open it so it forms a circle again and covers the entire pie plate. As warm-up, spread out your hands, palm up. Bring your thumbs across the palms toward the little fingers. Now apply this motion to the rolled dough.

4 Press the dough into the pie plate

With your fingertips, gently push the pie dough into the bottom and sides of the plate. Yes, be gentle. But let your thumbs get into the pie plate, where the bottom meets the sides. Revel in the thumbprints that’ll bake right into the pie.

5  Trim the edges

Use a scissor to cut any extra dough along the edge, leaving a 1/2-inch border. Fold the edge of the dough underneath itself so that it creates a thicker, 1/4-inch border that rests on the lip of the plate. Before the blades cut, the scissor holds the dough. That hold extends the human hand’s grip, particularly that of thumb and forefinger.

6  Crimp the edges

Create a patterned edge by pressing the thumb of one hand against the edge of the dough from the outside of the dish while gently pressing with the thumb and forefinger of the other hand from the inside. Rotate the pie plate until you’ve completed the pattern along the entire edge.  This is the coup de grace for the thumb as well as the rest of the hands. By this time, you should have dough somewhere in the hair framing your face.

Tip: Bake the crust right away, or refrigerate or freeze it for later use.

See how it’s done (although this baker doesn’t spend any time in thumb-contemplation): http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1726686707?bclid=1729305751&bctid=1668060958

What makes my thumbs different from yours

When I open my hands palms-down in front of me, I see two little mounds — calluses — in the Vs between thumbs and forefingers. I think of these parts of my hands as oar locks, where the shaft of my kayak paddle — the pole-y part between the flat paddle blades — rotates in my grip. When I travel via canoe, clutching the T-grip of a canoe paddle, the shaft of that paddle builds the calluses, too.

But those hard little bumps at the base of my thumbs, they’ve always been there, and I haven’t always paddled. They may have started with a tennis racket, or a jungle gym bar. In 4th grade at Valentine Elementary School, I wanted to be Nadia Comenici, earning 10, 10, 10 on the unparallel bars. At every 15-minute recess and the hour at lunch, I’d practice over and again my most perfect cherry drop, hanging from the bend in my knees upside-down and swinging, swinging until my chest was parallel with the ground. I’d release the grip with the back of my knees and fly …

…

Or I’d attempt a dead-man’s drop, where I’d sit upright on top of the bar and drop backwards, gripping with the back of my knees and releasing at just the right moment. Fuh-woooop …

…

Minutes, hours, days later, when I landed, I’d raise my arms above my head, signaling to the imaginary Polish, Romanian, and French judges. My routine was complete. And … now Amy Sanderson or Kathy Crimmins or Michelle Amestoy could take their turn on the bar, provided they were wearing shorts under their dresses. Girls weren’t allowed to wear shorts or pants at Valentine Elementary.

The Los Angeles Review and Bat Thumbs

The Los Angeles Review’s website has finally, with newborn wings, flown the nest. Fly with it. The Fall 2009 Issue, No. 6, will be released into the wild Nov. 1. *

Speaking of wings, bats have them. They also have a short curved claw called a “bat thumb.” Along with the bat’s toes, the bat thumb helps the little flying mammal hang upside-down and climb. Bat Thumb  is also the name of a 30-minute parody of Batman created by director Steve Oedekerk. The film’s characters are live-action, costumed thumbs, with the actors’ faces and voices superimposed.

 

*I’ve been the LA Review’s nonfiction editor since February 2009.

Thumb-a-vision

Tibetan Buddhist monks of the 9th or 10th centuries used spells to learn prophecies, to wrest power from demons, find treasure, cure illness, tame wild beasts, cause springs to gurgle from the ground, and other such everyday needs.

One such spell, recorded in a monk’s ritual manual*, describes a kind of divination that invokes a deity to answer questions put to it. The ritual refers to the deity as “the sky-soarer,” and this sky-soarer communicates through a “pure” (aka, pre-pubescent) child. Sometimes the child sees visions in a mirror. Sometimes, the visions appear on the flat of the pure child’s thumb. 

 *found in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, and now archived in the British Library as part of the International Dunhuang Project

This is not a blog post

A couple months ago, my husband brought me a gift of Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal, a journal that you’re pretty much supposed to annihilate. When writing to ask about Wish Jar, her blog, I told Keri that I have been randomly smearing, thumbprinting, torching, and fruit-stickering my Wreck This Journal with abandon. I’ve even stamped and addressed it. I plan to mail it to myself from Happy Camp, Calif. Because … who doesn’t want a journal from Happy Camp?

This is what Keri had to say about blog motivation:

In my case, I suppose I too have not been writing on the blog as much as I used to.  This is due in large part to the fact I have a toddler, and I do much less of everything in general.  But I will admit to a bit of malaise with regard to the blogging world.  What used to be an exciting and new medium has slowly become a little formulaic or redundant.  I find myself yearning to push the blog to some kind of new place, use the medium to some kind of advantage, yet I don’t know what that is just yet.  The only real answer I have to your question of how to stay motivated is that because I often use it as a creative medium I find that it feels good to put stuff out into the world.  Even if it is some small and seemingly insignificant thing.  A few words, or a quote.  Or even things I find on the street.  Things I like looking at.  All can be interesting and help me to feel like I am getting something out, which is very good for me with so much time going to my child these days.  I don’t put any pressure on myself to make it “good”.  The only goal is to get something out.  Anything.  Often it is the simplest things that others respond to the most.

Keri Smith's other books include This Is Not a Book, The Guerilla Art Kit, and How to Be an Explorer of the World.

Pets and the Planet

Carol Frischmann, a fellow Dukie, a fellow Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA candidate, and author, blogs at Pets and the Planet – A Practical Guide to Sustainable Pet Care. When I asked Carol what revved her blogging engine, she said:

In addition to my secret motivator for blogging (which I cannot reveal) I do love to hear from readers, such as yourself, about related items. Also, people read the blog without replying. So, for the moment, I blog on faith that I’m sending ideas into the world that matter to someone. And I take it as a part of the dailiness of writing. However, I’ve always believed that the time we have is short, and that one day the aggregators will be good enough that we’ll be able to select just the sort of items we want to receive from the blog-o-sphere and have those (and only those) delivered to our desktop each morning.

Hope this answers your question. If not, try this: I learn what I think about things from blogging.

Ninja says, "Thanks, Carol."

Like spinach?

Blogging, like spinach, liver, and weight-bearing exercise, is good for you. I’m not big on liver, but I’m awright with weight-bearing exercise, and I looove spinach. Where, then, do I stand with blogging? I’ve been asking myself that a lot lately. Asking asking asking. Asking asking asking. Asking asking asking. Hooboy, that’s a whole lot of asking, and not much blogging.

So I’m on a quest to find out what keeps people blogging every day, or, ya know, weekly, or whatever-the-hay regular morsel of time. I’m looking for inspiration for these blogging digits.

Feel free to comment if you’re in the Thumbing Through neighborhood.

Ben Bachelder, Digihitch.com contributor, interviewed by NY Times

I met Bass Drum Ben, so-called because he played in the UC Berkeley marching band, on a roadtrip to Slab City. We drove from Santa Monica to California’s Colorado Desert, south of Coachella and east of the Salton Sea. We were part of a group creating and documenting the Hitchhiker Tribute Cairn, a memorial mound of stones dedicated to those who have ever known the road via thumb. Ben is an admirable spokesperson for hitchhiking in North America (as well as the six other continents) today. I also have a happy memory of eating cornmeal pancakes at an I-Hop before dropping him at the Ontario Airport.

http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/qa-hitchhiking-with-ben-bachelder/

Five raccoons on the roof

This morning, we woke to the pitter patter of little feet — 20 little feet. Five raccoons had made our roof an aerial super-highway after using their almost-human-like hands to pull up the grasses in our pond. That’s 10 little thumbs (not fully opposable thumbs) out wreaking aquatic havoc. I have no photos of the roof-rambling perps, but found a YouTube video of a thumb-sucking raccoon named Outlaw.

Cute or disturbing?

Thumb enchanted evening …

I’m back from Thesisland, and ready to renew my  navel-gazing quest, only with my thumbs. Big News! I graduated on August 22 with a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction. That means the journey has changed. Where The Thumb of All Parts was once an MFA thesis, it is now a book.

Stand by for some things completely different: some old thumbs, some new thumbs, maybe even a few postcards from my left thumb.