This Week In Pie Making (Nov. 21)

Last week, your pie maker was dangerously close to the shadow of the Mouse for a conference devoted to the technical side of preventing very bad things from happening. There is nothing quite like being surrounded by hundreds of engineers, scientists and medical professionals who sincerely hope that the work they are presenting never sees its intended use. Actually, a guest speaker highly recommended that we find alternative uses for our ideas, lest the vagaries of politics and realities of economics cause us to lose work that could be the difference between a small incident and a major catastrophe. Also, the most effective response any society can have to most any type of terrorism is a very good public health system. It is very hard to kill healthy people who can be treated quickly and effectively.

This meant flying during the ongoing TSA-as-sexual-predator controversy. Your own pie maker was not subjected to any extra screening, which is good since his bike-shorts were in the wash, but it does seem odd that young women in slip dresses who did not set off the metal detector were selected. Even odder when men who are acting strangely (well, like irresponsible teenagers) were able to set off the metal detector, distract several workers and still not face any extra attention. In short, your pie maker finds himself in agreement with this Forbes op-ed, the staff of Digg, Ann Coulter and the ACLU. Anyone who can make financiers, internet junkies, populists and egg-head liberals agree must be a heck of a leader. Unless, of course, he's managed to unite them all against him.

The loudest voices in support of this policy come from the President, DHS Sec. Napolitano and Ayman al-Zawahiri. They argue that preventing any incident means spending considerable amounts of money everywhere because those sneaky guys will try just about anything. Stockholders in RapidScan and Smiths (like major Dem. donor George Soros and former SecHS Chertoff) agree that this is absolutely critical, and an important part of growing our economy through stimulus spending. The only other option is that we ask ourselves, honestly, what risks we are willing to accept as a society.

That is going to be a very difficult conversation. Issues like profiling and liability will come up, and we need to be ready to be civil and assume good faith on the part of the other. It's a conversation that gets to the heart of what exactly our government is supposed to do for us, and what we are supposed to do for our fellow citizens. As a first step, there's the National Day of Listening. That will take a lot of energy, and to refuel, P&P recommends the Rolled Date Pie with Honey Glaze. Recipe coming soon.



Sustainable plug: Hooray for AMTRACK! First-class seats, power outlets and no involuntary groping.

Sustainable Substitutions #2: The Blowtorch

Disclaimers:
Kids: DO NOT DO THIS WITHOUT PARENTAL SUPERVISION!
Parents: DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS DO THIS!

We're getting into nut pie season. We might also be heading for much higher gas prices again, and your bike-commuting pie maker may have to celebrate with Schadenfreude Pie. This requires roasted nuts, and, given the price instability and unsustainability of fossil fuels, a natural gas oven is not an option.

So, how do we get nuts hot enough to carmelize some of their sugars and break down their bitter flavor? We need two things: A metal bowl and a butane blowtorch. Butane is a lot easier to make out of biomass than gasoline, and a lot easier to transport than natural gas.

Place the nuts in the bottom of the bowl and rapidly wave the flame over them. Those little balls of proteins and fats will burn vigorously if you're not careful, so keep that flame moving. Make sure you keep the flame moving, shake the bowl to get nuts from the bottom to the top, and stop as soon as the kitchen smells warm and nutty.

This approach will lightly char some of the of the nuts, giving your pies a more complex flavor profile. It does involve a bit more active labor, but significantly less total time than oven roasting, so depending on which econometric you use this process improves or harms pie making productivity. However, it does involve playing with carefully wielding fire, so the added enjoyment makes this a net positive from a PMCIN perspective. For more on making up convenient economic metrics, check out William Easterly's excellent Aid Watchers blog.

This week in pie-making

Two pieces of news caught your pie-maker's eye this week, and it's hard to say which is more significant:

(1) We just witnessed our third "wave" election in a row.

(2) The Federal Reserve is going to print another $600,000,000,000 (that's $600billion)

Both are a reaction to the perception that the US economy is in terrible shape, and I think both will prove remarkably ineffective. Neither the Republicans nor the Federal Reserve have the authority or will to break the politics of stasis in which we find ourselves today. Both will warn of the dangers of large, continuous Federal deficits, but both rely on them for political support or policy tools, respectively. Both count on a large increase in consumer spending to make their economic models work, and all will be disappointed on that score.

Sustainable Substitutions #1: Coffee Grinders

Sustainable Substitutions is a new feature devoted to making small changes in the kitchen to make pie-making more sustainable environmentally, economically and/or enjoyably.

First up: Coffee Grinders. There are pie recipes that call for coffee grounds, and, more importantly, pie making often keeps your pie-maker up late. Fresh ground coffee is enormously better than vacuum-sealed ground, and with this substitution we can extract the full flavor.

The antique grinder on the left was your pie maker's original device, until the frequently small repairs and ~1NPR Morning Edition story's worth of grinding time convinced him to go electric.

Two broken electric grinders later, it became obvious that electric grinding is not a sustainable solution. It turns out to be impossible to repair even a simple malfunction like the inevitable failure of the bushing that held the blade in place. So for want of a $0.10 part, roughly 1kg (2.3lb) of plastic, steel and copper is rendered useless.

The wood, brass and steel manually cranked version is very repairable. Both of those screws are probably replacements, and the entire unit can be dissembled with a simple toolkit. Some replacement parts will probably require custom machining, but nothing on it is so complicated a good art school won't have the right equipment. Additionally, because the distance between the grinding wheel and the wall can be set manually, it's possible to select exactly the size of the average granual. Your pie maker uses this to make a very fine powder for Austrian-style coffee, or a courser grind appropriate for a big mug from a French press.

An added bonus is that "grinding" is exactly what your pie maker does in his favorite non-baking hobby.