Apple Pizza Pie

This is one of those recipes that reflects this blog's "waste not" mentality. I mixed up too much yeasty water for pizza dough, and decided to make a yeasty apple pie.

It starts with the sweet yeasty crust (makes two):

Ingredients:

Combine in a glass measuring cup:
1Cup warm water (~120F)
1/2 t dry yeast
1/2 t sugar
Let sit until frothy on top.

Combine in a bowl or food processor with dough setting:
3 1/3 Cup white flour
2T sugar
1t salt
3T butter, cut into small pieces
Mix until well blended

Add the yeast mixture to the flour while mixing, mix until the dough cleans the side of the bowl. Mix another 30s in processor or knead 5min. Allow to rise for about an hour in a warm, sealed and greased container, like a plastic bag or bowl covered with plastic wrap.

The Pie:
Place a pizza stone in the oven, cover with a layer of cornmeal and preheat to 375F
In a large bowl, combine:
5 Granny Smith apples, peeled cored and sliced thin
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 t cinnamon (fresh ground)
Allow to juice while rolling out the crust to a ~13in circle. Transfer to a pizza peel covered with cornmeal. Arrange the apples to cover the crust evenly, leaving a small part of the rim uncovered. While the oven is still heating, combine in a small bowl:
1/2C brown sugar
1/2C flour
pinch of nutmeg
3T butter, cut into small pieces
Mix until it resembles fine gravel, then spread over the apples. Carefully slide the pizza pie into the oven, bake for about 40min, until the topping turns golden, remove, slice and serve.

The sexiest mode of transport?

A young woman with whom I frequently discuss bike-commuting issues complained about the amount of honking she hears from drivers who, she suspected, are trying to tell her to get out of the road. I said that I hardly ever got honked-at, and we speculated about whether it's related to our routes (possible) or riding styles (which are very similar), and came to the conclusion that someone, perhaps us, ought to arrange for PSA's during Michiana Bike to Work Week encouraging better driver behavior.

This weekend I rode about 80mi (130km) to and from a small lake for a regatta. I didn't wear a shirt to avoid getting too sweaty before spending the day sailing (yes, I enjoy my low-carbon lifestyle). I was honked or shouted at by several cars full of young women, and only once by an older couple who I assume wanted me off the road.

So, why is the physically fit female cyclist in lycra shorts getting honked at? Probably the same reason the shirtless young male one did. The drivers are expressing appreciation, not anger. A couple years of using our glutes to commute has had more than just health benefits.

Thus, the correct PSA is quite possibly a picture of me from 2006, when I was an unhealthy 225lb, and today, now that I'm down to 185lb. Results fairly typical, given the metabolism boost. Perhaps not as good as $4/gallon gasoline, but if you need a reason to ride . . .

Lighter Sweet Potato Pie

This could also be called "Crossroads and Lighthouse Pie", and was baked to celebrate the recent commencement exercises at Notre Dame. We here at Pie and Policy believe there is nothing more anti-pie than identity politics, and so we offer deep-dish support to those who seek and encourage constructive engagement.

Now, off the soap box and into the kitchen.

Ingredients:
1 whole wheat crust, rolled as thin as possible

~2 C baked sweet potato flesh, not skins

1/3 C brown sugar
1/8 T cinnamon
1/8 T nutmeg

2 whole eggs
2T butter, melted
7/8 C 2% milk -> put the butter in the cup measure and fill the rest with milk

Procedure:

(1) Get the crust into a standard 9" pie dish. Preheat the oven to 350F.

(2) Puree the sweet potato in a food processor, add the sugar and spices and blend some more, then add the eggs, butter and milk. Process until smooth.

(3) Pour the puree into the pie shell, and place the center rack for about 45min. Once the sides have start to puff a little and the center is still a bit wiggly, pull it out. Let cool for a couple hours before serving.

Reinventing Foreign Aid, Essay #5

This is a summary and commentary on the fifth essay in Reinventing Foreign Aid

Solutions When the Solution Is the Problem: Arraying the Disarray in Development

by: Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock

The authors describe how the classic problem of development aid is "getting to Denmark", i.e. reaching the point where a developing state has the same level of public services as the European country. In this light, the Washington Consensus, a popular view among large aid providers, is that the problems of the world are "needs" like food, healthcare, security, etc. The solution is some kind of "supply", and the means of providing the supply is the "civil service". In countries with a well established Weberian bureaucracy, this model works fairly well, and was in fact established due to political pressure to break up local political machines by providing a counter-balancing influence.

In development work, there are two types of government programs where this sort of effort works: non-discretionary, transaction intensive services like drivers licenses or mail delivery, where strict rules can be set for a broad population without ill effect. The other is in discretionary, non-transacting services like central banking and trade policy. Here, "10 smart people" can meet and determine the rules that govern how certain transactions will proceed without directly guiding those transactions.

However, this model fails rather spectacularly for discretionary, transaction intensive services like teaching, medicine and infrastructure maintenance. Here, local knowledge is required, as each decision made by the teacher, doctor or road worker must be the correct one for the individual student, patient or pothole. Because these require an educated, as opposed to simply trained, class of people who can think through problems, no one set of rules can cover all decisions.

Thus, when local knowledge is difficult to acquire, the best solution for an aid program is adopt a model that, with as few transactions as possible, empowers local experts to meet the needs in their communities. If this sounds an awful lot like the ongoing debate about federal vs. state vs. local control of school curricula in the United States, that's because it is the same problem, and the solution is not in the setting of rules, but that dynamic tension.

There's a broader question here about the need for greater empathy and engagement by service providers with and in the lives of recipients. Rational solutions only apply to rational problems, and some people just love their chickens (see the link). Providing services requires a level of trust proportional to the required expertise of the service provider. In most western societies, there is a strong tradition of accountability between civilian and state, but this has taken a long time to build up, and we cannot expect it to happen overnight abroad. The variety of institutions that accomplish largely the same thing in different countries speaks to the messy series of compromises required to get to Denmark.