Making – Page 4 – Hugh's Blog

The Pie That Isn’t There

It’s not much to look at.

It’s a spiral bound church cookbook that the church of my childhood put out in the late 70’s as a fundraiser. It’s blue, with a drawing of the church on the front – the church as I remember it, before the fellowship hall was built, and the new sanctuary, and the new electric sign.

This cookbook – the Country Cookin’ Cookbook, the title proclaims, was the bible of the meals of my childhood. My mom was not a natural cook – she can do it, but derives no joy from it, and is as happy to warm something up as she is to make something from scratch. At times, she would get creative, leading to… unusual combinations. My Aunt Louise once said Mom was “slap-happy” in the kitchen, because she would slap anything together and call it supper.

So when this cookbook came out and you suddenly could make dumplings like Ms. VanHook, or a caramel cake like Mary Elizabeth, or a sad cake like Sister Betty’s, well, now you are onto something. And frankly, our suppers improved somewhat.

It has spots and stains, more on some pages than others, so you can track our preferences and dislikes, each spotted page a vote for the dishes on that page. It suffers from specificity of categories, having chapters for Pies, another for Cakes, another for cookies and Candies, and then yet another for Desserts, just in case some sweet managed to slip through uncatalogued otherwise.

But the recipe I have made most from this cookbook isn’t in there. It’s for Ms. Dunning’s Fudge Pie.

Don’t get me wrong – should you manage to somehow acquire a copy of the 1978 edition of the Emory Methodist Church’s Country Cookin’ Cookbook from Watson, Mississippi, you will find, right there on page 144, a recipe labeled Chocolate Fudge Pie, submitted by Jeanette Dunning. But that recipe will not work. It’s missing things. You try to make it like that and you will have pudding in a pie shell.

There were rumors in the church that Ms. Dunning left things out on purpose so as nobody could make a pie as good as hers. I don’t believe it – I’m willing to extend her some grace and just assume she just forgot to tell them everything. Those Methodists are all about grace except when it comes to dessert.

Anyway, after this cookbook showed up, we started having chocolate fudge pies at every holiday gathering and potluck dinner. Wherever 3 or more were gathered, there was a fudge pie. Birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving? Fudge pies.

The recipe in my copy of the cookbook has been so altered, with additions and subtractions and alterations made over the ensuing 40 years in various inks that it’s not really fair to call it Ms. Dunning’s recipe anymore.

But because I want to help folks, and I shudder at the thought of one of y’all coming across a copy of this cookbook in the wild and trying to make a fudge pie that won’t turn out, I have decided to make things right and release the proper recipe into the wild.

Now, the original recipe is for two pies – that’s what it says, anyway. But remember, this recipe was released in 1978, and it was old then. It was made for 8-inch pie crusts, and they don’t make those any more. I recently tried to buy some 8-inch pie pans, and was gonna make crusts, and had a devil of a time trying to find any. It seems our pies have all super-sized now, with 9 or 9.5 inch pans being all there is. So, over the years, we have modified this somewhat to work with one 9-inch premade frozen pie crust.

What you’re going to need:

1/2 stick butter, melted. I ain’t even going to lie – most often this was margarine growing up, but it’s butter now. When you know better, you do better.
1 1/2 cup sugar
3 Tablespoons of cocoa powder. I recommend sifting this. If you don’t have a flour sifter, you can put it in a sieve and tap it until all the cocoa comes out the bottom. Or hell, you can just dump it in and take your chances and probably be OK.
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup PET milk. Now, I’m afraid I better explain, as somebody out there is going to put kitten milk in this with who know what consequences. PET milk is what old people call evaporated milk, because PET was a brand name down here.
1 teaspoon vanilla. Don’t cheap out here – use the real stuff.
1/4 cup flour
pinch of salt
9-inch unbaked pie crust. You can make it from scratch, or you can use one of those frozen ones from the store, or you can buy one of those that you roll out yourself from the cold box at the store by the whop-em biscuits. I won’t blame you, whatever you do, having done all of the above at various times. Do know that the frozen ones are often “deep dish” pie crusts, and this won’t fill one of those up, but will still make a tasty, albeit thin, pie, none-the-less.

What you do

If you got a frozen pie crust, set it out to thaw. It won’t take long – it will probably thaw during the 10 minutes it takes you to mix this up. Otherwise, put your crust in a 9-inch pie pan. Then, turn your oven on to 350.

In a mixing bowl, mix the sugar and the cocoa until they are well blended. Then add the melted butter, and stir it all until well mixed. Now, add everything else, and stir until well blended. You don’t need to buy a mixer for this – just a whisk or wooden spoon will do fine. It’s pretty forgiving – my sister-in-law once forgot the salt and added it after it was in the pan and it still worked out.

The mixture is thin – you will be pretty sure you screwed it up. Nope, it just looks thin. Now, put your pie pan on a cookie sheet, and then pour the mixture into the pie pan. The reason for putting it on the cookie sheet is because it’s easier to pick up a cookie sheet than it is a pie pan.

Slide the cookie sheet in the pre-heated oven on the bottom shelf, and set the timer for 35 minutes. It won’t be ready in 35 minutes, but it will be getting close. It will probably take closer to 45 or 50, but it has snuck up on me before and been burned as a result. You will know it’s done when it’s firm in the middle – at 35 minutes, the center will probably still jiggle when you shake the pan.

Another reason for checking on it around 35 or 40 minutes is to make sure the crust doesn’t burn. I take a sheet of tin foil, bigger than the pie, and crease it corner to corner, and then lay it on top of the pie around the 40-minute mark to keep the crust from burning. Creasing it keeps it off the top of the pie filling – you don’t want the foil to touch the surface of the pie or else it makes an unholy mess. It will still taste good, but you would dare bring it to the potluck for fear of the talk that would follow you.

Now, some warnings: The surface of this pie might crack. That is not a defect. I have had days when it took almost an hour of checking to get this pie done. I can’t explain why, as I do it exactly the same way every single time. Were I still a Methodist, I’m sure I would find a way to blame the vagaries of my oven on the Baptists, but as I’m not, I have no explanation for it. The ways of both the Lord and fudge pies are mysterious. Just check every five minutes or so after 35 minutes and see if the center is still jiggly. When it quits jiggling, it’s done. It will firm up a bit when it’s cool, but not enough to take a chance on a jiggly pie from the oven.

Growing up, we often put Cool Whip on this, but we all did things when we were young we are ashamed of later. Now, I like homemade whipped cream, or, on the third day after Thanksgiving, will often eat it straight from the pie pan, while leaning against the counter.

Vernacular shelving

Who invented the table?

Who was the first person to make a chair that looked like a chair?

Think about the first person who made a box. Did they have any inkling of how virtually all furniture in the future would be based on their design?

The idea of a thing like a chair, which exists in some form in every culture in the world, having been invented seems strange, because tables and chairs and boxes and shelves and stools didn’t have a singular inventor – they were simultaneously developed by many different people all over the world, and then traveled, infecting others with their designs. And until very recently, most furniture was made by the end user, or at least by someone in their family or village.

Most furniture that has existed in the world was utilitarian in form – they built a chair because they needed a chair – not because they needed something to put in the corner to balance the plant stand in the other corner. And it was made by the end user because until very recently in human history purchased furniture was the province of the very wealthy. Most furniture was made quickly and in a utilitarian manner because the person building it was one bad harvest away from death by starvation.

Utilitarian furniture made by the end user is called “vernacular” furniture by people who study such things. And you need not think it strange that most people could build their own furniture – until a generation or two ago, nearly every house had at least one person in it capable of making a full sit-down supper each night. These are just skills we lost.

But like cooking, they are skills we can reclaim.

I am renovating our 70-year-old unretouched pantry/laundry room right now, which is the first part of the larger kitchen renovation I am planning for this summer. And we needed some new pantry shelves for canned goods. They don’t have to be Instagram-able. They need to hold up cans of food. They need to be painted, in order to protect the shelves and make them easier to clean. They need to be strong.

I need vernacular shelves.

Yesterday afternoon I knocked them out – 60 inches long, 42 inches high, to go under a window in the laundry room. I made them from 1×8 Southern Yellow Pine, the wood of Southern vernacular furniture for generations of my people, acquired from Home Depot. Southern Yellow Pine is stronger than Maple when it has fully dried, and it has a pronounced grain pattern that some people love.

The shelves are spaced 9.5 inches apart, so two normal tin cans will fit on each shelf, stacked on top of each other, and they are 7.25 inches wide, so two cans will fit front to back as well. The top shelf is five inches under the window sill, so the top shelf has room for only one can in height. I used some 3/4inch quarter round as cleats to hold the shelves in place, which were then glued and screwed in place.

Tomorrow I will caulk and paint them so they can cure over the weekend and I can load them up next week.

Literally the only tools it took to make this was a saw, a speed square, a pencil, and a drill/driver, some 2 inch screws and wood glue (These are all simple tools you should probably have as part of a basic DIY kit.). It took an hour to build. It will theoretically hold 266 standard cans of food in a space previously unused, taking up less than 3.5 square feet, and the total cost, not counting paint, even in these inflationary times was less than the cost of a single Billy Bookcase from Ikea, and it will last the rest of my life.

When To Buy Cheap Tools

As someone who likes to make things, I read a lot of websites, forums, and Facebook pages that relate to making things. And a really common question that comes up in those places revolves around buying tools.

Can someone recommend a good table saw?

Which brand of chisels should I buy?

Is the Harbor Freight lathe any good?

When this happens, you will get a lot of answers, but not a lot of help, especially if you have an ADHD brain like mine. Instead, people will berate you for trying to save money, or for not buying the absolute top of the line thing.

“Buy once, cry once,” they will say.

I think this is bullshit, actually. But often well intentioned bullshit. This happens because people forget what it feels like to be a beginner. So they make recommendations based on what they, with lots of experience, would do, not what you, with none, should do.

When you are just beginning a hobby, you don’t know enough to make smart choices. Woodworking is, for example, a huge category that encompasses cabinet making, turning, jointing, carpentry, carving, whittling, and box making, among others. And all of those categories have sub categories: Turning has spindle turning and bowl turning and chuck turning and faceplate turning and… well, you get the point.

And they all require different tools, and often the work area you would need for them is all different.

This is worse for ADHD brains, because we will fall into rabbit holes of hyper-focus, where we want to know everything about a thing. And the temptation to buy the things you are learning about can be overwhelming. But if your focus changes, you are out a lot of money.

As an example: I got into wood working thinking I wanted to make furniture – but found out along the way that I suck at making square things, but I love carving. So I don’t need a table saw, ever, but a band saw is really important. Were I a cabinet maker, those priorities would be reversed. So, it’s a good thing I bought a used, sorta crappy table saw, used, for like $50, instead of a new, top of the line SawStop saw for $3500.

On the other hand, I own some carving chisels that are $75 apiece. A furniture maker would never need these. He will be fine with some $10 a piece Buck Brothers chisels from Home Depot (which, by the way, are actually really nice chisels for the price). Lathe’s are pretty inexpensive, but the accessories can break you.

The idea is to lay out as little cash as possible until you decide what part of this hobby you want to pursue, or even if you do, in fact, want to pursue it.

I have a long list of forsaken hobbies.

I flirted with wanting to learn to play the ukulele. But I know me, so I bought the $30 ukulele, which was good, as it has been sitting in the corner for the last 5 years, untouched. I have a really nice high end point and shoot camera sitting in a bag on my bookshelf. I went through a bookbinding phase. The list goes on.

My strategy is to buy the cheapest thing I can get away with in the beginning, to see if this will stick. A good idea is to search Google for “Best budget X”, where X is the thing you need. Best budget harmonica. Best budget wood burning kit. Best budget table saw. Another strategy is to see if you can borrow the thing from someone else, to see if you like it.

A surprising number of times, the “Best budget X” is all you need. The Harbor Freight thickness planer gets amazing reviews – much better than pricy planers costing twice as much. The Casio Duro watch is less than $40, but tons of professional divers wear them (as does, weirdly enough, Bill Gates). The Morakniv Companion is an outstanding sheath knife for under $20.

And even if it isn’t, as you use the free or cheap thing, you will learn if you like doing this activity, you will learn what options your thing lacks, and whether it would be worth it to upgrade or not. And then, you can upgrade smart.

Or, maybe you decide that what you really want to do is basket weaving.

Habits Are Things You Get for Free

Yesterday, my friend Don told me that he admired my output since I began daily blogging. What he didn’t know is that if I don’t do it daily, it pretty much won’t happen at all. I write every day, because if I only write when I get in the mood, I will write never. In the first 9 months of 2021, I wrote 9 blog posts. Since October 1^st, I’ve written 72, and since November 1^st, I’ve written one every day.

Today I have written more than 2500 words, between two very rough draft blog posts, a newsletter, and this blog post. I have written about 25,000 words in the last 30 days, which is about half the number of words in The Great Gatsby, by writing every day. That is 25,000 more words that I would have written had I written when I felt like writing.

I publish newsletters on Monday and Friday, every week. As a result, I have sent hundreds of newsletters to my lists in the last 5 years. When I had a newsletter that I sent when I had something to say, I sent perhaps 3 in two years.

I was talking to a friend this morning as I was on the way to the gym to swim.

“I really admire your regularity. It’s impressive,” she said.

I told her that regularity was sort of my super power. Regularity can make you unstoppable. My ADHD brain thrives on structure, but has a really difficult time creating structure. Like many ADHD folks though, I thrive in structured environments, because it drastically reduces my choices, and choices are paralyzing for me.

That is why, for example, I wear the same clothes day after day. I don’t wear shirts with letters or graphics. I tend to wear earth tones, and literally I grab whatever shirt is on top of the pile. When I wore suits for a living I did the same thing, only with blue and white shirts, red ties, and blue suits. I don’t have to worry about what I will wear, or if it matches or is appropriate. I have casual clothes and work clothes and dress clothes and there are rules for all of them, and I only own clothes that follow those rules. As a result, I bet I spend less than two hours a year thinking about clothes.

Some people exercise on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I would exercise Monday, Wednesday, and the forget and it would be Saturday and I would get mad and then forget Monday and say to hell with it.

Doing it every day means you don’t have to remember. How much time do you spend thinking about brushing your teeth? None, because it’s a habit. And as the writer and activist Corey Doctorow said, “Habits are things you get for free”.

I have a habit of exercising, whether that is a walk or a swim, every day. A habit of working in the shop after supper. A habit of reading before bed. A habit of writing. All things I get for free.

In fact, it’s the parts of my life I haven’t figured out how to create structure around that give me fits.

But I’m trying.

My workshop

On the 12th day, I’m grateful for my workshop.

When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my dad’s Aunt, Louise. Her husband, Lonnie, had died right before I was born, and so he was someone whose shadow loomed large in my childhood, but who I never met.

Uncle Lonnie was Louise’s second husband (y’all gonna make me devote a whole one of these to her before I’m done), after she divorced the drunk sign painter. Lonnie worked for Ford Motor company as a machinist, and had a good union job with benefits, but the thing that made him remarkable was that he was also a mechanical genius.

I don’t say that lightly – there were cars in the 60’s that rolled off Ford’s assembly line due to his patents (well, that Ford owned, that whole work for hire thing, you know). He wired the houses of pretty much everyone I knew growing up. He could plumb, do electrical, weld, build with brick, concrete or wood – he could do it all.

He had a workshop behind their house – a small 10×16 or so shed he had built, with his tools lined up above his workbench, a drill press and a lathe on the other side. And Aunt Louise told me that when he got home, he would eat supper, and then he would go out to his shop and work.

As a ten-year-old boy, I would go out to his shop when I would stay over at her house. It was dusty, having not been used since he died. The tools were gone, but the racks were still there, and so was his workbench. The lights he had wired still worked, and the fixtures he manufactured out of pickle jars still did what he had intended. It was a magical place. I would sometimes just sit there on a milk crate, soaking it in. I have, as an adult, been in gothic cathedrals and felt some of the same feeling, like I was in the presence of some higher intelligence just out of my reach.

Uncle Lonnie was the dominant man in my dad’s life after my grandfather died when Dad was 7.

My dad was a tinkerer – an inch thick but a mile wide when it came to skills. He could rebuild your engine, wire your house, fix your radio, cut down your tree, repair your air conditioner, weld a trailer, build a house. He wasn’t amazing at any of that, but he could do them all, and perhaps most importantly, he wasn’t afraid to try something he hadn’t done before.

He told me once that it had all started when he was 8 or so – his father had passed away the year before, and his mom was working at the grocery store on the corner for a dollar an hour – money was hard to come by, and there was none for frivolities. A lady at the church had a bike her daughter no longer used, and was going to throw it out – Dad took it and he and Lonnie rebuilt it.

“It was a girl’s bike, and it was in bad shape when I got it. But I didn’t have anything to lose, so I figured out how it worked, and then I asked him for help, and we fixed it. It was having that bike or have no bike, so I was motivated,” he told me once.

But Dad never had a workshop when I lived at home. We lived in a 1,000 sf home, the five of us, and there wasn’t room for things like that. And there wasn’t any money for things like that, either.

So, his projects would live on the kitchen table, or on the porch, or on the tailgate of his truck as an impromptu workbench. But he really wanted a workshop.

A few years before he died, he finally built one. He knew retirement was coming up, and he planned endlessly for what life was going to be like after he retired. He would build furniture, he would do blacksmithing – he had hundreds of pictures of pieces of furniture he saw out in the wild that he wanted to capture because he liked the way it was shaped, or fastened or was built.

But the shop just filled up with things – projects he intended to work on in retirement – tools he got on clearance he would need in retirement – bargains on materials he would need in retirement.

My Dad was supposed to retire in June, but then the pandemic hit and he didn’t feel he could ethically leave his job as Emergency Management Director for his county at such a bad time. He died in October, from COVID.

He never got to retire, never got to build things in his shop, never got to while away an afternoon there, never got to actually use it, in any real sense of the word. His shop is nice, and a lot of thought went into it, but it doesn’t feel like anything to be in it, because he didn’t get to really make it his. It’s just a building he built.

After Dad died, I inherited some of his tools. Like Dad, I have always wanted a workshop. I always have projects going, and tools scattered everywhere and…

Then we bought a house. And a pandemic hit. And my Dad died having never used the workshop he longed for and looked forward to.

So this spring and summer, I built a workshop.

It’s small – 10×16. But I mostly use handtools, and I don’t use it for things that aren’t a workshop (like, this isn’t where the freezer or the bikes go), and so it works for me. I also like to tinker, but mostly I’m a woodcarver and small wood furniture maker, and for that it works perfectly.

In some ways it’s nicer than either Dad’s or Lonnie’s. It’s insulated, and I have a window unit air conditioner in it, and led lights and Wi-Fi and clerestory windows and a small TV and an Alexa for music. I really wish Dad could have seen it.

Mostly, I’m glad I get to use it while I’m still young enough to enjoy it. I’m glad I get to actually use it, get joy from it, and get to have a creative workspace that I don’t have to clean up when we need to set the table, a space that is mine to shape and be shaped by.

It’s not perfect yet, and in some ways is still unfinished. But most evenings after supper, I go out to the shop and work.