We had a mini-cold front this week. It got down into the high 40s low 50s at night over the weekend, anyway, and so we said that we would bake one last pie for our dessert for wrestling night at our friends’. There’s a little local place that makes frozen pies that are absolutely divine… the cherries are tart rather than sweet which makes a slice served with vanilla ice cream perfectly divine.
Well, it looks like we’re going to be in the mid-50s and higher until autumn which means that it’s time to transition from hot desserts to cold desserts. If pies there are, they’ll be the French Silks or the Lemon Meringues or the Key Limes.
But the absolute *BEST* dessert is a simple one that I remember enjoying as a kid. I probably went decades without having it… I mean, I worked in a French restaurant and had access to all kinds of amazing desserts and I wandered aimlessly among the eclairs and tiramisus and the creampuffs but, recently, I’ve rediscovered the joys of the simple Tin Roof, I think it’s called.
It’s a couple scoops of vanilla ice cream, Hershey’s syrup, and a handful of honey roasted peanuts. That’s it. I remember having a bowl on occasion when I was a kid in Michigan. Eating it while we watched Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley back to back on the local UHF station. Well, recently, we stopped by Trader Joe’s and, on a lark, picked up a half-gallon of their vanilla ice cream. Used the syrup that I normally use for my chocolate milk (the absolute *BEST* post-workout drink) and a handful of peanuts and, holy cow, it felt like 1981 all over again.
So instead of doing something big and complicated (or something that requires a time investment of having to be home for 90 minutes), it’s nice to rediscover one of the simple joys of childhood and think “this was even better than I realized at the time”.
As such, this weekend will involve a trip down to Trader Joe’s.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Do you mind? I’m bathing.” Photo taken by Maribou.)
My weekend started a bit early last night. I met fellow OTer Chris for a burger and a couple of beers here in the Windy City. Interesting fella, and it was a great couple of hours. Plus, his toddler daughter is really cute. Sorta makes up for the LeagueFest I had to miss last Labor Day.
Other than that, nothing too exciting. Cleaning up the garden, home repairs, and doing some woodworking.Report
Oh, I’m envious! Sounds like a lovely time.Report
Last night, Our Tod presented another one of his marvelous spoken word shows at a local establishment and I patronized. Brought along an OT-adjacent fellow I became friends with over Tiwtter; he moved to the area a few months ago and is looking to establish his own routines and social circles, and I’m happy to help out with involving him in my own social and entertainment activities.
Tonight, I’ve no plans. Perhaps a good opportunity to do laundry and housework, as boring as that sounds for a Friday night, because much of the rest of the weekend is spoken for.
For me, tomorrow night is the symphony. I ought to brew another batch of beer at some point but the weather is too beautiful for me to stand the idea of spending most of the day in my basement even if it’s a pleasure to brew. It’ll rain one of these weekends soon enough.
Sunday is hiking day. This will be shorter than last week’s, because Sunday night will be a casual dinner with Our Tod and his lovely family. His young adult sons like my homebrew so I usually make a gift of several bottles to them.Report
Excellent. (And it doesn’t sound boring at all. It sounds divine. I try to punctuate laundry with vidja because, hey, I’m doing a chore but if you’re doing other real chores? That’s not bad either. If you’ve got music.)Report
I will say, there is no day when pie is not a good dessert.Report
Truly, you haven’t lived until you’ve had a fresh (tart) cherry pie. Best reason to visit Michigan.Report
When I was a teenager, we had a mulberry tree in the back of the lot. Mulberries are too sweet to make a pie with by themselves. A family up the street had a cherry tree. Cherries, at least these, were too tart to make a pie with by themselves. Mulberries and cherries, 50/50, made an excellent pie.
The mulberry tree overhung an irrigation ditch, and was oddly shaped. As the teenager boy, I was the one sent to scramble about and harvest from the tree.Report
Huh. I’ve made pies out of blood berries, but never mulberries.
Today’s pie is rhubarb, served straight up.Report
Rhubarb pie was problematic. What Mom and I regarded as nicely tart, Dad and my sister found inedibly sour.Report
A dear friend of ours visited for supper the other day and she gave me a CD. She’s a medical professional who treats people who have eye injuries (or head injuries that also result in eyesight problems). She gave me a CD that has a little bead of an eyeball in the little area between the hinges and she laughed. “It’ll probably suck”, she said.
I listened to it as I was out driving today. I knew *NOTHING* about the album except the art on the inserts and that it had a little eyeball bead rattling around.
If you want the full experience, don’t read any of the text and just press play in the video and open another window/tab and do stuff in that.
The album opened with this:
I was charmed, myself.
The next song on the album was this:
I’m charmed. I thought that this album would be the equivalent of tapping a guy in the crotch and yelling “VIBE CHECK” as he crumpled but… so far, so good.Report
I think we have the OT version of being rickrolled here.Report
Honestly, it’s not a rickrolling.
I had a CD about which I knew *NOTHING*. I suppose I could have pulled out the track list and looked at it and seen the title of the songs but I sighed and just put the CD in the case and I drove off to Trader Joe’s and Costco.
If you want to know the experience of bracing to hear a song that you don’t even know whether or not it’s likely to suck?
Click play.
(But I’m kinda cheating because, seriously, if it were awful, I would have dedicated that whole experience to a post.)Report
You didn’t know that first track? That’s kind of surprising. I found this version of it to be pretty terrible. YMMV, of course.Report
My take on it was entirely different. I made it about a third of a way through the song before it dawned on me… HEY! THIS IS A COVER!
And then, two seconds later, HEY! THIS IS A BEATLES COVER!!!
At which point, I was hooked and willing to listen to the next five songs.
And I kinda wanted to share that slowly dawning realization.Report