On Friday, August 29 the thunder of hooves and the jingle of harnesses could be heard as Budweiser’s fabulous Clydesdales made special beer deliveries throughout downtown West Chester, PA. Thanks to my friend Lee Ann and my friend Peggy, I can share these photos with you:
I purchased a pint of forgotten fruit at the farmers market yesterday. Ground cherries. They were in little papery husks almost like a tomatillo. They are a very old-fashioned fruit that you see once in a blue moon at farmers or local organic markets.
Preheat your oven to 400°F
Get out your frozen two sheet package of puff pastry – Pepperidge Farm or whomever and allow it to thaw at room temperature. If it’s really frozen it can take over half an hour.
First make the Frangipane (almond cream):
In a large mixing bowl whip together with your mixer the following:
3 tablespoons butter, preferably unsalted
One large egg
1/3 cup granulated white sugar
One half teaspoon pure vanilla or almond extract
One half a cup of almond flour or almond meal (I order mine from nuts.com)
1 tablespoon of regular white flour
Beat together until fluffy and set aside.
In another bowl, put your ground cherries (after removing the little husks from them) in with a 1/3 cup of light brown sugar and a couple dashes of cinnamon. (I had purchased a pint’s worth of this fruit.) To this I add 2 teaspoons of fresh lemon juice. I then take a hand potato masher and macerate slightly the ground cherries and the sugar and cinnamon and lemon juice.
Next take out a jellyroll pan – otherwise known as a cookie sheet with an edge and line it with parchment paper
Take one sheet of puff pastry and gently unfold it and put it in the center of the pan on the parchment paper.
Next take an icing spreader or spatula and spread the almond cream/Frangipane evenly on the bottom layer of puff pastry.
Next slice two to three medium size peaches in thin slices. Arrange neatly on top of the cream. Next spoon the ground cherry mixture evenly on top of the peaches.
Take the other sheet of puff pastry and unfold it and lay evenly on top of the fruit mixture. Crimp the edges of both sheets of puff pastry together all the way around.
Cut quite a few vent holes in the top of the path pastry. You can do it in a pattern if you want. Take one egg yolk and add a tablespoon and a half of water and whip it together. Use a pastry brush and brush the egg yolk lightly over the top of the pastry. Dust this with sugar. (egg yolk acts like a glue for the sugar)
Bake at 400° for about half an hour. My oven wasn’t doing something right today so I might have even taken longer baking. This is something you have to keep an eye on or you will burn it.
When everything is all golden and caramelized brown pull it out of the oven. It will also smell really amazing!
Cool before moving to a serving platter. I have a large round plate I picked up at a church sale years ago that I love for desserts that are a different than normal size.
You can serve this warm or cold. A little dollop of whipped cream should accompany each serving.
Refrigerate the leftovers.
I was cleaning out old photos and stumbled upon this photo I took a few years ago. It was still sweet to me, so I decided to post it. Taken at Radnor Hunt.
Last evening thanks to Tredyffrin Library in Tredyffrin Township I had a real treat: being able to listen to traditional folk music and to see an old friend.
When I was a little girl I had a friend named Aubrey Atwater. After grade school we went our separate ways but as adults reconnected via e-mail and Facebook. She and her husband Elwood Donnelly live in Rhode Island and are folk singers who specialize in traditional American and Celtic folk music and dance. They are known as Atwater-Donnelly. Thanks to them and artists like them, a very beautiful form of music (like the music performed by the Carter family and Jean Ritchie , for example) and story telling are preserved.
My childhood friend and her lovely husband actually have quite the following and in recent years have been at more local locations to us, like the Philadelphia Folk Festival. Although based in Rhode Island they have traveled extensively with their music for over 25 years not only in the U.S. but Ireland, England, and Canada. They have produced seven books, thirteen recordings, and have also been featured in a documentary.
Aubrey and Elwood have beautiful voices and they play such an amazing range of instruments. Among the instruments they play which I love are the banjo, mandolin, and dulcimer. They play as a duo and with their band. I am in awe of their talent.
If you want to check them out, visit their website. Many thanks to the Tredyffrin Township Library on Upper Gulph Road for scheduling such a fun event!
As I begin this post it has no title. It is just one of those things I woke up a few hours ago thinking about, so here we are.
I was wondering if as we age we give ourselves permission to be more our true or authentic selves?
Maybe I will just call this post what it is: a flowing stream of consciousness.
Yesterday I was thinking about high school. I wasn’t part of any special clique, I had friends in all groups. But I do remember the very real high school pressure to belong to one group or the other. To me, it never felt quite right, so I floated.
I remember girls and guys I knew even back then, and even in a private school, being bullied by their peers in different groups. Like a very preppy and civilized Jets vs. Sharks.
To this day the memories are so strong for some of these people that they never even come back for reunions. I work on my reunions so I think about this stuff when we are planning parties. The funny thing is I realized years ago again how these people who were pack leaders and bullies don’t really matter and never really did. As a matter of fact when these former pack leaders do show up at reunions I marvel at how little they have changed and it always strikes me as a little bit sad.
It sounds kooky to think that as adults we still can judge from the vantage point of our younger selves, but I have had other friends who also work on their reunions say the same things as me. As a matter of fact I remember once friend who planned her reunion being all worried about this one group of girls coming to her home as she was hosting the reunion party. And she has this awesome house and a terrific family of her own and has accomplished so much. Yet all these years later she was still worried at first until she realized she didn’t have to measure up in their eyes then or now.
What I have noticed is for every stage of life, there are people like that. Unhappy, malcontented people who essentially seem to like to make people unhappy and/or sit and judge with a misplaced sense of entitlement or superiority. My ex and some of his siblings are in that category. I am sure they hate being mentioned in my writing (and I have no clue as to why they still follow me) , but they were part of my life experience. And I have never said they were horrible people 24/7 because they weren’t. There was always just this hum about them, running underneath.
I will admit I never got to know most of these siblings particularly well. I was never allowed to by my ex, so it was an observer’s existence for me. In the early years when I would try to get to know them as in call to say hello, or send an e-mail I was always met with an angry wall of “Why are you contacting them? ” so eventually I stopped. It was funny spending 8 1/2 years with people as “family” with restrictions. What was even more strange, knowing myself, is that became normal to me.
If these people had stayed in my life or I in theirs, I would have ended up an angry and bitterly unhappy person at a minimum. I didn’t realize any of this until I was out and he had left. Then, all of a sudden one day a few weeks after he was gone, when I really wasn’t thinking about it, life was better and I could breathe. My point in all this is I had know idea until I was out how much these people had changed me. How I had allowed myself to be changed, as in molded. This was the first time I had pretty much denied who I was for the trade-off of “fitting in”. I learned by almost losing myself how bad that is. It’s a crazy realization.
I have noticed that as I get older and water continues to seek its own level, that these unhappy and malcontented types still sort of bunch up together. It is as if they know subconsciously as individuals their weaknesses and ill humor towards others won’t be tolerated. Maybe it is a pack mentality of sorts?
There is this one group of women, whom I actually don’t know so I can’t say as I understand what is so awful in their lives that they have to be so miserable, yet they are. They literally meet for tea and scones. It seems so civilized and sweet and country folksy, only what it is no better than a gossip club. They rip people up one side and down the other (myself included which is so funny because they have never met me and don’t know me, it’s because I am a blogger and shock and horrors different from them), and for what? What does it gain them in the end? Nothing.
There was a group like this in my Main Line neighborhood growing up. The leader kept binoculars on her kitchen windowsill. Her house was up on a hill so with a good pair of binoculars she could check out everyone around her. If there was a strange car in your driveway, the phone would literally ring and it would be her inquiring as to who was visiting you and why.
The leader and ladies would literally meet once a week with a brown bag lunch. They would report on the happenings and transgressions and presumed transgressions of the neighbors. They actually called themselves a gossip club, amusingly enough. It gained them nothing, either. At first they were sort of feared, eventually they were just ignored.
I guess it just fascinates me that as we age and become more comfortable with who we are, the more people feel the need to question that from the outside. And sometimes these people don’t necessarily have a strong voice, but they have a loud voice that at first gives the presumption of authority, but eventually all realize they are just loud and self-important. Not truly strong beings to be either feared or emulated. It gets to a point where you have to stop and turn and think about who are these people and do we really care what they think in the big picture?
The answer isn’t necessarily simple because as human beings it is human nature to want to belong. But what you realize as you get older is you don’t actually have to belong where you think you do and you will find plenty of people who are happy to know you just as you are.
What I have realized about myself is that over the years I have suffered collateral damage emotionally. I think we all do indeed suffer emotional damage that to an extent. It is what you do with that experience that matters. Do you let it sour you, or do you look at it for what it is: life experience and learn and move forward?
Life is a gift. If we are alive and kicking, why can’t that fuel happiness? I guess at the end of the day I will never understand the truly miserable. It must be sad and exhausting to be them.
Be true to yourself. Or learn to one baby step at a time. People are just people at the end of the day and as adults we can freely choose who it is we wish to be around.
Be happy and learn to breathe freely.
Thanks for stopping by.
I read this quote once:
“No matter the deviation, all things come full circle. You begin and end your journey in the same place, but with a different set of eyes.”
I don’t remember who said the above quote, I wrote it down on the corner of a notebook a couple of years ago.
When people say life comes full circle, it’s because it’s true. Not all the time, and not to everyone, but it happens.
The fabric of life is different for everyone, but there are things that connect us to one and other. Where we live, where we grew up, where we went to school created the formative life threads we all have. Then we add to the threads based on life experience as we get older.
Life has cycles, and people enter and leave our lives. But with the cycles, I find the circles. Coming back to what you are from. I have terrific friends, and a lot of them are friends I have had since I was a small child and since I was a teenager.
My mother’s mother always said you come back to what you are from. I don’t think she was referring to a physical place, I think she is referring to people in our lives.
I was talking to one of my friends from the way back time machine of high school today, Karen. She lives out of state now, so playing catch up today was a marathon call. She is one of these people whom I have always loved speaking with because she has always been very real. We have gone from being teenagers to middle-aged women and wow, where did all the years go? One minute we are like 18 and well…now we are 50. Yet I love talking to her now as much as I did then.
Time flies.
Don’t misunderstand me, I love meeting new people. But there is always something to be said about the comfortable long term friendships of life. As much as time flies, life has these circles and if you are lucky you still have these people in your life. And it’s comforting because these are the people who know you best.
Thanks for stopping by.
