More Pie!

I think Maria Antoinette really should have said, "Let them eat pie." I like cake, but I love pie.  This past weekend, I finally made a pie recipe I found last August in Bon Appetit. This pie spoke to me. Basically, it said, "Make me and your friends will LOVE you." It was right.

I mean, wouldn't you love me if I sat this in front of you and said, "This is dessert."? A lime blackberry Italian meringue pie?

You can find the recipe here:  Be forewarned that this is a labor of love. One doesn't make something that takes the time this takes if you don't love the people you are making it for. Or need them to do you a very, very big favor. I did, as usual for me, pushed this one to the limit. Which is why my dinner guests ate grilled eggplant and zucchini, rather than the eggplant, zucchini and tomato stacks I had originally planned. Something had to give and it wasn't going to be this pie. (For the record, I made the right choice.)

One tip: Since I was running a bit short on time, I opted to toast the meringue by using a butane torch instead of putting it under the broiler. It was an interesting choice since I don't possess a fancy butane torch of the type sold by Williams-Sonoma or Sur la Table. Nope, I just grabbed a basic long handled lighter and used that. It worked perfectly. Oh, and I didn't use the pie crust recipe given in the magazine with the pie. I opted to use my tried and true pie crust recipe that comes from the Woman's Day Desserts cookbook. (Came out several years ago and worth looking for just for that pie crust recipe.)

Miscellaneous Mischief

For my dear conservative or apolitical friends, you might want to skip this one. Yes, I'm going on a tear. A long overdue tear. So, following my tradition of giving you something to read that won't offend you, I offer up tonight Emotions with Jon Hamm. A brilliant bit of online craziness created by Tricia, who is a rising creative marvel. Loads of people love this blog (well, maybe not Jon Hamm, but hey, his loss). So enjoy and come back to me soon.

Now, on with my rants...er points of view...

Bye bye Rick: Act II.  Rick Sanctimonious – er Santorum, finally saw the writing on the wall and bowed out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Which leaves only three options: The Newt, Ron Paul, or Mitt. Given that Mitt has about ten million more delegates than The Newt or Ron Paul, it's pretty obvious that in November, republican voters are going to have a the choice of a man half of them are convinced either isn't a US citizen or a Christian (Muslim being the predominant thought if you can say these people are thinking) or both or Mitt who is a Morman. Depending on just how desperate they are, they may just go for the Morman.

Disclaimer: I personally don't care if our president is a Christian, Jew, Morman, Hindu, Muslim or atheist as long as he does have the ability to lead our country, which I really don't think any of the current crop of Republicans do, except for maybe Ron Paul. And I feel obligated to point out here for the uneducated that technically, there is absolutely NO requirement that an American president be a Christian (aka a member of a Protestant or if no attractive Protestant is a viable choice, then a Catholic). It's called freedom of religion people. We can worship as we please. And that right to worship as we please extends to the President of our country.

Speaking of Ricks, it seems that Texas Governor Rick Perry has decided that Texas legislators should be required to take an oath of loyalty to his policies. Or some such nonsense. Since I just love it when the governor of our state makes us look like a bunch of idiots for electing him over and over again, I want to thank all those who continue to make His Holy Hairness' reign possible. Do us all a favor during the next election y'all: Forget to renew your voter registration cards and stay home so we can finally vote this bozo out of office. Oh, and also any bozo in the Texas legislature who is stupid enough to vote for this stupid loyalty oath of Ricky's.

Next up, our intrepid secret service agents, who seem to have forgotten that scouting out the local prostitution options in preparation for a presidential visit to a foreign country stopped being necessary after Clinton left the White House. What truly amazes me is how these guys got caught: by being so cheap that they 'shared' a prostitute thinking that they were going to get the two for one deal. So, the prostitute called the police, who then called the US embassy on these bozos. So, not only were these guys stupid enough to actually hire prostitutes and take them back to their hotel rooms where they had classified info laying around, but they were cheap stupid bozos.

Finally, no rant on the idiocies of the week would be complete without the ultimate idiot of the week: Ted Nugent. I just don't know what to say here. The mind boggles at how Nugent's mind works, or rather, doesn't work. I'd advise Mr. Nugent to stick to music, but based on what I know about his musical skills, I'm not sure that's a viable option. I certainly don't have any of his music (if you can call it that) on my iPod. So, maybe the best advice I can give him is to crawl under a rock and hope that his most recent outburst will be taken for the random ravings of a lunatic. Because I'm betting that the secret service would love to have a reason to take Ted into custody and look like the good guys bringing a gun-toting, serious threat-making lunatic to justice right now in order to detract people's attention from that little problem in Columbia.