So it's the day before Thanksgiving, which at our house is Pie Day, in order to save my sanity. Tomorrow is reserved for the main event itself.
This year we decided to go with just a pumpkin pie. My deep-dish pie plate is an ungodly ugly thing, but important in one respect--with shallower pans you get that annoying, full-to-the-top thing when you add the pumpkin pie filling...then without spilling any, have to shuffle over to get it into the oven with all the intense care of a bomb disposal worker.
I also get a giggle out of the recipe for apple pie it has...that gets covered up the minute you place your pie crust in it. Better hope you copied it down first!
My fancy laminated wood rolling pin I love unashamedly, it's beautiful AND awesome, with a nice heft to it. Sadly, the man who made it retired from woodworking a few years back.
The pie crust bag seemed kind of a silly thing when I got it, but has proven to be another sanity-saver. You unzip it, dust the inside with flour, add your lump o' dough, zip it shut and then roll out your dough. No muss, no fuss, NO FLOUR EVERYWHERE, and you can roll your dough until it's the perfect size and shape. Even cleaning the thing afterwards isn't too awful, and the dough doesn't clog up the zipper teeth.
Elsewhere, I'm finally sitting down and scanning my older dulcimer sheet music into my computer--Most of it came from a beginning dulcimer class I took at the Folk Music Center in Claremont, CA back in the 1980's, at the time taught by the owner, Dorothy Chase. I also took a beginning banjo class from her, and after hanging around there so much got recruited to work their annual Folk Music Festival (which I did for a few years, and always had a blast!).
The rest of my old dulcimer music I collected at various folk music festivals. There were a few sheet music for dulcimer books for sale, but overall dulcimer was, and still is to a certain extent, scarce as hen's teeth.
But lots of the people giving classes at the festivals used the old thermal copiers...which means that storing the music in sheet protectors was problematic, as the copies would leave ghosts of themselves forever imprinted onto the clear plastic. Taking the music out of the protector got me this:
And once the paper was out, got me this:
So after I scanned the music, the originals got all-new sheet protectors. I don't know that the same thing won't happen again, but at least for now the headache-inducing ghosts are gone!
