I digress. Saturday. Ostensibly this fit of domesticity started because my cat brutally murdered a mouse. Our kitchen floor looked like a tiny Game of Thrones set – complete with a beheading. But, whenever I find myself scrubbing the baseboards with Lysol wipes at 10 on a Saturday night, you can bet there’s something else going on.  And there is. Something else going on. I will tell you about it later though. (Hand off the panic button Grammy. No one’s pregnant and no one’s breaking up with anyone.)

All you need to know for now is that resulting energy eventually lead to one of my more random and creative pies: apple/sweet potato with extra flaky crust. This was less a fit of inspiration and more a result of really wanting to bake, but not having any other ingredients to use. I was skeptical.

Side note: It’s super hard to take a picture of yourself while holding two hand fulls of fruit.

But it actually turned out great:

Ugh, the lighting in the kitchen is the worst. But even still you can tell that this pie is badass .

I treated the sweet potatoes just like apples. Instead of mashing them and puree-ing them, the way you would for a traditional sweet potato pie, I baked them until they were soft enough to slice and then layered them into the crust just like apples. It’s been a while since I’ve broken down a recipe for ya’ll (normally I’m just a lazy ass and link you to past crust recipes) so I decided to do that below. Crust is first, filling is second.

The crust:

Let’s be honest, we’re all in this for the crust. I’m pretty proud at how good I’ve gotten at making them extra flaky and awesome. To make this one here’s what you’ll need to make a double crust:

• A stick of butter. 
• A stick of vegetable shortening. I used Earth Balance. You can use Crisco if you want.
• 2 cups of flour.
• 1 cup of cake flour.
• 1/4 cup cornstarch
• Teaspoon of salt
• Tablespoon of sugar
• 1/2 cup of ice cold water

To get ready to make this crust you should do a couple of prep steps. Cut up your fat into cubes and freeze it. I let mine freeze for at least 30 minutes because the colder the fat, the flakier the butter. Once your butter/shortening are cold enough you’re ready to begin:

Step 1: Sift your flour – both kinds – and cornstarch into a bowl. Mix in the sugar and salt.

Step 2: Mix your very, very cold vegetable oil into the flour with your hands. Knead it until it completely breaks up and is the size of tiny peas.

Step 3: Do the same thing with the butter. Butter gets colder than vegetable oil so this will take longer. My hands always get really tired. I don’t know if there’s an actual chemical reason for this or not, but I have also found that the crust is better and flakier if you follow this order, instead of mixing the vegetable oil and the butter oil in at the same time.

Step 4: Slowly knead in the water. This is something else I’ve learned. Used to just dump it all in at once. Now I mix the water in two tablespoons at a time and, again, it just comes out better. Knead the water in until you’ve used the entire half cup and the dough is clumping together in a flaky, but still held together, ball in your bowl.

Step 5: Divide the ball into two, smash each ball into a pancake about 1/4 inch thick, wrap in wax paper and refrigerate for at least an hour.

The filling

Great! Now you’re ready for the filling.  It’s actually a little bit tedious to make. Hang in there. Worth it. You will need:

• Four medium size apples and an apple core-er. Is that a word? One of these.
• Two medium size sweet potatoes and a peeler.
• Whatever spices you like. I like cinnamon and pumpkin pie spice and I used a tablespoon of each.
• A tablespoon of agave nectar (which I like to use instead of sugar. If you like sugar, use that, but I don’t know how much you should use.)

Had to sneak my awesome rolling pin in there…

Step one: Deal with the sweet potatoes. This is the tedious part, unless you happen to like peeling potatoes. Peel them, wrap them in tin foil and bake them in the oven at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes or so. Basically, you’re pre-baking these so that they don’t turn out raw when you put them in the pie with the apples which, obviously, have a shorter cooking time.  You’ll know they’re ready to come out when they’re easy to slice, but still firm.

Step two: Core your apples. Peel them if you want. I didn’t because after the potatoes I was burned out on peeling. Once the apples are cored slice them into thin slices and put in a bowl.

Step three: Once your sweet potatoes are slice-able, cut them into slices the same width as your apples. Mix them in the bowl with your apples along with the spices you’ve chosen and the agave nectar.

Simple, except for the stupid peeling. Once this is done, you’re ready to roll out your crust. I use this method, although last night I was actually out of wax paper so I just used the “absolutely coat the dough and the counter in a ridiculous amount of flour method.” It worked ok.

Here’s how you assemble the pie:

Step 1: Roll out the dough for the bottom crust and transfer it to the pie pan using whatever method you find works.

Step 2: Fill the bottom crust with your filling. Some people just dump their filling right in all at once. I prefer to layer. I built a bottom layer of apples, a middle layer of sweet potatoes, and a top layer of apples.

Step 3: Roll out the dough for your top crust and transfer it to the top of the pie. I like to cut any excessive dough hanging over the edges off with scissors before I start shaping the crust.

Step 4: Shape the crust. This is kind of hard to do in my opinion. I basically just crimp it using my thumb and forefinger, but some people get really creative with it so go nuts.

Step 5: Bake. I baked mine at 400 degrees for 45 minutes. I accidentally burned the edges of the crust, so maybe do a little less time. I really think bake times depend a lot on your oven, so try 40 minutes and keep an eye on it.

And that’s how you end a night of furious stress-cleaning, cooking, and baking. I used to stay up all night having fun on Saturday. Now I stay up all night and bake. Weirdly, I’m ok with that.

So happy to have him in my life and to have all of these keepsake cards he’s made for me. This is why I’m not a flowers and candy kind of girl – I want things I can keep, and hold, and remember for years.

Sister Simone Campbell being an awesome badass lady at the at the DNC. Lady Pope 2013!

There’s a lot for a moderate, mostly lapsed Catholic woman like me to comment on this week.

Pope resigning. (Hooray! I never saw him as the kind of spiritual leader who could help me answer the persistent questions and concerns I have about faith in general, and the church in particular. As far as I’m concerned, Sister Simone Campbell is my Pope.) Ash Wednesday. Lent.

While I don’t attend Mass regularly, I have developed kind of a weird habit of praying the Rosary while running. The repetition of both exercise hypnotizes me in a comforting way.

I live in “sin” with my boyfriend and I don’t think that’s wrong. I use birth control, and think more people should – and should get it for free. I believe, without judgement, that love is love and the heart wants what it wants – no matter what or who that leads a person to. (And no God that I know “hates” anyone.)

Yet, I still believe in the promise of the church and the teachings of acceptance and charity taught in the new testament. Because I believe in those things, this is one of my favorite times of year. It helps me understand what I find to be the most beautiful line of scripture:

A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John, 1:5 

Truth be told, I attend Mass every Christmas Eve just to hear Father Harry (possibly the world’s most wonderful priest) say it. There are so many dark days in life, and whether you believe in God, or Goddess, or science, or nothing at all, it’s nice to understand that darkness – in whatever form you confront it – may be defeated.

So, I like Lent because it’s an opportunity to build on that thought, to contemplate our mortality — our internal darkness — and to make a small sacrifice to try to be better, to not be overcome by it.

This year I’m giving up my biggest vice – dairy. So, back to the “vegan kickstart” only this time it’s 43 days, not 21. Wish me luck, and whether you believe in some of the same things as me, or now think I’m just a zombie-Jesus believing nut job – I wish YOU luck with whatever struggles you’re up against.

Enjoy them, fight through them, learn from them.

The struggle, just before finding a light, is the best part of being human.

This photo basically sums up my life for the past five days. Haven’t been able to run or do anything besides take medicine and watch House of Cards. (Which, by the way, is amazing. Reminds me of all the reasons I love and hate politics, and, why I love and love Kevin Spacey.)

I’m worried about losing strength – and I don’t think I’ll be able to start up again for at least a week – anyone have any tips for low-impact ways to stay strong while sick? What do you do to stay strong when you can’t get the miles in? During my marathon training in 2011 I got pneumonia and, even though it was two months before the race, I think my time and my body took an extra beating on race-day from the strength I lost as a result.

I’m going to make it up this mountain, setbacks or not, I just really want it to happen in two hours or less….

Why did I do that? Not totally sure.  I registered for the race in some post-holiday, post-hometown visit, fit of ennui and confusion. I spent 10 days in Tucson this holiday break and it was an awesome-to-weird-to-awkward-to-horrible 10 days. I got back to Portland and immediately wanted a hometown do-over, so I registered for this race.

And now I run hills. Every day. Then I do this:

We’re watching Lost Girl. Nacho loves it more than I do.

Every day.

Anyone else have a race coming up that you’re simultaniously excited for and terrified about? Details, and training plans please!

I stayed away from here because I wasn’t baking, running, or accomplishing anything interesting. My life for most of the year was like a dial-tone.

Luckily, I think things are getting better. I went for a run this week and on the way home from the gym (yeah, I run inside in the winter. I hate being cold SO MUCH) I noticed I was happy. Yay for me. And yay for this blog, where I should be a little more active this year.

To celebrate, here’s a picture of me crossing an item off the ol’ 30-before-30 list:

This horse, Beau, was really grumpy and about 1,000 years old. But it still counts.

And just for your entertainment, here’s a holiday photo of my brother and I at our family Christmas party. Which was also the best night of the holiday break. And was also the night I taught my Grammy how to Tootsie-Roll.

I’m full & exhausted. Considering today a success because we had a table to eat off of (we didn’t always), and friends to share our food with.

I made this pie today out of a pumpkin I grew myself and my favorite extra flaky pie crust recipe. The insides were meh (starting to think I just don’t like pumpkin pie…) but the crust was amazing. The secret is cake flour and completely, rock hard frozen butter. Try it and let me know what you think:

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Extra flaky crust: You’ll need regular flour, cake  flour, butter, vegetable shortening, sugar, salt and water to make this.

Step one: Combine one cup of all-purpose flour with 2/3 cup cake flour (the two kinds of flours = extra flaky).

Step two: Mix in a tablespoon of sugar and a pinch of salt.

Step three: Cut in half a stick of very cold butter. The colder the fat, the flakier your pie. Mix with hands. Cut in 5 tablespoons of very cold vegetable shortening and do the same.

Step four: Sprinkle 1.4 cup of cold water and tossed together until you can make a ball. Flatten ball into a thick pancake, wrap in wax paper and refrigerate an hour. Go and make your filling.

Step five: roll out, press into pan, fill with filling and bake. (This pie was baked for 50 minutes at 350 degrees.)

This was a costume race – I hate costumes so I didn’t dress up. But, based on this photo, I’m going to say I went as a ghost.

I love my city and today was a good reminder of that. I ran the Run Like Hell Half Marathon and even though it was cold, wet, and my training was pretty half assed (though not as non-existent as it was in July for this race), I loved it.

This has not been a great year happiness wise. I fell into a post holiday funk in January and never really got out of it. Still in the middle of it to tell the truth. I should write about that, when I’m out the other side. But today – today I was happy. At the starting line surrounded by damp Ninja Turtles, Wonder Women (yes, plural, this was a VERY popular costume), and the Noid, I was just excited to run.

The race was pretty challenging. Like, four uphill miles through the Terwilliger Curves challenging. And, it was also beautiful. The leaves were changing, the bums under the Hawthorne Bridge were cheering (serious – they were my favorite cheering section and the course took me through their area twice), and even though I lost a toenail and bled through my shoe, it was fun. I’ll take it.

Signs of something very bad inside…

(PS: For anyone keeping track – and I doubt anyone is but me, but still – this race keeps me on track for the 30 Before 30 goal of running one race per month. In September I did a quick 8k with Race for the Cure (ahhh sorry super lefty lady friends – I needed a race and this was the only one that would work with my schedule. It was super boring and not worth a post.) 

So, I’m basically the last person you’d expect to go swimming around in the shark infested, fish-filled, coral reefs of Nassau, Bahamas.

But guess what, ya’ll? I DID IT.

And I loved it. Well, there was one huge, mean looking fish, that swam up to me and stared into my soul with his ugly fish eyes…

Besides that though, snorkeling is the best thing in the world. I could have stayed out there for hours. The experience was even cooler because I got to share it with my mom, in her first big one-armed snorkeling extravaganza.

Also, it’s extremely attractive:

All my photos from the trip are Polaroids because I’m THAT girl.

Unless you’re an adorable child in overalls, do not do this in public.

There are few things I like better than a list of things to do. So, of course, I’m attacking my 30 Before 30 list enthusiastically. The first item I knocked off was my 21 day Vega Kickstart, which ended a few days ago.

I’m particularly proud of accomplishing this one because the last two days of it occurred while I was on a cruise to the Bahamas with my mom. Cruises are essentially a celebration of gluttony. At one point yesterday I saw a lady double fisting ice cream cones. Lick one, lick the other, back and forth, like someone was about to take them away from her even though ice cream was free in unlimited amounts aboard the ship.  I’m not usually super judge-y about food — what do I care what anyone else eats —  but that one turned my stomach.

Needless to say – not an easy place to complete the kickstart. (Again: free ice cream.) But I did it. Actually, I liked it so much and I feel so great, I’m going to see how long I can continue this for. I’m not sure it will stick forever because it really does require a lot of work and time that I don’t always have. I figure at the very least I can stay away from dairy for another month though, thanks to the image of weird double-fisting ice cream cruise lady that I can’t un-see.