Tau Day, peaches, and paleo

Tau Day (6.28) was this past Thursday, which required baking pies. I went around in circles on how many to make, because I couldn't decide whether to represent tau with one or two pies--would two pies be four pi, or two tau, or what? I ended up making three pies/three tau/six pi, then called for help to eat them. One friend wanted to come a fashionable 6.283185307179586476925286766559 minutes late, but he was off by a factor of e.

I made chocolate cream pie, blueberry pie, and peach custard pie. N thumbs up.

The chocolate cream pie filling was adapted from here, using two 70% dark chocolate bars and reducing the sugar a bit. Yum.

The blueberry pie is my mom's recipe, made with freshly picked farm-share berries: 1/3 pie volume fresh blueberries, add a little water and sugar; bring to boil, add lemon juice to taste, then add some cornstarch in water to thicken; remove from heat, add 2/3 pie volume fresh blueberries, dump in prebaked crust. Yum.

The cream of the crop was the peach custard pie--a last-minute entry made from this recipe. I used Greek yogurt instead of sour cream, 4 egg yolks instead of 3, chopped candied ginger instead of cinnamon (not because I didn't have any cinnamon, but because ginger is the absolute most appropriate spice for peaches), and two layers of peaches instead of one, because four medium sliced peaches wouldn't fit in a single overlapping layer. I used one ripe peach and three crunchy peaches (thus my hesitation), because that's all that was available from OUR VERY OWN BACKYARD PEACH TREE (screw hesitation).

We bought the tree as a sapling three years ago at Costco. A friend asked what variety of peach we got, and all I could tell her was Kirkland.

This is the first year the tree has borne fruit that has survived into the summer. There were so many peaches on one branch that their weight snapped the branch.

Our neighbor J warned us to beware of local fauna getting to the peaches before we could. When I checked on the tree on Thursday, I saw this:

so I picked these:

I like that I can see wee tooth marks in the nibbled peach, and I like thinking about a squirrel (or raccoon?) sitting in the tree enjoying fruit, or having a peach party with its buddies. Peaches are so much tastier than acorns or compost; imagine the revelry! Nonetheless, a friend has offered to lend me her slingshot and arsenal of dried chickpeas.

The Tau Day pies left me with a bunch of leftover egg whites. Usually I'd make an angel food cake or meringues, but it was too humid for the latter, and I wanted to try something new. Googling yielded dozens of websites that recommended turning them into two-ingredient "Paleo" banana egg-white pancakes. "You'll never believe how good these are!," recipe blog authors joyfully claim--recipe blog writers who care about fitness and body image and, I am convinced, have tastebuds numbed by years of eating protein powder just like our prehistoric ancestors never did. So as a public service announcement, I offer the following observations:

1. These pancakes are not anything any sane paleohuman would have ever cooked, because no one who had prehistoric bananas and chicken eggs around in the same place at the same time would have sacrificed either for these.

2. Banana egg-white pancakes are gross. Do not eat them.

3. Re. optional toppings: what kind of trade routes and prehistoric succulent refineries do Paleo fans think would have ever put bananas, agave syrup, and peanut butter in the same vicinity? Oy.

4. See #2.

Next time, angel food cake.

The Great Fish Tank Crisis of 2018

Readers who have been following this blog for a while might remember The Great Ice Storm of '02 and The Great 2010 Fish Tank Catastrophe. What these events have in common--along with most other snow storms and home calamities--is that S is out of town for them.

Today, S is here:

Scenic Les Diablerets, Switzerland! What a lovely place for an academic conference, with free time scheduled in for hiking and biking. When the conference ends, S will spend several days biking from Les Diablerets to Bavaria, where he'll spend a week visiting his mom. Fifteen days from now, he'll fly home.

The timing could thus not be any better for The Great Fish Tank Crisis of 2018 to commence.

Yesterday, E and I noticed that the fish tank filter spray bar was making a lot of noise. This happens when enough water evaporates that the spray bar is no longer under water, creating a fountain as the filtered water returns to the tank; and it was odd, given that S had recently replenished the tank.

This morning, as E and I were rushing out the door, we noticed the noise was even louder. How odd that another inch of water could have evaporated so quickly out of the 45-gallon tank. Then we noticed the water seeping out of the bottom of the tank, meandering down--a drip here, a rivulet there--into the expanding puddle on the floor below. I looked at the fish; the fish looked at me. And then, with fingers crossed that the tank would not burst in the next 20 minutes, E drove us to his job (he's still 8 practice hours and 2.5 months away from getting his driver's license) while I texted S in a panic.

The fish tank and its accompanying geekery are S's deal. I know about as much about maintaining the tank as he knows about making pottery--which is to say, usually enough, but not much when the clock is ticking. For example, I know how to feed the fish, and how to add tea-tree oil if someone takes a bite out of someone else's tail, and how to pull out and rinse off the filter, just as S knows how to appreciate a form and fill a handmade bowl with salad, and how to blow into a chickarina butt to make music. He doesn't know how to throw a pot or load a kiln under time pressure, just as I don't know how to stop a tank from emptying out onto the floor or how to set up a hospital tank and relocate 25 living fish into it. (Yes, S guided me through the Great 2010 Fish Tank Catastrophe over the telephone--at 3 a.m., Germany time--but in that case there were, alas, but two survivors to relocate, and the tank wasn't threatening to burst.)

Thankfully, our neighbor R was available and came to the rescue, with S checking in periodically by phone from his scenic bike ride near Les Diablerets. (The above photos were taken at each phone-call stop.) All fish have been transferred to the hospital tank in the kitchen, including the powerful giant plecostomus that resisted netting and that R consequently carried by its tail through the dining room; all plants have been transferred to a second spare tank and bucket; and enough tank water was salvaged to keep everyone healthy and happy through a water change or two. So that E and I don't have to enjoy the scent of decaying fish poop for two weeks, R and I scooped all the gravel out of the tank, carried it outside, rinsed it off, and spread it on cardboard on the porch to dry, and then we carried the tank outside and R rinsed that too. Then we pulled the fish tank stand away from the living room wall, so the floorboards will have a chance to dry out and hopefully unbuckle.

And then peace descended upon the house once more. When S returns, he can repair and reassemble the tank, and it will be ready for a brand new crisis the next time he goes out of town.

From less troubled times: