A Strawberry Tart

After my last experience with making strawberry tarts, where I forgot to cover the dough while it chilled and ended up with a hard ball instead of a pliable cookie-like consistency, I decided to bust out the handy puff-pastry sheets for my next attempt. I also used a different recipe where the strawberries were cooked instead of put on top of the dough afterwards. I must say I am extremely impressed with this version of the strawberry tart than I was previously. I started out with one piece of frozen puff-pastry (2 to a box!) and topped it with cream cheese and some powdered sugar mixed together.

I added a tablespoon of milk because it seemed too thick, but looking back it would probably be better NOT to add it because the mixture thinned out a lot in the oven. After spreading the cream cheese mixture out on the pastry, I mixed 2 cups sliced strawberries, some cinnamon, and 1/3 cup strawberry/raspberry jam together and poured it on top of the other. Then I cooked it for about 25 minutes in a 400 degree
oven. My oven, as I've said before, gets extremely hot, so that temp. is subject to change depending on the oven. The result: a delicious strawberry tart. The tart traveled with me to Charleston for the weekend and I'm sure Tyler will be a reference for the taste if any is required.









During the process I wore my beautiful mother's day necklace Ethan made for me and got flour all over my clothes. Needless to say, I enjoyed my therapeutic baking experience of the week.

The Worst Oven Ever

I began my day on Tuesday with the motive to make some dang good bread and a delicious strawberry cake with lemon icing. I started with the bread, scouring The Bread Baker's Apprentice cookbook Tyler gave me for my birthday. No such luck! Almost all of the cooking equations required more than 24 hours or some form of a starter, which I had not previously prepared, and so I could not use either. I resorted to my Vegetarian cookbook that amazingly possesses some good bread recipes that have served me before. I found one for sun-dried tomato and basil bread. I didn't have sun-dried tomatoes, but I decided it would just be basil bread and I began. It rose well and didn't require but about 2 hours total for mixing, rising, and cooking. However, my oven presented a new problem. It has consistently overcooked items on the bottom while not completely cooking them through and through. This bread baking experience was no different. The bottom and top started getting brown, then dark brown, while the timer had only elapsed 20 of the 25-30 minutes allotted. So I pulled it out, let it cool, and sliced it....gooey inside!!! NO! I had to cut it and cook it some more, hoping and praying the bottom pieces wouldn't turn black and hard. They didn't, but I ended up more frustrated than anything and discouraged that my bread would taste like cardboard. But it soared in flavor and was a hit at my dinner engagement with Faith and her roomie Laura. Ethan even commented on how amazing it tasted, though he was skeptical of the basil leaves originally.

After baking the bread, I started on the strawberry cake, a recipe I yanked out of a Cooking Light Magazine, where strawberries were the star ingredients of the spring recipes. My oven performed much more professionally this time and didn't let me down. However, I found the strawberry flavor did not emanate throughout the cake. It tasted good and complimented the lemony icing very well, but didn't really taste like strawberries. I threw the recipe out, discontented with the dissolution of my expectations. So I'm on the search for another strawberry cake. Maybe this time I will make it and then fill it with strawberry jam or something similar - to ensure that yummy taste!! However, though I was let down by the cake, the mixing process was beautiful and I enjoyed watching the colors mix and swirl! I enjoyed the bread, cake, and salad Faith made for us and more importantly the night of community with some good friends!

It's been only 2 weeks...

I've made it through merely two weeks of studying for my English Oral Examination in the fall, where I must face a daunting room of three professors and be quizzed on everything from The Declaration of Independence and Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy to Beowulf and John Milton's "Paradise Lost." And at the end of these two weeks, I feel as if I've accomplished nothing, other than some minor reading, and I dread reading every morning. On Monday, my friend Rachel and I went to IKEA in Atlanta in an effort not to study, and to look at some pretty cool home furnishings. On Tuesday, I indulged my desire to bake by making some delicious basil bread, see below, and a so-so strawberry cake, using a new recipe. Wednesday I sucked it up and read and posted, working hard. Thursday I went hiking with another friend, Christina and her husband James, and today I'm working again. Taking a break after the epic "Beowulf", before tackling Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Once I start reading, I really enjoy the work, but the motivation it takes to get me started is similar to the motivation it takes to get me to start running. I love to run during and after a run. I love feeling as if I'm breaking through the air, creating my own wind, feeling the air flow by my skin along with the beat of my heart in sync with my breathing and my breathing in sync with my feet pounding the gravel trail by my house. I love the adrenaline afterwards and the knowledge I've succeeded in working my body, giving it strength. But before I run, I dread the process of putting on running clothes, pulling back my short hair and crazy bangs, and even tying my shoes becomes a laborious task. The same is true for reading. I would rather take a nap, cook, or anything else to prevent myself to starting the marathon of works ahead of me. Once I start, I'll enjoy all of them, even enjoy taking notes and connecting themes and theories throughout the work. I just have a hard time getting there. In my pretended stupor of not working on my school work, I'm reminded how much I just want to escape. I want to escape Clemson, South Carolina, the US, everything. But I know my satisfaction in escaping this country wouldn't serve my true purpose. Other than missing my family horribly (Ethan would definitely be in my backpack) I wouldn't be content in another country for long before that same feeling would creep back into my life, no matter how exotic a location. I'm reminded of some words from C.S. Lewis I read in a Tim Keller book recently,

Speaking of a type of Sehnsucht, or profound homesickness or longing:
"Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are no the thing itself...Now we wake to find...[w]e have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken in...

Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation" (C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses).

More and more, as I live in Clemson by myself, attempting school and motherhood and maybe a few friendships here and there, I'm reminded I cannot do this on my own and I long for the freedom from imperfection and feebleness. I fail so often at being a good mother and friend. I strive to do things on my own and forget to ask for help. My pride leads to my downfall and I constantly realize my shortcomings. I'm learning, seeking, growing, cherishing this tough time and hoping in what is to come.