The leaves are all gone. They’re saying it may snow this week (they hope it’ll snow this week). And part three is nearly done. I am one scene away. One sad scene away. I hate finishing these.

It’s mild outside, just a jacket necessary. The rain falls eagerly sometimes and then it stops as if to take a breath. The clouds hang low but there’s nothing bleak about them, just a weary silence that invokes novels and cheese plates and baking and bowls of ice cream. The rain is washing the city clean. It brings out the old architecture in high relief, it makes the colors bright. It’s washing the winter away.

The summer gets its Dog Days when the tops of buildings are invisible in the layer of humidity, the roaches are loose on the sidewalks like toy poodles, and the air has lost all its lift. Then, there’s the harshness of the winter when even the orange of a sunset has lost all its warmth to the gusts of bone-chilling blasts that tear past the skyscrapers like bank robbers on the run. We’re in the darkest of the winter now, the Three Dog Nights of winter.

The Mevlana Mosque and Museum in Konya, Turkey

It took me a while to post, thanks to being busy, shellacked, and decompressing. This was the weirdest yet most rewarding trip I’ve ever taken. It was with a tour group but the country was so fascinating, so different from anywhere I’ve ever been that the two, the complacency inherent in being in a tour group and the daring in being in Turkey, balanced each other out. Beautiful, cosmopolitan Istanbul is easy to be in for someone who lives on the Eastern seaboard and has a list of her favorite cities. The hinterlands of Turkey, on the other hand, were another thing altogether. It was the first time I felt that I am no longer at home. Headscarves were actually very common, the language is bewildering, and after dark the streets make it clear it’s a man’s world.

History has been written here, though, by those with the guts to write it. Alexander and Julius Caesar, the sultans, Asia minor, Anatolia, the Crusades, Hector and Priam, all words written into legend, words that are legend. They’ve been through here. The hills and mountains and olive groves in places look like they must have looked thousands of years ago. History speaks and lives and breathes here, against a backdrop of small farmers, minarets, and open markets. Tourism is a large part of the economy but Turkey hasn’t sold its soul. I had the feeling we were catching it just before the old world vanishes. I can recall that in a short list of missed photographic opportunities: the hills on the way to Konya with a little village in the plains at the bottom complete with red roofs on the stone houses, Hieropolis perched at the top of the calcium deposits at Pamukkale and the modern village at the bottom, our tour bus crossing the tracks behind a train with a shepherd and his flock of sheep walking along the one-lane road. Oh, baby. If this is Asia, then I want more of it, though there is still a time and place for the warm and familiar places like the Piazza del Popolo in Rome.

That’s where my fictional characters are talking right now, and I must return to them. CIao, a piu tardi.

In the early morning light

Rittenhouse Square in the first blush of the morning mist.

The courtyard behind the Thinker.

I need to get Aperture 3. The way things are currently, everything is named so confusingly that it’s hard to find a picture. I admit that it’s entirely my fault since I didn’t bother to read the manual when I started using it and so it snowballed from there. Does it have a portal to Photoshop? That would be incredibly cool but probably disallowed by Adobe.

Snow Day

Well, the weathermen were finally right. I’m glad for them. They can keep their jobs now and with the constant bloodletting in the latest business news, I’m happy when anyone anywhere keeps their jobs, even if it’s weathermen, a subgroup of some of the shallowest people on Earth.

I was on call today but I think the storm may have saved my bacon. No surgeon was coming in from the suburbs unless it really was an emergency and the likelihood of those happening in a storm are much smaller than they are in good weather. So how did I spend my day? Well, I read a chapter of my latest how-to book, read a few chapters of the mind-blowing Brothers Karamazov, watched TV, researched Christmas Eve dinner, made crespelle, and spent half the day with Andrea Bocelli. All in all, it was a good day. I printed out my latest novel and wrapped it so I won’t be tempted to look at it before Christmas Day. Later on as the evening began, I went out to my neighborhood restaurant to buy bread and a protein and then my corner store to get milk with which to make the crespelle and the hot cocoa I plan on drinking tonight.

As I write this and sip beaujolais nouveau, I have arrived to a conclusion or two: I have to write a sequel and use the scene that’s been killing me this past week (even if I hate sequels), true emergency cases are rare and I get my ass called in for stuff that really doesn’t need to go, people may lecture on and on about how to write a great novel and yet I have never heard of their work (see the link above). Is it more important to be known or be true to some kind of fuzzy ideal? I think art has to be accessible and you can labor in your garret forever on writing a “great” novel or you can allow yourself to have fun with it. People need distractions and art should never be so far away that only a few anointed people can appreciate it. There is only one Dostoyevsky every century (if that), don’t kid yourself into thinking that you’re it or that anyone should be. This is a paralyzing ideal.

Luciano Pavarotti was the voice of God, like a volcano or a coming storm. Andrea Bocelli is more accessible and I love him. That’s all. I was struck by a falling bunch of snow by the passing PATCO train and I should go lie down. I’m confused…

Subjects for the new BA headers are, in no order since they change: bottles at the Plaza Dorrego fair, a statue from the cemetery in Recoleta, the ceiling from Cafe Tortoni, and the ceiling and lights at the Abasto. These things have something in common, can you guess?

More later.

P.S. I have forgotten a lot of the Photoshop essential shortcut keystrokes. Have I really become that useless? Plusly, that program grinds my computer into the dust. Maybe I need a new one.

The last of the leaves

We not only have streets like this, but we also have the newest Iron Chef and five of his restaurants. And it’s a all a lot cheaper than the same in Manhattan.

The Plaza de Mayo in the morning

I thought I’d take more pictures. I ended up not even using the third CF card I brought along. Oh, well.

Well, this is it. My first challenge with the Daring Bakers.

The challenge was vols-au-vent, which are canapes (or larger tarts) made with puff pastry. They could be filled with whatever the baker chose, sweet or savory. Though I have a sweet tooth a mile wide, I broke with my usual tradition and made savorys with the last of the summer’s vegetables. I took them to a spa event I had organized to rave reviews.

Though in name the challenge was to make vols-au-vent, in actuality, the real challenge was to make the puff pastry that makes up the crust. Puff pastry is one of the most finicky things to make in the home since it requires cold, huge amounts of butter, prodigious arm stamina and nerves of steel. Early September is not the best time to be making this in Philadelphia. It’s still warm and could be disastrously humid. And it was warm that first weekend, which is when I made the pastry. But I knew my calendar was full, what with a trip on the horizon and dates and dinners and spas, so there was nothing for it. I had to make it that first weekend.

It was in the high 70′s and damp when I took that butter out of the fridge and the clock started ticking. I also have very cheap, very crappy, very 80′s countertops, so that didn’t help. Stone helps since it has a tendency to remain cool. I stayed in for most of that day, like a loser, since I could feel the heat getting to the butter. Originally, I had planned to make only half a recipe since I had plans for some of that butter and didn’t want to use a whole pound all at once. But, since it would be so much work, I said to hell with it and used it all. I used half pastry and half all-purpose flour and rolled that sucker like there was no tomorrow. A few of the bottom layers got kind of screwed up since I don’t think I’d done the original wrap quite right and had left a few thin spots in the dough. I used the bench scraper to keep everything more or less neat.

After I had finished the six turns and the laminated dough sat on the counter more or less dry and ungreasy, I wrapped it and threw it into the freezer. With nerves frayed and arms tired, I put some shoes on and went out. There has never been so much effort put into no immediate satisfaction.

Two weeks later, I took it out of the freezer, cut off about a 4th of it and put the rest back in. It was spa day and I had gotten up early to make the canapes. I decided against any creams or sauces or mousses or anything too heavy. I chose to highlight the summer’s produce and make a sham light filling since there was so much butter in the crust already. The previous day off, I had roasted and cooked the red peppers much like Jose Andres does in his book Tapas. I cut the CSA’s small yellow tomatoes in half. I filled each canape with a very small piece of aged rachlette (they’re invisible in the pictures), a strip of pepper, a tomato, and a leaf of fresh parsley. Boring, maybe, but Andres’ peppers have so much flavor that they enliven everything they touch.

The rest of the puff pastry sits in my freezer, awaiting its turn. Maybe I’ll make a tarte tatin when I come back from South America. I’m not in a hurry to use it. It cost me too much to make it.

Moral of the story: Puff pastry is a winter-only food. September in Philadelphia is still summer. To avoid emotional damage, avoid making it in the summer.

The Met's rooftop exhibit