=Mini Pecan Pie!=

(mini pecan pie)

This year my husband requested a pecan pie for his birthday & since I'd give him my liver if he wanted it, a pecan pie was a pretty easy order to fill. In fact, I actually made him two pies, the way you put an extra candle on the cake for good luck in the coming year. 

I used a recipe I've adapted from Guy Fieri. In this case, I halved the ingredients you'd normally use for a full pie and used my trusty ramekins. 

Pecan pies, by their very nature, can put even people with a raging sweet tooth and a healthy pancreas into a sugar coma. But this recipe, with its inclusion of chopped pecans throughout the traditional filling, is a little more balanced and substantial than the usual pecan-sugar pie. Plus, making mini-pies makes for a less overwhelming caloric spectacle, particularly if you aren't having company and there's only two of you doing the pie eating.  

Crust: You start off making the crust, which, in this case, requires only 1 cup of flour, .5 tablespoons of sugar, .5 cup of cold butter (or margarine), and a pinch of salt. 

You mix this all up in a bowl with your fingers until it starts to adhere to itself. Then you add cold water little by little. Lately, I've taken to using cold vodka because the alcohol evaporates during the baking process and leaves the crust flaky and crispy; at least that's the theory and it seems to be borne out in practice. Add the water or vodka sparingly, just until the dough comes together in a ball, wrap it in cellophane, and refrigerate for at least 20 minutes.

Filling: In the meantime, mix .5 cup of corn syrup, .5 cup of light brown sugar, .25 teaspoon of salt, 3 tablespoons of melted butter, and one teaspoon of vanilla extract in a bowl. Beat an egg and mix that in last.

Set that bowl aside. 

Crust, again: When your dough is properly chilled, roll it out and divide. Press it into the bottom of your two ramekins. Bake the crust at 350 degrees for about ten minutes until it's golden brown.

Now chop up enough pecans to sprinkle over the bottom of the pie crust, about a quarter of a cup. (You can either have toasted the pecans or not—it's your choice). Set aside.


Filling, again: Stir another quarter cup of chopped pecans into the pie mixture that's still waiting patiently over there in the bowl. Pour the filling into the ramekins. 

Top of pie: Use whole pecans to decorate the top of the pie. 

Bake: Pop the pie(s) into the oven that you've preheated to 375 degrees. Ordinarily you'd bake for 40 to 50 minutes if this were a full-sized pie, and you more or less do the same for the mini-version, but I'd check it closer to the 35 minute mark just to be on the safe side. You don't want to burn it. Nothing tastes more foul than burnt sugar. Well, I guess burnt rubber would taste more foul and a lot of other things, too, but you get my drift. Maybe it's better to say nothing so ordinarily sweet tastes so foul burnt as sugar. 

Anyway...

If it's your husband's birthday, stick a candle in the finished pie, light it, call him into the room and sit on his lap singing happy birthday while you fondle his crotch. Let him blow out the candle. Hopefully both your wishes are the same and they both come true. Probably they will. For one thing, you still have your liver.   

=Recipe for a Pornographic Carrot Bread=

I was writing a porn story for money and interrupted myself to bake a loaf of carrot bread.

I preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Many people think that poetry has no practical purpose but I want this one poem at least to prove them wrong.

I prepare a medium loaf pan by spraying it with Pam.

I grate two cups of carrots and set them aside.

In my porn story, the woman is waiting for her lover in a park after dark.

She is standing inside a jungle gym and reflects how it is the iron parody of a gilded bird cage.

“This is where children play,” she thinks to herself, deliciously ashamed.

She feels her high heels sinking into the soft sand.

She has been told to dress like a streetwalker.

There is un-PC element of male dominance in this story

and I am unapologetic about it.

You shouldn’t lie, at very least not to yourself, about what gives you pleasure.

“Art is like ham,” Diego Rivera said. “It nourishes people.”

I mix together one and a half cups of flour, a half teaspoon each of salt and baking powder, a quarter teaspoon of baking soda, and a half cup of sugar, although you can use up to a cup of sugar if you like it sweeter.

Finally I add a lot more cinnamon than the recipe suggests, which is only two teaspoons.

Those are the dry ingredients.

I want this poem, in some way, to nourish people.

I think porn stories get a bad rap; after all, they give people the most intense physical pleasure possible, with the possible exception, perhaps, of eating, and they do it using only words.

In a separate bowl, I beat two eggs, then mix in a quarter cup of milk, two-thirds cup melted butter (or vegetable oil),  and a teaspoon of vanilla extract.

These are the wet ingredients.

Sometimes I come to a shuddering climax reading a porn story that was written a hundred years ago by an author long dead.

I think, isn’t that amazing?

That someone dead can make me come, can touch me like that from beyond the grave?

Isn’t that real magic?

Isn't that a kind of proof of life after death?

I mix the wet ingredients into the dry, add the carrots and three-quarters of a cup of chopped walnuts.

Where I left off in the porn story, my lover steps out of the dark and orders me to turn around and bend over.

With one hand, he grabs me by the long hair and yanks my head back.

I feel like a lamb about to be slaughtered. 

This is important.

I’m suddenly staring at a small patch of stars visible between the trees which have already begun shedding leaves.
It is early October.

He reaches under my plaid schoolgirl skirt and yanks down my panties.

I’m wearing fishnet stockings with garters so there’s no need to pull off anything else.

I feel the chill air on my naked flesh.

He spits in his palm.

You pour the batter into the already greased loaf pan.

You bake it on the top shelf of the oven for 45 to 50 minutes.

He enters me roughly from behind.

He pumps and pumps and my knuckles on the bar of the jungle gym rub painfully into the flesh of my cheek but I don’t move.

There is, obviously, a strong masochistic element to this poem for which I also make no apology.

I close my eyes and open them when he comes and through the tears the stars inside me are somehow joined to the stars in the sky.

It's as if I'm seeing semen spread across the heavens.

You check for doneness with a toothpick inserted in the middle of the loaf.

If it comes out clean, it’s done.

You remove the loaf from the pan and let it cool.

You eat it warm and you enjoy.