Category Archives: Nature

Easy as Apple Pie

Posted on by
Reply

Apple stilllife

I’m hungry for an apple pie and this recipe from Southern Living Magazine (Sept 2011) makes a great one.

Its almost like apple dumplings but not!

And the iron skillet is essential to the pie.

Try it and let me know how it turns out!

Making an apple pie has never been so easy. Simply toss apples, cinnamon, and brown sugar, and spoon over a refrigerated pie crust in the cast-iron skillet. Top with the other crust and bake.

Ingredients
4 pounds apples (whatever you have apple-wise)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 (14.1-oz.) package refrigerated piecrusts

How to Make It
Step 1
Preheat oven to 350º. Peel apples, and cut into 1/2-inch-thick wedges. Toss apples with cinnamon and 3/4 cup granulated sugar.

Step 2
Melt butter in a 10-inch cast-iron skillet over medium heat; add brown sugar, and cook, stirring constantly, 1 to 2 minutes or until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat, and place 1 piecrust in skillet over brown sugar mixture. Spoon apple mixture over piecrust, and top with remaining piecrust. Cut 4 or 5 slits in top for steam to escape.

Step 3
Bake at 350º for 1 hour to 1 hour and 10 minutes or until golden brown and bubbly, shielding with aluminum foil during last 10 minutes to prevent excessive browning, if necessary. Cool on a wire rack 30 minutes before serving

woodsmoke and autumn prayers

Posted on by
1

Rainy Day - Table Rock Lake

Thudding of heavy rain
against the tin roof
deep as thunder,
as the chill arrives carried
on the back of the north wind
and the wings of geese
fleeing south.

Black winged clouds
dark as ravens eyes,
chase the day away west
and down the ridge
into dark hollows and deep ferned rests
of wildings and heavy furred souls.

Scent of woodsmoke
curls up from unseen hearths
where bright fires catch the last of the sun,
warming benches and tidy rooms
hidden from all but wide eyed owls
roosting til moonrise.

I watch the clouds spill over the ridge
and into my kitchen
deepening the dark of autumn,
my dusk and evening prayers.

the seas I dreamed

Posted on by
3

bob boat 3 2016

I find myself
strangely in a home
I never dreamed nor wanted.
Its a feebled reach from the water
to the seas I dreamed.

A small beautiful vessel
where I found you perched,
its white bow striped blue,
the color of your eyes.
I saw the horizon and knew how it would feel
not to remain as we were
but different.

The possibility of here and stay
or go
and the choice was made
with the tenderness
of how the key was held and the lock
no longer needed.

Because I had dreamed how it would be
to drift in that moonlit ocean,
alone.

Then you were there at my shoulder,
tiller in hand,
steering us toward home.

its the first day of autumn

Posted on by
Reply

fall - flowers2

and the coolness in the air is more figment than
real
mixed with heat rising from parched pavement
and aching ground.

It is quiet-
only an occasional lilt from passing birds
and laconic buzzing
from red wasps
busy at the old board bench.

I lean against the hickory,
it bark worn gray from seasons changing,
readying yellow to overtake the dried green
of its saw toothed leaves
in preparation of shedding it all
for a long winters dreaming.

I leave ex votos, tamata, milagros
wedged in the folds of the hickory’s skin,
bits of tin in the shape of my grief
and lost years.
An altar good enough for most deities
and the angels that linger
in autumn woods
on the first day
of my fall.

harvest moon

Posted on by
2

April Moon 2014

the scent of night rain lingers on the morning air
mingling with the first fallen leaves

and white blooming autumn clematis clambering
over ledges of stone and fences in decline

resettling the summers meadow into colors
of buff and tan, then flames of sumac spark

stringent sun fades and softened the harsh tones
of late summer drought into early autumn dusk

when the grand harvest moon, oh so far away
graces the sky with her golden beauty

and the crickets sharpen their bows
first song of fall

An Ordinary Day

Posted on by
1

last summers evening 3

The west wind furrows the clouds,
mirroring the newly shorn hayfields
terraced in the colors of late summer,
golden and green.

Driving along the ridge, I enter
a Thomas Hart Benton painting
of undulating landscape
and sky. Fluidity of wind
cloud and leaf mural-ed
across the ridge.

May pops bloom wrapped
in vines of autumn clematis
their exotic flowers mingle
along the rocky path. Doe
and her fawn, still in dappled spots,
graze the ditchbanks
along side wild turkeys
with their celtic blue faces.

A day, late in August,
when the earth turns toward
autumn. A day as ordinary
as any other in its vast
extraordinary way, just
an ordinary day.