egg pie without white sauce

I learned to make a basic white sauce when I was 8 or 9. For many years, it was a very useful thing to know. A second-order effect of not eating dairy products is that I no longer know how to make a white sauce. I tried replacing the butter with non-dairy margarine (which is astonishingly rare--most margarine seems to have some dairy in it. Why do people eat margarine in the first place?) and using soymilk, and wondering why I bothered. With olive oil and mushroom stock, it tastes like something, but it doesn't thicken anything like a white sauce. With olive oil and chicken stock, it thickens gelatinously...which is different.

There is a recipe in _The Enchanted Broccoli Forest_ that has been catching my eye for weeks. It's called "Deviled Egg Pie," and it's based on a mashed potato crust. I like the idea of pies that don't use real piecrust, because I don't actually like real piecrust (that flaky pastry thing with shortening.) So I mashed 2 potatoes with minced onion and oil and pepper, pressed it into a pan and baked it. Then boiled eggs, not hard-boiled, just boiled enough to peel and slice. The recipe called for making a thick white sauce with flour and butter and milk, horseradish and mustard and dill, and pouring it over the sliced eggs in the crust. Then bake again to set. So I wanted my stand-in white sauce to thicken, as well as taste good. As Cattitude suggested, I used V8 instead of soymilk to replace the milk. Because I was uncertain about it thickening, I increased the flour from 3 tablespoons to 4, for what was supposed to be a cup of liquid. It ended up thickening like crazy. I had to add more liquid to get a sauce liquid enough to pour, using almost 2 cups of juice and more horseradish and mustard to taste. I think it's because V8 has so much vegetable pulp (it's mostly tomato juice and carrot juice.) The larger volume of sauce turned out to be the right amount for the 9" pie plate I was using, and the pie set beautifully. It tasted good, and the cold leftovers were good for 3 days.

I think the sauce, and the pie, are worth making again. But as a white sauce, it probably counts as a failure, as it came out bright reddish-orange.

There once was a man from Wabash

There once was a man from Wabash,
But the brain eater got him when he was young,
So the world will never know what his limerick might have been.

Friday night at Boskone, I was talking to a friendly group in the hallway about _The Princess Bride_, and how the frame story changes the tone of the adventure story. Someone (who might have been Kate Nepveu, but I don't remember) mentioned reading it from the library as a child, without any frame story, and asking if it had ever been published that way. We talked a bit about how the story existed with the original frame of Billy Goldman and his father who could barely read English, reading him "the good bits" in 1941, and in the movie frame with a sick boy in the 1980s and his grandfather reading to him. We talked about skipping boring introductions and prefaces to jump right to the story...and maybe a kid who was very focused on the adventure story itself could have failed to notice that the first 30 pages of _The Princess Bride_ are setting up an interesting and relevent frame story, not just introducing the author and the context in which he wrote the book.

Then last week I read Dan Simmons' _Ilium_. ( Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles. )