Grabbing you by the arm and asking "OMG have you read..."
I have not one, but two book recommendations for you this week. Usually I would have saved one for a subsequent newsletter, but both of these books are the kind where I keep asking all of my friends "HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK???" and for books like that you have to tell the world about them as soon as possible.
The first book I can't stop talking about is Bad Blood. This is the book about Theranos, the Silicon Valley blood testing start up that was valued at billions of dollars but it turned out that its blood testing device NEVER WORKED FROM THE BEGINNING. It's also about Elizabeth Holmes, sociopath who started a blood testing company when she's afraid of needles, and was so insistent on using only a single drop of blood that she faked results rather than let her engineers use more blood. There's lots of lying and cheating, hidden rooms, family disputes, secret relationships, and a satisfying ending (though the most satisfying would be if she got arrested, which has not yet happened). Everything about this book is WILD and I tore through it and then dropped my copy off at a friend's house soon afterward so she could read it and we could talk about it.
The second book is There There, which I'm so proud of Past Jasmine for giving to her dad for Father's Day before she'd even read it, because hopefully at some point he'll read it and we can talk about it. This book is the interrelated stories of many people, all Native American, all from or living in Oakland, and how their heritage and their home affect who they are and how their lives have gone. It's one of those books when after you finish reading it, you want to immediately reread it, in order to pick up on all of the things you missed the first time. It's also one of the only books I've ever read that has gotten Oakland right; it felt steeped in this place, the good and bad things about it, and it made me think a lot about how much I love this city, and how I mourn for it, all at the same time. All of the people in this book felt so real to me, even though it was a large cast of characters, and I can't wait to read it again.
I realized this week that I have yet to make a pie this summer, and I need to remedy that asap. I may make this pie, which I made a few years ago on a whim for myself, and ate a slice every day for a week. That was an excellent week. I found it on Smitten Kitchen and made some changes, and she'd found it on Martha Stewart and made some changes, and I'm sure each pie variety was fantastic. It was originally with peaches, but I tend to replace nectarines for peaches in most recipes, because they're similar and I like nectarines better. As a reminder, my favorite pie crust recipe is in this old newsletter, but you can use purchased pie crust for this, I won't judge you!
Nectarine and Creme Fraiche Pie
1/2 recipe the above pie dough (or your favorite pie dough, or your favorite purchased pie dough)
Streusel:
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
4-6 tablespoons flour
1/4 cup (1/2 stick/4 tablespoons) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
Filling:
1 1/2 pounds ripe yellow nectarines or peaches (4 to 5 medium) pitted and cut into six pieces each
2 to 4 tablespoons granulated sugar (depending on how sweet your fruit is)
pinch of salt
5 tablespoons creme fraiche
Roll out the pie dough and fit it into a pie plate and secure and crimp the edges. Prick the bottom of the dough all over with a fork, and transfer to the freezer for 30 minutes, or the fridge for a few hours.
Streusel: stir all of the dry ingredients together, starting with only four tablespoons of the flour. Add the cold butter, and combine with your fingertips until it's all coarse crumbs, adding more flour as necessary. Put in the fridge while you do everything else.
Par-bake: Preheat the oven to 350. Tightly cover your pie crust with aluminum foil. Okay here is where I tell you a par-baking secret that I may have already told you all about and forgotten. This I saw in an article by Stella Parks, who wrote the cookbook BraveTart -- use sugar as your pie weights!!! I failed at par-baking literally every time I ever did it until I used her trick. It works much better than beans or whatever else they tell you to try, and you can just pour the sugar back into a canister afterwards and use it for whatever you use sugar for. Here's the whole article about how to par-bake; the sugar tip is the last one, and the one that changed my pie baking life.
Bake for thirty minutes, the foil and weights in place the whole time (see linked article for why), and remove to a rack to cool. Turn the oven up to 375 F.
Filling: Sprinkle the fruit with sugar and salt and let sit for ten minutes. Spread two tablespoons of creme fraiche in the bottom of the pie shell, sprinkle with a third of the streusel, and place the fruit inside. Dot the rest of the creme fraiche on the fruit, and sprinkle with the rest of the streusel.
Bake the pie at 375 for 50 minutes, until it's bubbling and the streusel is a golden brown. Let cool before serving, and store any leftovers in the fridge. Enjoy!
Before I forget! Goodreads is doing a giveaway for advance copies of The Proposal, go forth and enter; you have until August 15th to enter! To those of you who won my giveaway for The Proposal, you should have gotten your books by now, thank you all for entering!
Have a great weekend!
Jasmine
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