Social Security

More baking with pears

~ MaryG ~ 26 Comments

What are your favorite side-hustle ideas?

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Maybe…baking? Or blogging? Or painting watercolors? Or singing?

Nah.

Nobody would pay me money for any of my hobbies, which is fine. I’m no longer an earner. I’ve accepted that. According to my last Social Security Statement, I had reportable income every year from 1980 to 2023. That’s 43 years of paid work. According to financial planners, my husband and I have saved and invested enough money to enjoy a comfortable retirement into our 90s, barring runaway inflation or a global financial meltdown—both of which seem highly likely in our current kakistocracy. I’m not really sure I believe the financial planners, but I’m going with it. However, we’re really trying to keep our spending down these days, which brings me back to baking at home.

We tried yet another recipe with our homegrown Bosc pears: America Test Kitchen’s Pear Crisp. I did that thing where I found the recipe on ATK but I didn’t want to pay for a subscription so I signed-up for a 7-day free trial, screenshotted the recipe, then cancelled the subscription before I got charged. Is that wrong?

AMERICA’S TEST KITCHEN PEAR CRISP

Ingredients

• ¾ cup coarsely chopped nuts (3 ounces/85 grams) I’m allergic to nuts so I substituted 3/4 cup of oatmeal (it was a genius substitution, if I do say so myself 😉)

• ½ cup unbleached all-purpose flour (2½ ounces/71 grams)

• ¼ cup packed light brown sugar (1¾ ounces/50 grams)

• 4 tablespoons granulated sugar

• ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

• ⅛ teaspoon ground nutmeg

• Table salt

• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

• 1 teaspoon cornstarch

• 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice from 1 lemon

• 3 pounds (1361 grams) ripe but firm pears (6-7 medium)

Instructions

1. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 425 degrees. Process nuts, flour, brown sugar, 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and 1/8 teaspoon salt in food processor until nuts are finely chopped, about nine 1-second pulses. Drizzle butter over flour mixture and pulse until mixture resembles crumbly wet sand, about five 1-second pulses, pausing halfway through to scrape down sides and bottom of workbowl. Set aside while preparing fruit.

Because I substituted oatmeal for nuts, there was no need to use a food processor. I used only a fork to make the topping.

2. Whisk remaining 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice, and pinch of salt together in large bowl. Peel pears, then halve and core. Cut each half into 4 wedges and then cut in half crosswise (pieces should be about 1 1/2 inches). Gently toss pears with sugar mixture and transfer to 8-inch-square baking dish.

Not gonna lie, this step was a pain in the neck. My husband bought a tool to scoop out cores of the peeled pears, but forgot he had it, so he did all this work with a paring knife.

3. Sprinkle topping evenly over fruit, breaking up any large chunks. Bake until fruit is bubbling around edges and topping is deep golden brown, 27 to 32 minutes. Cool on wire rack until warm, at least 15 minutes, and serve.

This is the unbaked version. We ended up leaving it in the oven for the full 32 minutes and pears were perfect. Tender and sweet.

VERDICT: Good. 👍 The topping works well with the pears. I had it hot with ice cream for dessert (yum) and also cold for a snack that actually felt relatively “healthy” with all that fruit and oatmeal. It’s not as exciting as the Dutch Pear Pie or Pear Cobbler, but I would make it again.

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A Baking Post (Dutch Pear Pie) featured on Freshly Pressed

Another Baking Post (Pear Cobbler)

Stress Baking (Puff Pastry Apple Strudel)

Fruit Trees

A Jackson (Apple Pie)

Deer me

I feel less safe

~ MaryG ~ 4 Comments

Another airplane accident yesterday, after Trump and Musk fired a bunch of critical FAA employees.

A doctor friend of mine posting this message on Facebook, after depraved anti-vax freak RFK, Jr was confirmed as Secretary of Health & Human Services:

We are so fucked. For my non-medical friends you deserve to know that so many of my physician friends are planning to leave the US, or leave clinical medicine rather than practice medicine with no research, no humanity, no respect for science, and what seems to be a deliberate attempt to make our country less healthy. This person is responsible for the deaths of children, not to mention him being a generally insane creep. Measles outbreak in Texas, TB outbreak in Kansas. Who knows what’s up with bird flu since the CDC is gagged. But sure, let’s “move away” from focusing on infectious disease.

And I don’t trust them with my money either. I downloaded my social security statement yesterday from SSA.Gov, even though I’m not collecting social security yet. Who knows what Musk and his merry band of teenage tech nerds are going to change in our accounts.

I’m not going to argue that there is no waste in the federal government (there definitely is), but I am absolutely certain that this “administration” is not motivated by a desire to protect and serve the American people. They do not care if we are safe and healthy. They are the opposite of public servants. Every single thing they do is a form of self-dealing.

My parents got the best of America

~ MaryG ~ 17 Comments

My parents are part of the so-called Silent Generation. They were born in the 30s, in the decade before the baby boom started. My father is about five years older than my mother so he remembers being a kid during World War 2. He was born to poor Italian immigrants, but thanks to the GI Bill, after serving four pre-Vietnam years in the Air Force, he got to go to college for free. He wisely studied engineering and his life went straight up from there. My mother was born to lower middle class second-generation immigrants of mixed European descent and her parents were able to afford to send her to UMass on their modest incomes. She graduated debt-free and stopped working as a teacher the minute she started “showing” with me and never really had to work after that.

They were able to buy a new house (actually two), raise two daughters, send them to college (in my sister’s case, numerous colleges), travel the world, and enjoy a decades-long comfortable retirement, including 6+ weeks in sunny Florida each winter. Now, as they enter the final season of their lives, they are in remarkably good health and have various good options. They could sell their two-story home (which they purchased for about 30K in the 60s and is now worth 1M+) and move into one of several different high-end assisted living facilities nearby, or move into their one-floor condo, or adapt their two-story house as needed and just stay there. They have many different options.

From the GI Bill to plentiful and affordable new housing, quality public education (including college), Medicare, Social Security, and generous ongoing veterans benefits, America has been great to them.

Now, I’m not complaining (much) because I’ve been lucky too, but things were a bit different for us. My husband and most of my friends incurred tremendous debt to go to college and grad school in the 80s and 90s. We made sacrifices for me to stay at home for a couple of years when my kids were babies, including buying a dilapidated, antique house with a down payment I had to ask my father for in a humiliating conversation.

We worked hard to fix up that tiny old house with the severely slanting floors, lead paint, and leaking fieldstone basement. I got a job, my husband got a second job, and he also put in tons of sweat equity. We were able to roll his student loans into our mortgage. And then, when we decided to try to sell that house in 2004, we got lucky. I found buyers that overpaid significantly for our house. I met a woman on a playground (another young mom) who wanted to buy a house in our town and I told her that ours just happened to be on the market. We hit it off personally and that predisposed her to like my house more than she should have when she and her husband came to see it with a realtor. We ended up making nearly 150% on that house in just nine years. If we had waited three more years to sell it, the subprime mortgage crisis would’ve been underway and we never would’ve done so well. That one lucky sale set us to be able to get most of the things my parents got. We’ve achieved a similar lifestyle to theirs, but without the second home, extravagant travel, and 6+ weeks in Florida each winter.

After we moved to our bigger, newer house, we were super savers and got lucky with some corporate stock from one of my husband’s jobs and were able to give our two kids debt-free college educations. We know this is rare. This is not what most Americans can expect these days.

And as we face very uncertain times ahead, I can only hope that my kids, and their kids, will be able to get most of what we had. We will help them as much as we can, but we have our own retirement to worry about. Who the hell knows what will happen with Social Security and Medicare. We have to be prepared to pay for everything ourselves.

The contrast between what my immigrant grandparents arrived with and what my parents have been able to achieve in this country is staggering. Yes, my parents worked hard and stayed married (divorce is a real wealth killer), but they also happened to be born at a very good point in American history. I think it may turn out that they got the absolute best of America.

Four generations together for the first time yesterday

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La Dolce Vita

The College Experience

Grandparents

My two grandmothers