And while my hand has hovered over the “Like” I haven’t been able to click. It’s not endorsement of the piece as agreement — I’d “Recommend” it, but liking takes it to another level.

What people might not expect is that I agree with several points Heller makes. Let’s face it; there’s a lot of crappy pie out there. Whether it’s made by someone who is inexperienced or just doesn’t care or commercially cranked out and over processed, pie is often bad. It’s tricky, and most people aren’t up to the patience required and practice needed to learn to make a good from-scratch, tender, flaky crust.

Since Heller focuses on fruit pies, that’s part of the issue as well. Think about it; millions of shortcut artists are using canned fillings with pre-made, store-bought crusts. That’s NOT PIE! For a good fruit pie — and I would bet that there’s a tiny percentage of Americans who have had a really good homemade fruit pie and far fewer who can make one — the fruit must (and it seems ridiculous to me to have to write this) be FRESH. If it’s locally-sourced, even better.

My friend Brian “The Food Geek” Geiger once made a pie from apples picked that morning. That apple pie is legendary and led to Brian’s current status as the best pie maker in Charlottesville, Va. (feel free to argue/challenge this) and the head judge of the Charlottesville Pie Fest.

After crusts that are out of balance or not pre-baked, par-baked or otherwise properly prepared to receive their fillings, it’s the fillings themselves that cause the downfall of many a pie. Heller complains about runny pies bleeding cooked fruit. It is a carefully measured mixture that results in the non-gloppy, sweet and tart filling that holds together without being gluey. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Heller, perhaps, has never experienced a really good slice of pie. (Dear Nathan, please join us for Pie Fest or let me know if you’re ever in Charlottesville.)

Besides characterizing pie as a completely disgusting concoction, Heller criticizes pie’s claim as being American. It’s not. Neither is pizza, as we know it, Italian. Or the Chinese food we bring home in takeout boxes remotely Asian. The history of pie is much older than our country, naturally, and the evolution has taken the path of so many “Americanized” items — we’ve ruined it in the effort to mass-produce, speed up and create a product made for travel. Yuck.

The best pie, the pie that, in my book counts as pie, was made in a home, with love, with the best, freshest, regionally and seasonally-appropriate ingredients. The best pie takes a lot of time and not a little effort. It is made by those who have made hundreds of pies, some good, some bad. It goes from ingredients to oven to plate in the shortest possible amount of time. In the best pie, you can taste the sun that ripened the fruit, the spices and flavorings pop and the crust reminds you of the grandmother you wish you’d had; the one that knew how to make a really excellent pie.

The secret to a prize-winning pie? Patience.

“I really took my time,” he said.

I am not a patient person but have learned during this Life of Pie, that if I don’t take my time, the pie will not be as good. Pie has taught me to slow down; to carefully consider, prepare and plan.  I take it step by step, cut no corners and the more I do so, the better the results.

2. Making something with your hands is good for your soul. If you’re angry or stressed about something, it’s almost impossible to hang on to that feeling when you’re working shortening into flour for a crust. It’s impossible to have skyrocketing blood pressure as you inhale the scent of a bubbling hot pie, fresh from the oven. Peeling apples, blanching peaches or pitting cherries offers time for reflection and provides satisfaction as prepared fruit emerges.

3. Giving bears riches. I give away a lot of pie. I’ve given pie to friends, clients, strangers, neighbors, client prospects and nonprofit organizations. Every time I give away a pie, and I swear this is true, I’m repaid tenfold. I never expect it but I either gain a loyal friend, a new client, a trusted partner, a fan . . . and I am wealthy with relationships.

4. If you’re going to do something, do it up right. I started out on a mission to teach myself to make good pie. That grew into an obsession to be the best . . .  and to have everyone associate me with good pie. I grew passionate about this hobby of mine and when you’re passionate about something, I think you should go for it with everything you’ve got. (Go ahead and Google “Marijean Jaggers Pie” and see what’s happened.)

5. Be not afraid. A friend of mine always tells me I’m brave when I show up for a party with a pie from a recipe I’ve never tried before. I like to try new recipes and as I put a recipe together, I can tell if it’s going to be good. If it’s not, we might get a laugh out of it. I am not afraid to flop; I just try again.

Have you had a hobby teach you something about life?

My next-door-neighbor is about to have her third child — I will make sure that Coconut Girl knows about Whitney and her blog — and remember to still be a helper past the early weeks of a new baby next door.

Coconut girl song video

Food Within Reach

The Other Baby Bump

Sit Mommy

a.m. & p.m.

Here’s the video from the featured blog and here’s my final Blog of the Week segment on CBS-19.

Farewell TV land!

For about a year now, I’ve been providing a community service — not to work off any convictions, just out of the goodness of my little blogger heart. Many of you are aware of my weekly appearance on WCAV CBS-19 where I’ve provided the extremely popular Blog of the Week segment.

Once I got over my shock that there WOULD NOT be a private, fully furnished trailer with my name on the door and that there WOULD NOT be a hair and makeup team, I settled into a weekly routine that went something like this:

Tuesday, 5pm – stop working, sprint upstairs and put on TV-worthy clothes. Slather on more makeup. Fret over hair. Add more powder. Change top again. 5:45pm, get in car, drive to station. 6:30pm, start paying attention to what’s going on behind the door at The Newsplex. 6:40ish – enter studio, take seat, and provide LIVE commentary on a featured local blog.  6:55pm, call home to see what they want for dinner. 7:15pm, pick up dinner. 8pm, arrive home, watch video clip of segment. Fret over hair. Start thinking about featured blogger for the next week.

I really loved every minute of it. I loved being recognized by people all over town. I loved that my far-flung family and friends could watch the video clips no matter where they are. I loved the chance to improve my live TV broadcast skills and to have the opportunity to get better with each week. But mainly, I loved that the segment gave a well-deserved focus on local bloggers, many of whom are friends or became friends through the Blog of the Week.

Past tense, eh?

Yes. I’m hanging up my Blog of the Week TV hat — I will provide one more week of Blog of the Week coverage and then the segment will live on with two very worthy replacements, Jason Hull of OpenSource Connections and Amy Eastlack of SuzySaid Cville. I want to thank everyone who was featured in this segment, who watched it on TV or online and who helped promote the segment via their blogs, Facebook and Twitter. It’s been a great ride.

All the videos are view-able on the Newsplex Web site and if you’re really nostalgic, you can read all the Blog of the Week posts on STLWorkingMom.

I will miss the many friends I’ve made at The Newsplex; Dan Schutte, Sara Ross, Travis Koshko, Brantley Ussery, Jim Hanchett, Brad Ramsey, John Rogers, Mark Tenia, that guy that always opens the door for me, Cheryn Stone, Jennifer Black , Tim Free, Tom La and Liz Palka just to name a few (gosh, I hope I haven’t left anyone out). Beth Duffy was my friend even before the TV segment, and I enjoyed having the chance to see her every week.

I’m taking the step back from TV to get some time back to focus on My Gift of a Year and to better accommodate my full-time day job at Standing Partnership, which has added a lot of travel into my schedule for 2010. (Also? I’m running out of fabulous TV outfits and do not want to do any repeats).

Also? It’s time to let someone else sweat under the lights of live, weekly, local television.  I’ve had my 15 minutes. Now if Oprah’s people call, that will be another story entirely.

And now, here’s some link love for all of the Blog of the Week’s I covered in 2009 and a few from 2010.

Dream House Blog http://www.dreamhouseblog.com/

www.cvillenews.com and www.cvilleblogs.com

The Children’s Book Garden http://thebookgarden.wordpress.com/

Life in Sugar Hollow http://lifeinsugarhollow.blogspot.com/

Vale of Evening Fog http://valeofeveningfog.blogspot.com/

Dried Figs and Wooden Spools http://driedfigsandwoodenspools.blogspot.com/

The blog of Encyclopedia Virginia http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/

NailGun Media http://www.nailgunmedia.com/blog/

Bella Eats http://bellaeats.com/

Amy’s Yard http://www.amysyard.com/

Polly Vous Francais http://pollyvousfrancais.blogspot.com/

Suzy Said Charlottesville http://suzysaid.com/charlottesville

Small and Chic in C’ville http://www.smallchic.blogspot.com/

Run Molly Run! http://runmollyrun.wordpress.com/

The 2.0 Life (which is now Digitizd) http://www.digitizd.com/

Edible C’ville http://ediblecville.blogspot.com/

Crown of Corn http://crownofcorn.blogspot.com/

A Life Less Ordinary http://elenadoodle.blogspot.com/

A Day’s Outing http://adaysouting.com/

Charlottesville Sports and Social Club blog http://www.cvillesocial.com/

Sara’s Era http://www.sarasera.com/

C’ville Entremom http://cvilleentremom.com/

Charlottesville Albemarle SPCA blog http://www.caspca.org/

Family Hack http://www.familyhack.com/

Late Bloomer Bride http://latebloomerbride.com/

Traveling with Baby http://travelingwithbaby.wordpress.com/

Locallectual http://blog.locallectual.com/

C’ville Words http://cvillewords.com/

The United States of Jamerica http://usjamerica.wordpress.com/

Sweet Pea Photoblog http://www.sweet-pea-photoblog.com/

Jen on the Edge http://jenontheedge.com/

Shawn & Gwenn. A Boy. A Girl. A Virus.  http://www.shawnandgwenn.com/category/blog/

Real Central VA http://www.realcentralva.com/

Living United http://livingunited.typepad.com/

The Food Geek http://thefoodgeek.com/

Gillian Grimm proved a lovely subject for this week’s featured blog. Check out the segment’s teaser piece.

I asked Gillian to tell us a little bit about her blog:

This week’s Blog of the Week is the blog that accompanies the project. Got that? The blog is this: http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/ an entirely separate publication from the encyclopedia itself.

I’m fascinated by the project in and of itself, but what I wish to celebrate this week is the all-important blog that helps serve several critical purposes in support of the Encyclopedia Virginia project.

1. The blog helps to market the project — a regularly updated blog is the single, best way to enhance your Web site’s search engine optimization. If you have a Web presence at all, it serves you well to have a blog to share your story: search engines like blogs and without one, your audience may not find your content.

2. Transparency is a social media-era buzzword, but an appreciated and ever-rising way of doing business and serving one’s community. It’s sharing the good alongside the bad — and addressing the bad to make it right is the new, respected way of providing good customer service. The blog (any blog, really) allows the project managers to share the good feedback along with the negative, and to address the negative feedback in a public way, sometimes generating some thought provoking conversation.

3.  Cross-promotion – and Brendan Wolfe illustrates this more fully below but in the case of any blog that accompanies a larger Web presence, it’s a way to link, link, link to other related news and information about your organization. See my post about repurposing content – this is a good example of that practice.

4. Building Community and yes, I intentionally left that C capitalized — this is the future, folks — we’ve all started talking about our “audiences” as communities and the new PR job will be a “Community Manager” starting now. Yes, this blog, and all the others I’ve featured on Blog of the Week have Communities and that is a group of people who share a common interest — even if that common interest is so narrow as to attract a very small number of people. As an example, I blogged once upon a time about a significant and rare medical issue we went through with my daughter. Once in a blue moon another parent searches online and we, those one in a million parents are brought together through a common experience and feel better for it and THAT, my friends, is why building community is important.

In summary, I want to applaud the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities for being a forward-thinking organization — and the people involved in the Encyclopedia Virginia project for “getting it” and realizing the value of their blog and keeping it going for the students, educators, history buffs and blog fans out there who they serve every day with their online presence. Way to go, VFH!

Excerpts from my e-mail interview with Brendan Wolfe, associate editor for the project:

HISTORY OF ENCYCLOPEDIA VIRGINIA

Encyclopedia Virginia is a multi-year project under the auspices of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. In 2001, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded VFH a $50,000 grant to study the feasibility of creating a comprehensive online resource focused on the culture and heritage of Virginia. From this planning process, VFH learned it was well suited to bring together the agencies, resources, content, and technology to make EV a reality. The Virginia General Assembly and organizations such as the Virginia Cultural Network, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Library of Virginia have endorsed the project, which is made possible in part by VFH’s amazing ability to foster collaboration among institutions and individuals.

In 2004-2005, VFH garnered $400,000 in seed money to support the planning and early implementation of the project through an appropriation from the Virginia General Assembly and a gift from a friend. Since that time, the General Assembly has increased its financial support for the project and, in 2007, the Dominion Foundation awarded a two-year $100,000 gift to bolster EV’s progress.

We have a staff of five, including a managing editor (Matthew Gibson), associate editor (Brendan Wolfe), assistant editor (Tori Talbot), programmer (Peter Hedlund), and media editor (Donna Lucey). We are also overseen by editorial and technical advisory boards.

We create the site by sections — so far, we’ve nearly completed all of literature, twentieth-century history, and the American Civil War. And we are beginning work on pre-colonial and colonial Virginia history, as well as folklife.

IDEA BEHIND THE BLOG

Marketing — It’s a venue for us to explain what we’re doing with the encyclopedia and point people to particular entries. Here’s an example:

http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/2009/06/02/spotlight-george-b-mcclellan/

Transparency — The blog can be used to illuminate some of our processes. We use the blog to print any feedback we receive about the encyclopedia — both good and bad, and where appropriate, explain the thinking behind some of the decisions that we make. Here’s an example:

http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/2009/06/24/waiting-for-lee/

Cross-Promotion — It’s a means of reminding readers that we are plugged into other things going on at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and indeed the entire Virginia humanities community. We’ve done a lot of posts on the VFH radio show BackStory with the American History Guys.
We’ve also posted video from the VFH Folklife Showcase and a remembrance of Mike Seeger by VFH Folklife director Jon Lohman. Here are some examples:

http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/2009/05/21/the-new-masters/

http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/2009/08/10/remembering-mike-seeger/

http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/2009/06/16/the-great-mans-dirty-linen-contd/

Building Community — The blog can create a community of readers who can then become a community of encyclopedia users. Beyond that, though, the blog can be good as a community of ideas and discussion, both in terms of the encyclopedia, but also in terms of Virginia history and culture.
See the last link above for an example of that kind of discussion.
Anything we’ve run related to Sally Hemings has generated (relatively speaking, of course!) a firestorm for us.

VISITOR BASE FOR SITE/BLOG

EV is still in its infancy in terms of the amount of content we have up.
Most of our visitors will come from people using search engines to find text or images. (For instance, someone looking for information on Massive Resistance or Edgar Allan Poe are likely to stumble upon our
site.) Those “searchers” are already coming from all over the country and the world — a testament to how rich Virginia’s history and culture are.

We hope that a large part of our audience will eventually be students and educators. (To some extent, they already are. Our numbers drop off noticeably when the school year ends.) No resource quite like ours exists in Virginia, and we think that teachers, especially, will find EV really useful when preparing lessons on Virginia history. We’ve spent a lot of time talking to teachers and have some interesting ideas about how to tweak the site to make it more useful for them.

WHO THE BLOG ATTRACTS

The blog is eclectic, sometimes a little brainy, sometimes a little confrontational. We hope that it attracts anyone interested in Virginia history and culture — everyone who might want to use the encyclopedia and more.

I threw a bunch of hair stylist jargon around at the salon, highlights! NO, lowlights! Dimension! Natural! Shiny! Essentially I said . . . and my stylist finished for me, “You want to hide the gray.”

So we began a process that has my head still reeking of chemicals and me feeling guilty for being vain. But would a vain person have snapped this photo and tweeted it, sharing my head full of foils with the world? No, I think not.

To our dismay (mine, and my stylist’s) my hair came out a bit, well, highlightier than we’d intended. I didn’t freak out. She said she could fix it, and I trust her, so I sat back and snapped another shot as we embarked on The Hairdo, Take 2. By the way, that’s not a giant cataract, just the flash bouncing off my left eye. Also? Yes, this is what I look like without any makeup. Hot, huh?

Not to leave you hanging, I’m sharing the final result – very subtle gray-masking highlights – just what I wanted. And look Jason! Wrinkles! (Sigh.)

My interview with Andrea Hubbell, author of Bella Eats, appears below:

When did you begin Bella Eats?

I’ve learned so much since starting Bella Eats – about photography, writing, cooking and baking.  I have no formal training in any of these areas and have certainly had my share of disasters over the last year, but have found that there is no better way to learn than to practice.  The food blog community is strong and supportive and I’ve “met” some really amazing people through our blogs.  People who are happy to answer questions about camera technology or the amount of tapioca you should use in a fruit pie filling.  There is an amazing amount of knowledge out there to tap into, and I’m excited to be providing a fraction of it to my readers.

Video of interview with Andrea Hubbell.

Turns out I’m far too self-critical to choose one of these great headshots (good photography, mediocre subject) by the fabulous Angie Brement. Vote for your favorite here.

For more Francophile blogs, check out Polly’s blogroll on http://pollyvousfrancais.blogspot.com