Susan Carton's recipe book (Jason Schumer)

This week on SSW Radio, we spoke with a home baker, heard stories from the Englewood Speaks series, and considered connections between natural disasters and the sins of our ancestors

Susan Carton really doesn’t like to lose. In 2012, the first year of the South Side Pie Challenge, she was sure she’d win. She didn’t, although she was told her pie crust was the best. For five years, Carton continued to enter pies, always alluding a ribbon. “There’s something about a pie that’s a real accomplishment,” Carton told South Side Weekly’s Ellen Hao and Erisa Apantaku. “To get all the elements right is sort of a fun challenge.” This year, Carton’s plain and simple pecan pie got all the elements just right; she brought home a first place ribbon in the nut pie category. In an interview at the beginning of this week’s South Side Weekly Radio episode, Carton explains how she adapted a Julia Child recipe to make her award-winner flakey crust.

To close out the show, we shared two stories from Englewood Speaks: Things I Learned While I Was Teaching. Englewood Speaks is a series of storytelling events held at Kusanya Cafe. Clarence Hogan (aka Sonny Speaks) hosts the series and explains how it got started in response to a round table discussion about gentrification. Realizing that they may not be able to stop gentrification, Hogan and others decided to leave their mark by sharing their stories. “When people look back on this community,” Hogan said at Kusanya Cafe at the beginning of the event, “it will tell a story of what it meant to live in Englewood at a certain time and a certain place.” Things I Learned While I Was Teaching was full of stories by educators, both in the traditional classroom sense and educators within the community. The two stories we shared this week were from Hogan and Tiffany Watkins.

Between, we brought you a throwback edition of the Weekly Read, in which she relates Dick Gregory’s uncanny feeling about hurricanes and the linkage between natural disasters and the wrongdoings of ancestors.

SSW Radio is the Weekly’s radio hour, featuring stories and interviews from the people of the South Side of Chicago. SSW Radio airs Tuesday afternoons from 3pm-4pm on WHPK 88.5 FM.

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