By Popular Request (Heather)

The Art of Pie.

Pie should not be difficult to make. I think it's hard for me because I stubbornly refuse to use recipes.

However, I used the apple pie recipe in my Better Homes and Gardens standard cookbook, and I followed it so closely (well, for me, anyway). What happened?

It burned.

Black.

I blame the oven. It was overenthusiastic. It had nothing to do with the fact that I put it in to bake and promptly went back to bed.

The tragedy of the burning of the apple pie was that I didn't exactly follow the crust recipe. I made a crumble for the top, involving hazelnuts ground up in the food processor I tend to forget about. It should have been divine. It would have been divine, had it not burned.

So I did what any self-respecting food artiste would do. I took it to the company dinner anyway, and then guilted my friends into eating it, burnt crust and all.

That was a dry run, the week before actual Thanksgiving day. The real pie was yet to be created.

In my own defense, my trusty BH&G cookbook had no recipes for berry pie. I call that gross neglect in covering the basic food groups, but that is immaterial.

I went online, because that's what we milliennials do when we want to cook. I found dozens of raspberry pie recipes. So I glanced through enough of them to assume I had got the hang of it, then I went to the kitchen and started shelling hazelnuts again. This time it wasn't as time consuming because I had a nut cracker that actually believed in cracking nuts. And because Gingey helped (Yay, Gingey!).

The root of the problem was that I assumed that when you see cornstarch as an ingredient, you can just estimate how much you need, and I didn't put nearly enough. Not only that, but I forgot to follow the recipe I invented for the crumble top, and I put excessive amounts of butter.

I'd like to say we had raspberry pie for Thanksgiving, but it was more like raspberry soup. However, the point is that it tasted good. That, after all, is essential to the art of baking a pie.

Proof that it tasted good? Gingey ate at least four "slices".

Incidentally, I bought some more raspberries yesterday, and I still have an entire bag of hazelnuts left. For anyone who has the patience to come over and help me crack them, there will be pie with your name on it. And it will be a work of art.

On Blogging

It's hard to blog (is it strange to you how many verbs are seeping into polite conversation?) without an Internet connection, so I'm just going to make a list of the topics I would have posted about in the past few months had I shelled out the funds for it.

Mistborn, book review of an obsession-inducing trilogy

The Art of Pie

Turkey Day. Yuck. Haven't we figured out it's about the mashed potatoes?

Anyone Can Draw (?)

I don't agree that All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. But I probably did learn it when I was five.

You did not give birth to that dog, so why do you refer to yourself as its "mommy"? The limitations of the English language

Expound if you will.