I didn't do this, but it rules: "Cook Your Comics"

http://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/category/lifestyle/cook-your-comics/

Hey, look who's app allows links!!! That's right, we're super-fancy now.

And speaking of super-something, this link provides helpful recipes and tips for cooking an elaborate Thanksgiving meal that's inspired by superhero comics.

Disclosure: I don't know this writer socially, but Rachel Stevens is my friend and she does write for Women Write About Comics. I don't actually think that this constitutes a conflict of interest or anything, though. I'm mostly just using this disclaimer as an opportunity to brag about knowing Rachel, because she's awesome, and you should read her stuff, because she knows a lot about Transformers comic books.

You should also read the stuff that I actually linked to here, too.

Paneer cheese is no replacement for whipped cream, when served with pie

In good news, I still have a little pie left, and it's still delicious.

Everything else is bad news.

I think I've figured out the rules of my own vegetarianism?

Okay, so for right now, this is what I have:

1. I go 100% vegetarian about 95% of the time. That means pectin candy instead of gelatin candy, puddings from scratch instead of gelatin-based pudding from a box, and also grilled cheese sandwiches or whatever, instead of steak.

2. That was not a confusing use of percentages.

3. I am currently trying to cut down my dairy consumption, and I do my best within my budget to buy locally produced dairy, and lower-cruelty eggs. So, caged-free eggs at the least, and eggs from folks' pet chickens at best.

4. Death comes to all life, and minimal-cruelty slaughtering practices matter. Even when I'm not buying meat, I still want to encourage the best possible practices be applied when animals are harvested for their meat. I also come from a rural background, and I respect well-run, minimal-cruelty farms very much.

5. I will sometimes break my vegetarian prohibition of the consumption of meat, for culturally important occasions, although I still prefer to fill up on meatless dishes. 

For example, one of my cousins is from Oaxaca, Mexico, and he works in a restaurant, and he prepared chicken mole tamales for the family and friends on Día de los Muertos this year, and you'd better believe that while I filled up on the homemade black bean soup that he similarly prepared from scratch (he is a badass!), I also ate a tamale, because of course I did. I will also, a couple of times a year, eat a burger from Dick's Drive-In, because they take good care of their employees, and I consider that to also be a higher-good thing. This is higher-good kinda stuff, right here.

6. While I try to stay within close proximity to vegetarian sources of protein, if my blood sugar is dropping, I might eat meat if a meat eater offers some of their food to me.

7. I also taste meat dishes when I'm cooking for omnivores, which is especially important because from what I've observed, my husband reports feeling uncomfortable if he goes meatless for longer than about 18 hours at a time. 

8. I don't really know what to think about eating fish. I definitely have a strong taboo against eating cephalopods, because they're too much like cats. (Google that.) I'm originally from a very small island in the Pacific, just a little bit off of the coast of Washington State, way north of Seattle. So I respect fishermen. But right now I don't fish, because killing fish wigs me out. And I haven't eaten fish for a while, because I just haven't wanted to. I still eat mollosks when my family prepares them. My dad has an excellent technique for grilling oysters, and they're too much of a tradition to take lightly.

9. Tofu is genuinely fun, according to me. I also grew up eating tofu, prepared in ways adapted from the recipes of the American South, so it's a sentimental comfort food for me.

10. I don't have a prohibition against eating foods that were prepared alongside meat. For example, I love it when my husband makes breaded and fried cubes of extra-firm tofu for me while he's making breaded, fried chicken for himself. It's REALLY GOOD.

PIE DISCOVERY! 5 OUT OF 5!!!!!!

I FIGURED IT THE FUCK OUT!!!!!!! This, my fifth post about the same fucking pie, is the conclusion of the story about this pie. I think.

The pie was undercooked. I gave it another hour or do at 425F, and the peaches are now squishy instead of crunchy, and the whole thing looks WAY more like a pie than it did the first time that I took it out of the oven.

It also expanded and got way bigger, so eating two undercooked slices was a pretty crucial step in the process, because otherwise the thing would have kept boiling over into a soufflé-like science fair syrup volcano. Next time, I'll use 2lbs of peaches instead of the 3lbs advised by the recipe.

I feel a little sick. I'm not gonna lie about that. Eating a hearty sample of undercooked peach pie made with underripe peach slices is not the road to health, as far as I reckon. But I did it. I SURVIVED.

And this is the goddamned pie I deserve, for taking this hero's journey:

Thankee mightily, for joinin' me on this adventure, Reader. It's been quite a ride! A ride with lots of naps happening in the middle. My kind of ride.

FOUR PARTER!!!!! HOW BIG CAN I MAKE THIS STORY?!?!?

The crust was also undercooked, except for the pretty past if the top crust. So I think that the problem is one of the pie just being undercooked.

Gonna try to put it back in the oven. I will keep eating pie to test how done it is.

This may become a five or six-part writing extravaganza! 

Last post felt incomplete? Pie feels incomplete.

So, doing a meandering three-parter about not really thinking it through, during a pie experience, is exactly what I want for my food writing today. I have recently discovered my writing formula, and I've decided to experiment with it a little.

As for PIES, though...I don't think that I will ever cook "partially thawed" peaches straight into a pie like that again. Next time, I'm going to try cooking those fuckers into gooey pie filling in a pot on the stovetop before even putting them into the pie crust. These peaches are even a little crunchy.

I'm eating my second slice of pie, mind you. I may even eat a third, in a few hours. Who knows? So it's not BAD-bad. It's just...the pie did not reach its full potential.

Also, I am eating it off of a plate with raw flour on it, which just HAS to be a bad idea. *guitar solo*

The pie is just okay.

It's photogenic, though! Like, godDAMN, that's a photogenic pie.

But the peaches aren't mushy, they're still firm, and some of them occasionally have little bits of peach pit stuck to them.

The apple pie from earlier this week was one that I just kinda winged, but I had way more control over the fruit, and I feel like it came out better.

This pie isn't BAD...but I feel like starting with fresh, definitely ripe peaches that I cut carefully myself would end up producing a way, WAY better pie than this.

I still plan to eat a lot of it, though.

Even better pie today

So I made a pie a few days ago. Then I didn't want to bother with pie crust, so I made an attempted crumble with frozen cherries. I didn't use thickening starch, though, because I wanted to see what would happen. The result was some weird oatmeal cookies fused to the top of a cherry soup. Good flavor, but not what it was supposed to be.

(THE CRUMBLE WAS ALMOST PERFECT!!!!! But I didn't use any thickening starch. Oh man.)

()

I decided that today, I'd use a recipe as faithfully as I could, instead of just winging it again. I haven't really done the recipe thing before. At least not this week.

This is the pie recipe that I used today:

http://www.pillsbury.com/recipes/peach-pie/e09fbe68-5291-4642-aa1e-4686fcf17c4e

...Regular readers should remember that I have some technical whatevers with making hyperlinks in my app. But a simple copy-paste will let you follow the link. Sorry for the inconvenience! 

Except that really, should I be sorry for that inconvenience? 

This is not a blog about doing a good job. There are lots of food blogs about appearing competent. THIS, on the other hand, is a blog about surviving mild failure, and about the occasional moments of success that still happen when the ratio of fail to non-fail is heavily skewed towards the "fail" side. Yes! Embrace the process! Embrace and cherish your mortality! Life finds a way...INTO YOUR FACE!!!!!

So.

This is the pie that I just took out of the oven. I wrote "PiE" on it. How cute! I find it cute. I'm my own audience. My audience thinks it's cute, because I am that audience. I am 100% of that audience, and that means that this pie received a 100% approval eating from its target audience.

YEAH, I WIN AT THIS ACTIVITY!!!!!!!!!!

I can't yet speak to the quality of the frozen peaches that I used, but as far as I know, they're the most wild wildcard in it...assuming that the cooking time was still correct, even though the peaches were only kinda-sorta thawed when it went into the oven...

Okay, this is too much stress. I'm going to take a nap.

I made other food too! Lasagna, also beans. I didn't make cottage cheese, though.

Here is a recipe that I was loosely inspired by:

http://www.marthastewart.com/338978/rich-artichoke-and-mushroom-lasagna

I forgot about most of the seasonings, and I used sautéed zucchini and fresh spinach instead of artichoke hearts, but I made the fuck out of the béchamel sauce. Like, that shit turned out GREAT. The rest? The rest of the lasagna needs salt, so it is pictured with salt.

The beans are cannellini beans, roasted with homemade garlic butter. I made the garlic butter by literally just putting two whole cloves of garlic in a mini blender with butter and olive oil. It was so spicy that when a clump dropped onto the floor and my cat licked it, he made an "eech" sound and sprinted away like he was frightened.

The cottage cheese is just cottage cheese, but it's 4% milkfat and Darigold, which is a local brand. So it's pretty fucking good.

Pie. I ate the pie.

It tastes like cheap store bought pie crust and baked apples. So...I like it. I am eating while I type. 

The sea salt flakes on the top of the crust (I stood up and looked at the kitchen) were definitely a good idea. I just realized that I COMPLETELY FORGOT ABOUT THE EXISTANCE OF CINNAMON! But who cares?

Featuring, our sweet couch and my husband's cook feet:

Pie? Maybe.

Okay, so it baked at 425F for about 50 mins, and the internet says that it has to cool for two hours before I can eat it. So I have no data to reliably measure the quality of the pie with yet. It looks a little crappy and sad, but I'm still very impatient and I want to eat the whole thing RIGHT NOW. But I cannot, because I still have over an hour to wait. Dammit.

Those freckles look like a rash.

Pie? We'll see.

I just made an apple pie. It is in the oven. I tried something I haven't done before, with the filling, by layering thin slices of apple in a series of flat spirals. I then topped the apples with flour, brown sugar, and butter. 

I forgot to add salt before putting on the top crust, so I sprinkled some chunky(?) salt, like...uh...those medium-sized salt crystal flakes? You have to know what I mean. It's not, like, regular table salt. It's fancy table salt. It came in a little tube jar with, like, a spice grinder built in. Anyway.

I sprinkled those salt pieces and some raw sugar crystals on the top of the pie crust, which also had some room-temperature butter smeared across it, because why not?

The pie is now in the oven. I don't know how it will turn out, but I DO know that I like sitting down again. So I have that going for me.