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.