mostly pie and books
I'm baking an apple pie at the moment, based on a recipe from my recently acquired copy of Paul Hollywood's Pies and Puds. I adapted the crust slightly by adding a teaspoon of cider vinegar--a trick I got from one of Rose Levy Beranbaum's books and which makes a very flaky crust--omitted the cheese layer Hollywood adds to the filling, and added a little bit of nutmeg. Just nutmeg, no cinnamon or anything, because I wanted a pie I could eat with cheese even though I didn't want cheese actually in the pie. I also got ambitious and decorated it with pastry leaves and grapes. The leaves look fantastic, far beyond the slight effort it took to make them. (Use a round cutter to cut out pastry circles from the dough scraps, then use the same cutter to cut from each edge to the center, making two leaves. Score to make the vein pattern.) It just now occurs to me that I could have made pastry apples instead of grapes, but oh well. It looks pretty and makes me feel almost like a person who can bake.
Pies and Puds is full of recipes I want to attempt, such as bacon and egg pie; cheese, potato, and onion pie; "Hollywood's Temptation" (a riff on the Swedish dish Janssen's temptation) which features potatoes and smoked salmon in filo pastry; choux buns with mushrooms; lemon and lavender posset with lavender biscuits; and so on. I'm especially drawn to something called Bedfordshire Clangers, which are individual pastry rolls with a ham filling at one end and an apple and pear filling at the other, so you've got your main course and dessert all in one neat package. There's also a game pie recipe, which falls in nicely with my tentative Christmas dinner plans.
Some of the recipes call for suet and some for lard. I'm perfectly happy to use the ingredients, but they are not so easy to find in the US. I've discovered that leaf lard, the best quality lard, can be bought at Whole Foods if you're willing to pay $20 for a 14 oz jar. So far I am not. Ordinary cheap lard is everywhere, but not only is it poor quality, it's hydrogenated, and while having seen many food panics come and go I am not particularly on the OMG Deadly Trans Fats bandwagon, I'd still just as soon not when you can have better lard without hydrogenation.
Leaf lard can also be found online, but not much cheaper, and by the time you've paid the shipping it's probably more. Suet is even harder to find offline and has the same price problem. It's ridiculous, because I'm sure there's a lot of perfectly good pork fat and beef fat being discarded by the US meat industry. Or, in the case of suet, being turned into bird food.
Clearly I need to just buy some pork fat and render it myself, which will solve the lard problem if not the suet one. But as soon as I began to think of doing this, naturally every store I went to no longer seemed to have pork fat for sale. (Incidentally, I'm still fuming over the reaction of a meat-counter worker at Whole Foods when I asked if they had lard. "Oh no," she said, aghast. "We don't sell anything like that in our stores." Not only was this rude (unintentionally, I think, but still rude) it wasn't even true, because it's Whole Foods that has the $20 jars of lard on its shelves. I was just hoping to get it cheaper at the meat counter.)
Besides my new longing for lard and suet, I'm also coveting more baking equipment than I have the budget or the storage space for. Cookie sheets that are small enough to fit in my oven (i.e. no more than 13 inches a side) but also heavy and well made! Cake pans in all the sizes! Tube pans! (Because not only are they pretty, but apparently they're better than regular round cake pans for high-altitude baking.) Those nice pastry cutters they use on the Bake Off that have one plain side and one fluted side! Cake decorating equipment!
I blame the Bake Off. (Update: the pie is now out of the oven. It is brown and pretty and smells of apples.) Speaking of which, I just watched the last Masterclass of the season, and I've decided that the best thing about these is not what you learn, though that's nice, but watching Paul and Mary joke around and tease each other and generally be BFFs who argue over whether Paul should really have to chop a kilo of dried fruit for Mary's cake. I might have to modify my Yuletide request to emphasize how much I want Paul & Mary banter.
In life outside of baking, work is . . . work. This week was a bit of a nightmare as we received a ridiculous amount (pretty much a truckload) of Christmas stuff that we can't display yet but have no room to store, also because corporate haven't authorized extra hours yet even though there's a lot of extra work to do. I was so tired yesterday that I went to bed at about 5:30 pm--this is slightly less ridiculous when you consider that I get up M-F at 4:00 am--and slept until almost 8:00 am. I was awake for about an hour at around midnight, but still.
There's not much else going on. I re-read my four preferred Jane Austen novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion, in that order) again, and loved them as I always do, and then wished again that there were m/m slash AUs where Darcy courts Bingley and Mr. Knightley adjusts his snobbery enough to realize that he loves his steward, William Larkins. M/m isn't really possible for S&S* or Persuasion, but if there was an AU where Elinor doesn't marry Edward and Colonel Brandon doesn't marry Marianne and the two of them are unconventionally best pals for life, I'd be happy.
*Brandon/Willoughby could be attempted, but I hate Willoughby more with every re-read. Colonel Brandon is too good for him by far.
I've also read Philip Purser-Hallard's The Pendragon Protocol, which is sort of like Kingsman with fantasy elements and more intelligent politics, and enjoyed it enormously. Need to get the second in the series.
We had a book sale at work and I got copies of several of Mark Hodder's novels for cheap. The Burton & Swinburne series ought to be perfect for me: Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) and Algernon Swinburne investigate weird crimes in a steampunk alternate Britain. Alas, the one I'm reading is not well written at all--how is it even possible to make Burton and Swinburne boring?--and I'm having to slog my way through. I keep hoping it'll get better.
ETA: Some pie has been eaten. The filling is delicious. I used four Golden Delicious apples and three Honeycrisp, and the combination is gorgeous. The nutmeg added just the right aroma without overwhelming the apples--much better than cinnamon.
Unfortunately the juiciness of the apples rather overwhelmed the pastry. The edges were lovely and crisp, but the bottom crust especially got soggy. I should have cut the apples a bit thicker and also used more starch in the filling. The recipe didn't call for any, but I used a bit of tapioca starch. Not enough, apparently. Also, to compensate for the high altitude I baked the pie at a slightly lower temperature than called for, so that the crust wouldn't brown before the apples cooked. This may have been a mistake. Using Honeycrisp may also have been part of the problem--it's a very juicy apple--but the taste is too good to want to change.
Definitely not a bad pie, but there's still room for improvement.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.
Pies and Puds is full of recipes I want to attempt, such as bacon and egg pie; cheese, potato, and onion pie; "Hollywood's Temptation" (a riff on the Swedish dish Janssen's temptation) which features potatoes and smoked salmon in filo pastry; choux buns with mushrooms; lemon and lavender posset with lavender biscuits; and so on. I'm especially drawn to something called Bedfordshire Clangers, which are individual pastry rolls with a ham filling at one end and an apple and pear filling at the other, so you've got your main course and dessert all in one neat package. There's also a game pie recipe, which falls in nicely with my tentative Christmas dinner plans.
Some of the recipes call for suet and some for lard. I'm perfectly happy to use the ingredients, but they are not so easy to find in the US. I've discovered that leaf lard, the best quality lard, can be bought at Whole Foods if you're willing to pay $20 for a 14 oz jar. So far I am not. Ordinary cheap lard is everywhere, but not only is it poor quality, it's hydrogenated, and while having seen many food panics come and go I am not particularly on the OMG Deadly Trans Fats bandwagon, I'd still just as soon not when you can have better lard without hydrogenation.
Leaf lard can also be found online, but not much cheaper, and by the time you've paid the shipping it's probably more. Suet is even harder to find offline and has the same price problem. It's ridiculous, because I'm sure there's a lot of perfectly good pork fat and beef fat being discarded by the US meat industry. Or, in the case of suet, being turned into bird food.
Clearly I need to just buy some pork fat and render it myself, which will solve the lard problem if not the suet one. But as soon as I began to think of doing this, naturally every store I went to no longer seemed to have pork fat for sale. (Incidentally, I'm still fuming over the reaction of a meat-counter worker at Whole Foods when I asked if they had lard. "Oh no," she said, aghast. "We don't sell anything like that in our stores." Not only was this rude (unintentionally, I think, but still rude) it wasn't even true, because it's Whole Foods that has the $20 jars of lard on its shelves. I was just hoping to get it cheaper at the meat counter.)
Besides my new longing for lard and suet, I'm also coveting more baking equipment than I have the budget or the storage space for. Cookie sheets that are small enough to fit in my oven (i.e. no more than 13 inches a side) but also heavy and well made! Cake pans in all the sizes! Tube pans! (Because not only are they pretty, but apparently they're better than regular round cake pans for high-altitude baking.) Those nice pastry cutters they use on the Bake Off that have one plain side and one fluted side! Cake decorating equipment!
I blame the Bake Off. (Update: the pie is now out of the oven. It is brown and pretty and smells of apples.) Speaking of which, I just watched the last Masterclass of the season, and I've decided that the best thing about these is not what you learn, though that's nice, but watching Paul and Mary joke around and tease each other and generally be BFFs who argue over whether Paul should really have to chop a kilo of dried fruit for Mary's cake. I might have to modify my Yuletide request to emphasize how much I want Paul & Mary banter.
In life outside of baking, work is . . . work. This week was a bit of a nightmare as we received a ridiculous amount (pretty much a truckload) of Christmas stuff that we can't display yet but have no room to store, also because corporate haven't authorized extra hours yet even though there's a lot of extra work to do. I was so tired yesterday that I went to bed at about 5:30 pm--this is slightly less ridiculous when you consider that I get up M-F at 4:00 am--and slept until almost 8:00 am. I was awake for about an hour at around midnight, but still.
There's not much else going on. I re-read my four preferred Jane Austen novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion, in that order) again, and loved them as I always do, and then wished again that there were m/m slash AUs where Darcy courts Bingley and Mr. Knightley adjusts his snobbery enough to realize that he loves his steward, William Larkins. M/m isn't really possible for S&S* or Persuasion, but if there was an AU where Elinor doesn't marry Edward and Colonel Brandon doesn't marry Marianne and the two of them are unconventionally best pals for life, I'd be happy.
*Brandon/Willoughby could be attempted, but I hate Willoughby more with every re-read. Colonel Brandon is too good for him by far.
I've also read Philip Purser-Hallard's The Pendragon Protocol, which is sort of like Kingsman with fantasy elements and more intelligent politics, and enjoyed it enormously. Need to get the second in the series.
We had a book sale at work and I got copies of several of Mark Hodder's novels for cheap. The Burton & Swinburne series ought to be perfect for me: Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) and Algernon Swinburne investigate weird crimes in a steampunk alternate Britain. Alas, the one I'm reading is not well written at all--how is it even possible to make Burton and Swinburne boring?--and I'm having to slog my way through. I keep hoping it'll get better.
ETA: Some pie has been eaten. The filling is delicious. I used four Golden Delicious apples and three Honeycrisp, and the combination is gorgeous. The nutmeg added just the right aroma without overwhelming the apples--much better than cinnamon.
Unfortunately the juiciness of the apples rather overwhelmed the pastry. The edges were lovely and crisp, but the bottom crust especially got soggy. I should have cut the apples a bit thicker and also used more starch in the filling. The recipe didn't call for any, but I used a bit of tapioca starch. Not enough, apparently. Also, to compensate for the high altitude I baked the pie at a slightly lower temperature than called for, so that the crust wouldn't brown before the apples cooked. This may have been a mistake. Using Honeycrisp may also have been part of the problem--it's a very juicy apple--but the taste is too good to want to change.
Definitely not a bad pie, but there's still room for improvement.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.