Blog Request Two: The Saturated Fats Strike Back

Hey, looky what we have here! Another cooking project request! That's two now, in two months. At this rate I'll soon be overtaking Ina Garten except instead of providing "expertise" or "helpful tips" I pretty much have "spare time and the willingness to take pictures of things."

So. Lauren wants me to make pie crust. Sure, it lacks the exotic nonsensical fried-ness of the last suggestion, but I think it compensates for it by intimidating me more than anything that doesn't possibly involve covering up a crime scene.

This lovely bowl of butter is to make up for showing you my bathtub laundry yesterday.

The first step was deciding what type of pie crust to attempt. I ended up going with an all-butter recipe adapted from Salt and Fat and Simply Recipes. I'm not going to lie, I'm still suffering some after-effects from WHF week, one of which is to be irresistably drawn to "all-butter" anything.



I tried to follow both sets of advice as nearly as I could, considering that it mostly consists of EVERYTHING MUST BE COMPLETELY ICE COLD INCLUDING YOUR DEMEANOR, JUST IN CASE and I live in Central Texas and it is August and my ice-maker is broken.

I tried to be as aloof with it as possible.

I don't know. It was kind of a mess. I added the water I was supposed to, but the dough was still super crumbly and at that point I was terrified to touch it at all for fear of overworking it or melting all the precious colder-than-a-Hitchcock-blonde butter. I managed to sternly will it into something resembling a sheet of dough, and using about four spatulas I wrestled it into the pie pan. At that point I realized that all the "trim the edges, crimp the pieces together" stuff was not going to apply to me, as I was fumbling to have "edges" at all.

This was not your failure, Smashy. It was mine.

So, now, with what shall we fill this majestic homemade pie dough? With thousands of pie recipes at my disposal, it took a while, but I finally decided that the blueberry pie linked to Simply Recipes's crust page sounded good. It's summertime! Let's be seasonal. Seasonal and decadent and a million miles away from WHF! Wait...what the...um, can you guys check that link for me? In that first paragraph, am I hallucinating? I did hallucinate a monkey yesterday.

I think the heat may be getting to me.

More wrestling with the top crust.

Craftsmanship.

But hey, what do you know? It came out of the oven looking like a pie!





It also tasted like pie. The question is, did it taste like completely awesome pie that was worth the effort? Well, Dan repeatedly used the word "fine." And when I asked if he could tell it wasn't store bought, he said "Nope!" in a way that I believe was meant to be encouraging. So I think my final verdict is: don't try to make pie crust when it is 107 degrees out. Cobbler is also very delicious. So is ice cream.

In the afternoon, Anna made me feel bad about how little I've been exercising by spontaneously breaking out in some baby yoga.









We celebrated Robert and family's last night in town with dinner at Hula Hut. I swear, you guys, I am not seeking out the queso. It is somehow finding me.

I had a cold noodle salad:



Dan was obviously feeling pretty adventurous, opting for a beer and a burger.



Given the choice between being loud and horrible in a restaurant and making me look like a liar for saying she's loud and horrible in restaurants, Anna chose the latter. I'll take it.