epic fail

It's a good thing I started off on a positive note with the olive scallion appetizer when Risa, Travis, Dan and Jeanine came over for dinner.  Everyone enjoyed it.  Then we moved on to wedge salads with blue cheese vinaigrette because I'm obsessed with wedge salads and want to eat them constantly.  No complaints there, so we moved on to hot bowls of corn chowder to fill us up.  Fantastic :)

For dessert I decided to try my hand at pie-making.  Real pie making that involved crust that wasn't just pressed into the pan or purchased from the refrigerator section at the grocery store.  People have been telling me left and right that pie, specifically the crust, is no big deal.  Easy.

Oh, boy, do I beg to differ!



Looks easy enough, right?  I'm a reasonably intelligent person who has put in a significant number of hours in the kitchen.  Jill talked me through it multiple times.  All I had to do was follow her directions.  No problem.

Right?



So where did it start to go wrong?  Thinking back, I'm pretty sure it was when I decided to stray ever so slightly away from Jill's instructions regarding the size of butter (rather than margarine) chunks in my dough.  You see, I started thinking about Joy the Baker's method and how her dough has big shaggy bits of butter in it.  And I also remembered an episode of America's Test Kitchen where they demonstrated this fraisage method which produced similar shaggy bits of butter in the dough.  Shaggy butter = flaky final product.

Riiiiiiight.



This is where I am guilty of one of my biggest kitchen pet peeves.  I am easily irritated by people who take a recipe and tweak it before ever trying it as it was written FIRST.  You see this on recipe websites and blogs all the time.  Then these tweakers complain about how the recipe sucks because it didn't turn out properly for them.  Grr!  Makes me want to gnash my teeth!

So, I learned my lesson the hard way.  Rather than committing to a recipe, I (in my infinite wisdom) decided to pick and choose from a variety of sources.  This could have been ok with something I'm already comfortable making--but not pie crust!  Pie crust and I are not friends.  Why did I have to make things even more difficult between us??



The crust smelled fantastic as it was baking, but once I removed the foil and pie weights... Let's just say I was bummed :(  Then it only got worse as I made the fillings.  The chocolate pudding filling was excellent and turned out exactly as expected.  But my banana cream filling that I've been making for years was a lumpy flop.  Too much milk.  Not enough pudding.

The pies looked ok enough.  They actually tasted yummy.  The crust, however, was tough.  So tough that you couldn't cut through it with the side of your fork.  Wes ate all of the chocolate off the crust, then picked up the crust and ate it like a tortilla chip :(  And Risa asked me if the crust was made of corn flakes :(

FAIL.

Please learn from my mistakes.  Pick a recipe and stick with it.  I'm sure pie crust isn't as hopeless as I make it out to be.