Comments on Kitchen and Residential Design: Making your own pie crusts is as easy as, well, pi...

People get all excited about baking cakes, but the...

2009-11-30T23:06:40.672-05:00

People get all excited about baking cakes, but they bore me. I think pies are art. The baker pours more of his or her heart into pies. Or so I say at any rate.

Gluten-free baking is a mystery to me. What holds everything together without gluten as a binder?

yay for making pie. I made eight pies (six were p...

2009-11-30T20:52:25.413-05:00

yay for making pie. I made eight pies (six were pumpkin) and two cobblers over Thanksgiving weekend. My mother makes a fabulous pie crust, mine is merely good, I use a food processor to introduce the butter into the dry mixture. But "homemade merely good" is extremely tasty, so much better than anything you can get premade at a store or bakery.

A couple of the pies were gluten-free (and not from scratch; using Bob's biscuit mix) and I blind baked the crusts of those. I've never baked gluten free before.

I have never blind baked for apple pie before, but...

2009-11-25T18:57:00.696-05:00

I have never blind baked for apple pie before, but I was wondering if perhaps I should.

My butter-flavored shortening processor-pulsed pie crust is in my fridge now. I'm going to bake the pie but have to wait till tomorrow to taste the full pie. I'm going to make a little individual ramekin pie though for tonight. :)

Sometimes I'll blind bake crusts (dried beans ...

2009-11-25T15:19:28.477-05:00

Sometimes I'll blind bake crusts (dried beans makes them stay put) but with apple pies I never do. I like the texture they get on the bottoms when everything bakes together at the same time.

I have bread dough rising as I type this and am about to go tackle my pie crusts. Boy I love Thanksgiving!

YOU MAKE YOUR OWN PUFF PASTRY??? Do you blind bak...

2009-11-25T13:19:18.369-05:00

YOU MAKE YOUR OWN PUFF PASTRY???

Do you blind bake your crusts for double crust pies or quiches?

This season I am giving my first go at butter flavored shortening.

I like to fleetingly pulse my chilled cubes of fat with my flour in the food processor. It's not as good as a homemade pie crust from a true expert baker, but for me, I seem to do better at achieving an even "coarse meal" size with that, than a fork or pastry cutter.

Hurray, I'm not alone in my crusade. I agree, ...

2009-11-25T10:51:47.021-05:00

Hurray, I'm not alone in my crusade. I agree, it doesn't take a whole lot of time, just some planning and prioritizing. My scratch cooking thing started with bread years ago and it took off from there. I'm convinced that it's a worldview, a philosophy I've adopted and it reverberates out from my kitchen, that's for sure.

I agree with your emphasis on making meals from in...

2009-11-25T10:39:41.768-05:00

I agree with your emphasis on making meals from ingredients you assemble from scratch. My crusade against boxed cereals started a few years ago when I came across my mother's granola recipe. Whole grains, nuts, and you can vary the ingredients to prevent boredom. Every two weeks it takes about 30 minutes to make enough cereal to last at least 2 weeks.

I never think of Luxembourg and frozen pizza in th...

2009-11-25T08:54:56.311-05:00

I never think of Luxembourg and frozen pizza in the same sentence I have to admit. Is that kind of pre-made stuff popular there? I always think of frozen convenience foods as a US thing. I've tried frozen puff pastry before and it always seems limp and bland to me. I make it from scratch for the exercise of making it from scratch, I have yet to perfect it. Puff pastry's in a whole other league, that's for sure.

I'm a pie maker too and never buy the short cr...

2009-11-25T08:19:06.821-05:00

I'm a pie maker too and never buy the short crust type. But I have to confees that I do buy the puff pastry and never get compliments for that. In fact my daughter peels it off and gives it to one of her siblings.
I tried a frozen pizza the other day (only because it was free) and it was awful!