pameladean | Pies of Doom

It has been one of those days.

My mission, which I had already decided to accept, was to make two vegan pumpkin pies and one mince pie for Thanksgiving. One vegan pie was to stay here for my recluse, and the other one, with the mince pie, was to go to my mother's house, where we are gathering this year.

Pumpkin pies do not have a top crust. Mince pies do. This meant four nine-inch pie crusts. Mercifully, I decided to make them in two batches, because I find it difficult to get everything mixed well enough if I double the two-crust pie recipe. I made the first recipe, using the white whole wheat flour given me by a kindly benefactor not long ago. The crust sopped up twice as much water as the recipe wanted, but between its whole-wheat nature, the dryness of the atmosphere, and the general cussedness of natural ingredients, I didn't worry about it. I rolled out half the dough and put it into its designated pie plate. Since my mother was the one who managed to run a jar of mincemeat to earth and I saw no reason to make her drive over here to deliver it, I am planning to assemble and bake the mince pie while we're eating, or before the turkey goes in the oven. So I rolled out the rest of the dough and then rolled it up in a piece of waxed paper. When I was taking the bowl I'd made the dough in out to the kitchen to wash it out, I snagged a scrap of dough and ate it. It was much wheatier than I'd been led to believe (not by the benefactor) that white whole wheat flour is. David wouldn't like it much, I thought. I'd use those crusts for the pumpkin pies and make a regular white crust for the mince, which is his favorite.

I disentangled the rolled-up crust from its waxed paper, put it into another pie plate and lugged them upstairs. The upstairs oven is much better for baking. Neither kitchen has any work space worth mentioning, and the upstairs has no dining-room table, so I'd made the crusts downstairs and carried them up. I set the timer on the microwave and went to the front of the house to my office. I do this all the time when cooking. However, this time, I did not hear the microwave beep. I went to check the timer at some point, but unfortunately the clock said 3:21, a plausible amount of time to be left, according to my apparently fuddled brain. I was washing some of my dishes when the smoke alarm went off.

The center of one of the crusts wasn't burned, so I can report that the flour made a very nice flaky and slightly nutty crust.

I still felt David wouldn't like it much, so I made a two-crust batch of dough with unbleached white flour, washed and dried the pie plates, rolled out half the dough, put it in, trimmed it and fluted it; then I rolled out the other half, rolled it up again in waxed paper, laid it gently atop the crust in the plate, swaddled the entire affair in plastic wrap to keep out the cat hair, and put it in the cold front hall to keep until tomorrow. At this point my brain had gone to sleep entirely, so I made a second batch of white-flour crust, rolled it out, put it in pie plates, trimmed and fluted it, lugged it upstairs, and put it into the oven, setting the microwave timer again but this time going into my bedroom, directly across the hallway from the kitchen, to await the beeping. The crusts were a little underdone, but I decided to take them out anyway. I pulled the oven shelf out so that I could get at them, and it tilted much more than it's supposed to be able to, sending and both glass pie plates sailing majestically across the opened door of the oven and onto the floor, where they landed with a tremendous bang.

They landed right side up. One crust bounced up out of its plate and then settled back in, unbroken. The other didn't even do that. I picked them up and put them on top of the stove. The plates were not cracked. The crusts were not cracked. I felt less grateful than I might and more as if I'd entered some alternate reality where the laws of physics were not quite right.

All right then. It was time to make the filling. I dug pleasurably through folders of very old recipes, some printed on a pin-fed printer at Digital Equipment Corporation in Marlborough, Massachusetts in the 1980's. I found the recipe for tofu pumpkin pie. It was as I had remembered it, except for one minor detail.

"Pour filling into unbaked pie crust."

I had confused it with vegan French silk pie, which is not baked in the oven. There was no way I was going to make any more pie crusts. I put the tofu and the vanilla in the blender, turned it on High, and mixed up the other ingredients in a saucepan. I heated them gently, but I lost my nerve. I was worried I'd burn the filling. I tasted it -- after all, you make lots of vegan pies without cooking the tofu. But as I'd suspected, the sugar was grainy and the spices rather raw-tasting. All right, I thought, those crusts are underdone. When the tofu was blended I mixed it in with the other stuff and tasted it again. Still grainy

I lugged the bowl of filling upstairs, tipped it into the waiting crusts, turned the oven on to 350, and set about the annoying task of covering the edges of the crust with aluminum foil. This never works very well for me; subsequent bits of foil tend to push earlier ones off the edge, and the whole assemblage tends to fall off when I put the plate in the oven. However, I got them in the oven with the edges of the crusts covered, at the price of dipping the edges of the foil into the filling, and gave them half an hour. At the end of that time, the bottoms of the crusts weren't burned, so I gave them another fifteen minutes, and then another ten, thus giving the filling all but five minutes of its mandated baking time. I lost my nerve again and took them out at that point. They look like pumpkin pies.

I'll chill them overnight and hope for the best. Even if the filling is goopy, it tastes right, because I licked some of it off the aluminum foil where it had stuck.

I wonder what's going to happen tomorrow when I try to pour a jar of mincemeat into a pie crust and put another one on top.

Happy Thanksgiving, you who celebrate it tomorrow.

Pamela

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casacorona.livejournal.com

You make baking disaster so very entertaining! But sincere sympathy.

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Pies of Doom

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