Crusty.

I have a few things on my agenda this morning. Aside from carrying on with my Dante project and making some headway on a new, possibly book length, piece. There are the usual tasks of keeping up with the topics I write about (so as to minimize the chances of looking like a boob in print.) answering emails, sending out queries, figuring out which queries to send and all of the good stuff that while kind of boring by themselves result in the interesting occurrences that make life a good place to be.

No-deadline days are hard to describe. There's nothing I absolutely must accomplish today but there are many, probably dozens, of things I need to accomplish by the end of this month, this week, this year. What this means to me is that I have to find my own way through, there's no boss to tell me how those things need to be worked out. So what begins by feeling like a free day can, if I'm not careful, end up being a lost day with all the stresses and accumulating pressures that go along with it.

Still, it's a sunny day and I'm at my desk. That makes me happy.

On the other hand, the city seems to have discovered my neighbourhood and its very slow process of subtle gentrification. I think most of us who live here have been quietly enjoying all the interesting little shops that have sprung up, the block-party style events, the feeling of neighbourliness that comes with not being the richest people in town but being the most culturally diverse, hands down. As a community we seem to value our proximity to the river, the market, chinatown, downtown, we place a premium on things being both economical and worth the effort and expense of acquiring them. You can buy hand made soap and Indian food, organic produce, chrome hubcaps, vintage clothes, upscale sex toys and holistic pet products in this neighbourhood, you can buy lots of art but you can't buy designer clothes but you can buy an ipad (or order one for when they get to Canada) so it's changing and I suppose it would be foolish to think we could keep the secret forever.

They're replacing the plain cement sidewalks in my neighbourhood with wide, brick walkways and little, Charlie-Brown style treelets that will, no doubt, grow along with rents, property values and taxes. There's lots of new construction on the western edge of the neighbourhood. Most of it involves tearing down the little clapboard houses that really were nothing to look at and replacing them with "tasteful" "custom designed" homes, most of which are coated in a thick layer of taupe plaster or stone facing.

They match the new sidewalks pretty well.

Problem is, for me anyway, I like to work at home and the jackhammers are going from 7 until 6 every day now. I tell myself they can't go on forever, and they can't but while they were annoying a week ago, still blocks from my apartment, they are now pretty maddening as they approach my back lane. Thank goodness for earphones and a decent computer.

That's my whine for the day - I really came here to talk about pie.

My friend Shannon decided to make a pie yesterday. Nearly as soon as she announced this on Facebook, comments on the difficulty of piecrust began to trickle in. Everybody, it seems, thinks making a crust is hard.

As the daughter of a chef, I've been cooking since I could reach the counter. With the exception of a few years in late adolescence when I declared I could not and therefore would not cook - I've made most of my own meals and cooked for friends and family pretty much non-stop from the age of 15.

My parents divorced when I was 13 so my father's influence shifted somewhat. Anyway, I think my sister and I may have discouraged my father from cooking for us long before that. Starting when I was around six, when he would prepare absolutely perfect poached eggs for both of us and we would reject them.

These eggs were no simple task. To poach them he would fill a stainless saute pan halfway with water and white vinegar, he would then watch until the bottom of the pan was perfectly furred with a layer of medium sized bubbles. Before these bubbles lifted off the surface, he would take two or maybe three eggs and slide them, one at a time, from a china saucer into the water bath. Then the flame would be turned down to maintain the perfect temperature. He would make gentle waves in the water with a slotted spoon, washing the hot water over the tops of the eggs to ensure an even temperature and appearance.

During this time, the toast would be in the oven becoming perfectly crisp and a dark golden color - not brown, gold. The toast would come out seconds before the eggs were ready and be covered with a slathering of butter that would melt, perfectly. Then the eggs would come out of the pan, one at a time and he would slide them, carefully onto a perfectly laundered, fluffy white towel where he would dry them gently one at a time.

Once the water had been dried from the eggs, the eggs would go - one each onto their pieces of buttered toast. Which would then be plated and served to us with a flourish. At which point we would both say, "ick. do I have to eat the yolk?" and roll our eyes.

All of this took place quickly enough that those eggs on our plates were invariably piping hot, the yolks were always just cooked to a thickish yet still runny consistency and the whites never had a single raw spot or water blob.

Every once in a while I can reproduce those eggs and when I do, I think about that kind of effort and artistry and I am a little glad that I got to learn these skills young.

Poached eggs are difficult. Pastry is easy.

Pastry does not require perfect timing. It can be stopped and repaired at almost any stage, it follows strict and basic scientific principles and people's standards for pastry are so lamentably low that even if you blow it completely, they'll still eat it and smack their lips in pleasure if you give them some.

However, because everybody tells everybody that pastry is hard to do, pastry becomes hard to do.

I felt terrible for Shannon who struggled, cheerfully, with this last night and I wished she still lived a few doors down the street, I would have gone there and showed her not to believe the stories she hears about pastry.

As it is, I've noticed most of the recipes written out there seem to go along with the assumption that pastry is hard.

So, for my friend and anyone else like her. Here are some basic things I've learned about pastry-making:

What it takes:

A pie crust requires flour and fat (and sometimes a tiny bit of moisture) . Anything else you add because you like it. You need two cups of flour, any kind. As a general rule, if you have enough flour in your bowl to cover the bottom and sides of your pie pan to a depth of about 1/4 inch - you've got enough. You can eyeball it. It's ok.

What you do:

Wash your hands. Take off your rings. Clear a big space on the counter - you are going to make a mess.

Put the flour in a bowl, add any salt, sugar, cinnamon or any other dry dusty stuff that adds whatever taste or substance you like to the mixture then. Mix it around. Use your hands. Be stingy with the amounts of extra stuff you add - it's the crust, it's not the star of your culinary show.

Measure out a generous 2/3 cup of fat. Shortening, Lard or butter, even margarine, anything works as long as it's fat. Pastry chefs swear by lard. I use half butter, half whatever else is on hand but it has to be a pure fat - cream cheese will not work and I don't think those heart-smart spreads would work either but I could be wrong. Your goal here is to mix the fat into the flour and make pockets of fat (NOT STEAM) so that the layers of flour will be forced apart and yet remain dry and be discouraged when they want to form strings of gluten. Gluten is the enemy of a good crust.

Cut the fat into the flour. You can use two knives to do this or you can use a pastry cutter. I've gone through a few pastry cutters, I prefer the solid blade type to the wire style. I don't use either anymore. I start with two knives and finish with my fingers. If you decide to use one with wires you will have to leave your fat out to soften a bit, refrigerated fat will bend the wires and make your pastry making life hard.

Everybody talks about how everything has to be cold, cold cold. This is not true. I once watched in horror as a friend of mine mixed soft butter into flour and then used tap water to make her pastry. She patted it out by hand straight into the pan and yet it was delicious. One of the best crusts I've had. That taught me that all of these rules should be used as guidelines, in moderation.

That said, cold is better than warm. Anything colder than liquid will work. (and in fact, some people don't even follow that rule - there's a recipe at the end of this post, that proves it.)

People who write cookbooks will bullshit you endlessly about this. So will your Grandmother, your Mom, your Auntie - fact is, those of us who get it sometimes don't mind that others don't. This seems to be particularly true of people who write cookbooks. (It's not because we don't love you, really. We just want you to love us more.)

So mix the fat into the flour, using your hands at the end if you like. Mix until you have little fat balls coated in flour all through the mixture. Your little fat balls should be the size of the freshwater pearl beads you see in craft necklaces or maybe those tiny little frozen peas you can buy, or orzo - slightly smaller than a kernel of corn, bigger than rice, get it? And relax, you can use your hands to do this, it's ok. Just break up the big pieces of fat into the flour.

Now you add the water. The reason you're doing this is because it is hard to get the stuff to stick together and still stretch over your pan with just fat and flour. You're giving up some ground to gluten here in order to get the stuff to go where you want it to go and stay there.

Mix just enough water into your bowl to get it all to stick together. That's it. That's all.

Punch it around a little and knead it for a few seconds - not long, this is making the gluten you'll use to make the dough do what you want. Less is more.

Now, leave it alone for a second and take out your flour again. Scatter flour all over your clean counter.

Return to your dough.

Slap it on to the counter and roll it out in as round a sheet as you can manage.

Put the sheet, whole, into the pie pan and press it in gently to make sure everything will be covered. Now cut around the edge of the pan. Leave a wide margin cause crust shrinks when it cooks.

Press it down, cover the whole pan. Does not matter if it is sloppy or neat. Prick all over - hundreds of times, with a fork. Prick prick, prick - you are the Norman Bates of forkland here - it should be dotted all over. Do not tear. If you make a mistake and it tears, patch it with the trimmings - not the end of the world. It's food, you don't have to live in it. (save the scraps and bake them later with cinnamon and sugar or jam or whatever - people will love them.)

Here's where the cookbook writers and recipe freaks will get you again. All that junk about dry beans and parchment and pie weights? Ridiculous. Do you think your Nanna had any of that stuff? No, she did not. Do you think the guy who makes the truck stop pies does any of that frou frou stuff? No, he does not. And yet these are the two people who will make you the best pies you will eat in your whole life. Be like them; ignore the chi-chi, frilly, affected instructions you read anywhere. They are pulling your leg.

Now - assuming you've preheated the oven, you can bung the thing in there for five or ten to prebake. If you haven't preheated the oven and/or you don't have your filling ready, you can put it in the fridge until you're ready to prebake it.

Once it is light gold, it's ready to come out and be filled. No, you don't have to do it right away. The idea is just to get the thing half-baked so there's less chance of it being soggy and unpalatable later. If you're doing a top crust, that's the part the crust lovers will remember anyway so doing this is just your way of being an especially considerate cook.

Pie filling is way harder than pie crust. Don't let anybody fool you into thinking it isn't.

Once you have this down, (say you've done it three or four times), you can start experimenting. I put cheese in crusts I use for quiche sometimes. Made a lovely tomato tart by using butter and well aged cheddar cheese for my fats (exclusively) and then filling the shell with fresh tomatoes, basil and thinly sliced spanish onion from the farmers' market. Wouldn't do this every day, it's terribly fattening but it was unspeakably yummy. And you can use it as a main dish or as a side dish to take the place of rice or potatoes or pasta if you're having company for dinner.

You can add sweet stuff for sweet pies, herbs for savoury pies - don't be scared. It is all easy.

Easy as pie.

Here are some recipes.


http://whatscookingamerica.net/piecrst.htm


Now I have to get to work.