Sunday, October 30, 2011

Snowtober, Weekend Baking

Snow in October

So, we totally had an actual snowstorm yesterday--yes, SNOW. In October!! And it was a serious storm too, with pretty significant accumulation (although it changed over to rain in the middle of the night). Just look at it! It was coming down like crazy, and since I am an idiot, I decided to go out and go to the supermarket anyway. I looked like Frosty the Snowman by the time I got home.

More snow

This is what it looked like when I left the supermarket. Gosh! Well, once I was back indoors, I didn't really feel like going back out again so I dug in for some serious cooking and baking (oh okay, and there was some knitting too, but at least I watched some classic horror movies!).

Sunday lunch

The first craving that cold weather gives me is for anything stewed or braised. I got 2 small daikons in last week's CSA share (yup, that's still going strong!) and wanted to use them in a braise of some kind--in the end I went with a chunk of pork belly and some tofu puffs. I should also have added some hard-boiled eggs, but I forgot! Oh well. This cooks slowly over several hours, but you don't have to pay too much attention to it, leaving you free to work on other things. It's perfect over rice (just one or two small cubes of pork belly at a time!), and the only other thing you need is a big plate of greens.

Before

And this is what I did with all that free time while I was waiting for my daikon and pork belly to be done. As you might have guessed, I am still drowning under a sea of apples and pears and I figured it was time to break out this old favorite; if you're looking for a twist on the classic pie and are a crust lover, I highly recommend you give this a try!

More crust less filling apple pie

Isn't it beautiful? The crust is a dream to work with and bakes up really flaky, with a gorgeous flavor and texture. And this took care of 3.5 apples, yay! (I'll be bringing this one in to share with my coworkers to get us through a long meeting.)

Baked!

You don't even need a pie pan to bake this, just a cookie sheet (although it should be a rimmed one, unless you want a giant mess in your oven...). And of course, you can get as crazy or as simple with the steam vents as you want; I finally used a decorative pie crust cutter my friend gave me a couple of years ago. I can't wait to eat this tomorrow!

Hope you are all having nice Sundays :)

4 comments:

kath said...

You waited a whole day to eat this?? Crazy woman! It's apple pie perfection:)

tofugirl said...

I know!! But I was planning to bring it to work and I didn't want to show up with a pie with a slice out of it :) Anyway I finally got to eat some in the afternoon, so it's all good :)

Kaimono888 said...

That's a lovely pie ^.~ Quite easy to bake right?

tofugirl said...

Yah, I think it's pretty easy! You can make the dough with a mixer or in the food processor--very quick. And the key to having flaky dough is to be lazy and leave chunks of butter :D