ay back in November I finally staked my claim on a corner of the internet by registering and hosting a website under my name. I had stalled for almost a full year, thinking there was too much I would want to research before pinning down a registrar/host. Turns out that was the easy part (once I realised I didn't need a slew of dedicated servers in the former Soviet Bloc).
After choosing DreamHost at the recommendation of a friend and a popular website (Lifehacker, who recently re-affirmed DreamHost's dominance), all I had to do was learn how to code an entire website. And not just any website, one that would display a photographic portfolio dynamically and interactively and [buzzword] and [so on]. Ok, so I haven't quite gotten to that part yet, but the site exists and is a decent placeholder.
The holdup is that I'm the sort of person who can't just throw up something pre-fabricated and call it a day, I have to learn how to code the entire thing myself, learn databases and cascading stylesheets, from scratch. Maybe once I've done that I could take an easier route, but without understanding the background it seems too much like cheating. Besides, most of the point was giving myself opportunity to learn, given that my photos probably aren't going to start flying off the shelves (there are some up, but they, too, are placeholders).
So in the meantime I've just been using the web export feature in Adobe Lightroom (a god-send for those of us who like cataloging, integration with other applications and services and powerful but simple tools). The problem I'm leading up to is that I'd like to stop hosting the photos I use in blog posts on Picasa and move them all over to a dedicated storage folder on my website. Heck, someday I should move this blog there, too.
The problem is that to use a photo in a post, I need to have a link to the .jpg file that will never change, or at least use a relative link to just "/kitten.jpg" rather than "http:// blah/folderA/section56/kitten.jpg" and so on. So that's one solution. But I also need the photo to link to a gallery view on my website, so that the clicker can browse through other photos from my blog, and also use spiffy navigation controls to browse by keyword or just mosey back through other parts of my portfolio.
I'm not going to list how much of that I have no idea how to accomplish, because it's too overwhelming. But, I've written an entire blogpost about it now, so that will hopefully motivate me.
Oh, and the reason there are random photos of pie here is because they're hosted on my website, just... not very sophisticatedly.
ometimes the route I take to a baking project is long and roundabout. In this case, I started well over a month ago thinking "oh hey, I should make pie crust with all this cream cheese that came out of my parents' fridge during the hurricane." Having subsequently moved, still with said cream cheese, it's now October, and the fruit available has changed completely. Fortunately, I moved to a location two blocks from a weekly, year-round farm market and despite the apple season fanatics, I found some lovely pears and bought 10.
Then I went looking for a recipe. I'd do it first, but that tends to result in a harried and expensive trip to several specialty stores looking for things like "espresso powder" and whatever. In this case, I got away with nothing more extravagant than a vanilla bean (albeit a bit of a ripoff at the local "My Organic Market").
So there I was with pears and cream cheese pie crust premade and waiting in the freezer (keeps for up to three months, yet I never pre-make enough for it to last more than one pie). A quick poke through my trusty bookshelf o' cookbooks, and I arrived at the inevitable conclusion: The Pie and Pastry Bible. Someday, I swear I'll use different books. Really. Having avoided apples especially because I'm tired of fruit-in-crust pies, I wanted something a little more interesting. The options were a gingery pear chiffon pie (which I had modified a couple years ago into a ginger and chocolate ganache pie for Thanksgiving) or pear almond cream tart.
Before I get into the things I'll do differently next time, let me just say that this is a very tasty, decent looking little open-faced pie/tart. However.
It started with the pre-baked crust. Ok, so the recipe called for the normal flakey pie crust, in a tart pan, and I was using cream cheese crust in a pie plate. It kinda shrunk a lot and got a bit too toasty on its own when it should have been a little underbaked in order to withstand the subsequent baking with filling. Still, super flakey, and actually incredibly tasty when dark brown and slightly caramelized with filling.
I also neglected to thoroughly process the almond flour/stuff. And to use blanched, sliced almonds. But that's just cause they come in "raw" in the bulk department. So, instead of what I assume was meant to be a smooth, creamy filling, I have a nutty, thick filling. It did manage to puff up (eventually) and has the texture of chewy meringue around the edges (also a little darker than necessary).
The poaching of the pears went well, though I recommend watching them a bit more carefully than I did and not getting distracted by other wildly exciting things like de-clogging the vacuum. yeah. I reserved some of the poaching liquid for my food and drink obsessed housemate to mix cocktails or something with. The vanilla bean was very worth it and can never, ever be substituted with vanilla extract, so don't even think about it.
In the video on Rose Levy Beranbaum's website (below), she has the pears sliced the short way across and fanned into little ridged mountains in the almond filling. It makes a kind of star pattern, but that didn't quite make sense to me visually, edibly or uh, logistically, so I fanned them lengthwise instead, with the intent that the almond filling could puff up between the slices. This mostly worked, but again I neglected to really thoroughly drain the pears, so the pie/tart took a lot longer to cook and was too wet in the center for most of the time.
This is kind of a long post for one little pie experiment, but I went searching the interweb for more info when the recipe didn't make sense and only easily found RLB's website. Hopefully this will help someone else. And also photos. It's blissful having a back porch to take things out on into natural light in order to photograph. The finished pie photo is from inside and at night (bleh!).
aving the recipe is only half the battle. It took several pies for me to get the pie crust to behave in such a way that I could roll it out, instead of trying to piece something together out of the fragments that never became a whole. Your only hope in this matter is to start with a good recipe and figure it out for yourself. The very best book ever is "The Pie and Pastry Bible" by Rose Levy Beranbaum. I've gotten so many recipes out of this book, if you know me, you've probably had one. In my mind, the best kind of cookbook isn't just recipes but philosophy and information, so that you actually have some clue why things need to be just so. Absolutely essential for the baker. Go get it. shoo.
This past weekend I had the good fortune to spend a night atop a mountain in the Shenandoah region, and came back (thanks to Wortklauberlein) with a pound of fresh berries from the bazillions of vines lining the roads. The local population informed us that they are wineberries, a particularly sweet variety of raspberry. There's nothing so satisfying as baking or cooking with food you've picked yourself. er, or that someone has thoughtfully picked for you.
Ingredients
"Deluxe flaky pie crust" 21 oz
14 tbl unsalted butter, cold.
2.25 cups flour (pref. pastry)
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
7.5 tbl ice water
1 tbl cider vinegar
0.5 cup sugar (I only had brown)
2.5 tbl cornstarch
pinch salt
1 lb berries, washed and picked over for passengers.
Pick a pound of wineberries and a few blackberries from Flattop Mountain. Or your backyard. Or somebody else's backyard. I don't think you can buy wineberries in the store, but this recipe will likely work with whatever berries you have handy.
Make pie crust:
cut butter into small cubes, freeze for 30 min +
put flour, salt, baking powder in gallon size ziplock bag, shake to mix thoroughly.
add frozen butter, expel air and use rolling pin to (patiently) roll butter into flat flakes. Shake bag to redistribute when mix gets bunched up at one end. Freeze for 10 min.
sprinkle water and vinegar into bag, toss to mix.
keeping the bag open, knead from the outside of the bag until dough forms a single lump. To do this, you'll need to use the bag to fold the dough onto itself (don't touch it directly). About halfway through you'll get frustrated because it's not holding together yet. Put it in the fridge for a few minutes and come back to it. Once it's a lump, divide into two pieces, one for the top and one for the bottom crust.
Refrigerate for at least an hour, preferably overnight.
Roll out bottom crust on lightly floured surface to 1/8 inch thickness. Lay in pie pan, cover and refrigerate at least 30 min, no more than 3 hours.
Combine sugar, cornstarch and salt, whisk together. Toss berries gently in this mixture and let sit for 15 minutes.
Toss gently again and pour into bottom crust.
Roll out top crust to 1/8 inch. I used a lattice pattern, but you could do a full top crust and cut a hole in the middle for steam to escape. Lay top crust over berries, use water to glue and fold edges under (or over) and crimp using a fork or your fingers.
Refrigerate pie, covered loosely in plastic wrap, for about an hour.
Preheat oven to 425 at least 20 minutes before baking. Use a baking stone if you have one and put it on the lower rack. Bake pie for 30 minutes or until juices are bubbling and crust is browned. Put a baking sheet or foil underneath the pie plate to catch drips.
Let cool for at least 2 hours before serving, probably more like 4 if you have the patience.
Flaky pie crust, slow cooked onions with a bit of pepper and assorted herbs, a little custard and crumbled goat cheese. Wonderful hot and just as good at room temperature for lunch the next day.
This morning started out with slightly frenetic whipping of eggs, cream and mascarpone, followed by some folding and chilling, all of which led to this evening, when I laid out the strawberries and added lemon glaze... I'm pretty pleased with the results, but I'm very nervous that the nut crust will do its usual thing and refuse to dislodge itself from the confines of the pie plate. ah well. It will still be very, very tasty. Unfortunately I wont know until we get to the brunch party tomorrow. Impatience.
And wouldn't it be nice if I could include a digital taste in posts about food? Like scratch and sniff.
And then dinner tonight (after a batch of banana bread to take over to friends) is about to be fresh pasta with spinach, tofu, and green garlic pesto. Fresh pasta is wonderful, but it's very difficult to roll out by hand. The dough is quite stiff, and pressing down firmly enough with a rolling pin to get the sheet thin enough to make reasonable sized pasta is enough to make my carpal tunnel twinge.
And while I was out earlier I bought (extravagantly) a very clean, plastic covered jacketed copy of James Beard's bread book from Capitol Hill Books (staffed by an appropriately grumpy old guy and piled to the ceiling, literally, with books. Including the bathroom.). I'm pretty excited about it.
ay back in November I finally staked my claim on a corner of the internet by registering and hosting a website under my name. I had stalled for almost a full year, thinking there was too much I would want to research before pinning down a registrar/host. Turns out that was the easy part (once I realised I didn't need a slew of dedicated servers in the former Soviet Bloc).
