Do you ever get desespere? That's just a fancy word I use for being in a funk or feeling listless. When I'm feeling truly sad or angry, cooking always helps, but it doesn't always work on desespere. Thus I found myself on Friday night with all the ingredients to make multiple batches of mini pumpkin pies and mini quiches, and no energy or interest in making them. I had promised my best friend that they would be ready by around noon on Saturday, but I just kept putting it off. For once, I didn't think that cooking would fix my crankypants mood. And then this happened:
As much as I grumbled while rolling out 40-some individual pie crusts, these little things are amazing. I felt weirdly like a proud mom. I made them, they're wonderful, and then I got to share them with all my friends. So I guess the moral is that, even when cooking can't fix a bad mood, food is always a good thing. As are very appreciative friends.
For more information on the actual pies, I used my standard 1 crust recipe (1 cup flour, 5 tbsp butter, cut into the flour, 1 tsp salt, 4 tbsp cold water, added slowly in case you only need three) and rolled it out into 16 mini rounds. The first time I tried it, I rolled out all the dough and tried to cut it into rounds, but that was a loser. It works much better to cut the dough into 16 parts, then roll each individually. Rolling them out is a total chore. But they taste way better and are much lighter than store bought crusts, so there's that. I used a real pie pumpkin, of course, can't stand that canned pie filling anymore, and followed the Joy of Cooking pumpkin pie recipe. Mmm, it is so delicious! I had the last one for breakfast this morning!
