Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I've gotten very little done today. In light of how the day started, existing constraints on my schedule today, and how I was feeling earlier, this is not exactly surprising.

I still haven't picked up serious groceries (I did buy milk, bread, ibuprofen, and chocolate a couple of days ago, but that's about it), so I'm doing that thing where I open the cupboards and fridge and try to decide what I actually feel like eating, and I decided it was time to try to make a pie.

Being in the "starving artist" category, and having people know that, I sometimes get handed unwanted food. (Er ... no longer wanted by the people handing it to me, not unwanted by me!) Two friends have tossed suitably vegetarian carb-laden food my way when starting the Atkins (or similar) diet, so I've got rice to last me quite a while (especially since I don't eat rice often and keep forgetting it's there). And at the end of the last Pennsic War, the folks in the next camp over asked whether I wanted their leftover canned goods (the vegetarian subset thereof, anyhow) that they would otherwise haul up to the food-drive. Same idea, just more direct, eh? I wound up with some things I'd normally buy anyhow, some pretty close substitutes for things I might ordinarily buy or make, and a bunch of stuff I don't normally get. Most of that is already gone now, of course, but there were these cans of pie filling ...

I decided that tonight I would finally get around to making my first pie. Fortunately I had bought frozen pie crusts a few weeks ago with this notion in mind. A certain Sheepie had told me that the trick to using canned filling was to add a little bit of fresh fruit to it, and I'd been tossed an apple at the end of a recent gig, so I looked at the instructions on the can of apple pie filling and the instructions on the frozen crusts and decided they were similar enough that I could interpolate, and then, of course, the what-ifs started: What if I add some frozen strawberries (more donated food) to this? What would happen if I tried to sneak in something hot?

I've got a funny history with recipes. You see, I never really learned to cook; I just started cooking one day. I've told the story before (and discovered I'm not unique), but for anyone who came to my journal late: When I moved out of my parents' house, I found myself in an apartment containing a kitchen and some pots and pans, with a grocery store a short distance away. So I went to the grocery store and bought some ingredients. Then I had a kitchen, some pots and pans, and some ingredients that I didn't know what to do with. So I said, "If I just sort of will these ingredients to turn themselves into food, and wave pots and pans and knives and can openers around as if I'm performing a cooking spell, will the ingredients turn into food? Heh. Heh heh. Funny thing about that: they did. Pretty yummy food. Friends, lovers, ex-lovers have told me so, which means it's not just determined imagining on my part. But then people started asking me how I knew how to do what I did (a lover watching me cook would ask, "How did you know it needed that spice?" Or, "What made you decide to brown the mushrooms that way?"), and that's when I realized that I didn't know how to do what I did. Fortunately I escaped the centipede's dilemma and continued performing my spells secure in my lack of knowlege of why it all worked, but I started taking notes.

Okay, I didn't take notes. I meant to take notes. This is why I always got an A in math and a B in science: math didn't have a lab notebook as part of the grade. But I did start noticing things. Some of the things I noticed were downright odd, such as when I found myself cooking by the colours things tasted. "Hmm," I would say as I sampled a sauce, "This needs a red spice," and I would start sniffing spice jars for the right shade of red. But some red-tasting spices look brown or yellow. And some yellow-tasting spices look green. But I knew what I meant by the colour-tastes, and it all worked. It was just hard to teach anybody else. And since I was not good at keeping my lab notebook up to date writing down the recipes I invented, things pretty much came out differently each time. (One lover spun a fantasy of opening a bed-and-breakfast, where I would be the cook, and there would be only one item on the menu: "Chef's surprise", because not even I would know what I was going to make, but it would taste good.) So not only had I not been using anyone else's recipes, I didn't even follow my own.

And that's where my insecurity snuck in: you see, I was actually afraid to try cooking from a recipe. I knew I didn't know how to cook (results notwithstanding), and if I tried to follow a recipe and it came out wrong, that would mean I screwed up, which is a different thing from, "Oh, it didn't turn out quite the way I had in mind, but I was improvising anyhow." So it took me a while to work up my nerve to try a recipe.

And even then, I couldn't bring myself to follow the recipe when the taste-simulator-synthesis in my head was telling me to adjust it. So I skipped the "try it according to the book" stage and went right to the "well that's somebody else's recipe, I don't have to follow it exactly" school of thought, which I gather is a pretty common attitude -- I just took a nontraditional route to get there.

(Note that I do have my failures in the kitchen, and when I go waaay off on some experimental limb and the limb breaks under me, well some of the failures have been impressive. But that's the risk one takes, and on the whole I've felt pretty good about my ability to cook except for the time I was living with two people who both cooked far more expertly, one of whom had actually attended a cooking school.)

Which is a very long-winded way of saying, "Sheesh -- the instructions said to dump the can into a crust, put the other crust on top, poke holes in it, and put it in the oven, and I couldn't even bring myself to do that without having to change it around!" (For the record: I can make macaroni and cheese from a box according to the directions. Um ... occasionally. (But adding a bit of curry powder, and some broccoli, and maybe a little bit of onion to the mac+cheese just makes so much more sense....))

And a long-winded way of explaining why there's (a very small amount of) cayenne pepper -- and strawberries -- in my "just follow the directions on the can" apple pie.

So. Where was I? Oh, right, the results of my first ever attempt at pie.

It's not bad. It's not great. It's not my mother's, but fortunately I knew better than to expect that. (Mom makes good pie. Mom makes a lot of yummy stuff. I do remember a span of a couple years when she was mysteriously unable to make instant mashed potatoes correctly (real mashed potatoes still worked fine), but that's really the only thing I can remember her ever not making well off the top of my head. So I guess the "easy things hard, hard things easy" bit might have been inherited? But I digress. Again.) Right, to my pie...

I don't know whether Mom uses canned pie filling -- I don't think so, based on mouth-feel and degree of sweetness -- but in any case, I wasn't expecting a "dump can into crust" pie to be anywhere near as wonderful as her pies. With that reasonable level of expectation, I'd say this pie isn't bad. It's not boast-worthy either, but it's okay. I'm happy with it, as long as I improve from here. And besides, this wasn't really a "learn how to make pie" pie. It was a "use up that can of pie filling because I'm hungry, I want carbs, there's not much else in the house, and it's here" pie. It might be better with melted Cheddar cheese on top of it (I don't usually put cheese on apple pie, but I know some people do, and I've tried it before).

I wound up slicing up a handful of frozen strawberries and the one small, fresh apple ... I put a layer of strawbery bits on the bottom, the can of pie filling on top of those, and a layer of fresh apple pieces and more strawberry chunks on top of that, sprinkled a very fine, very light dusting of cayenne over everything, and then put on the top crust with a couple of slits cut in it. I followed the time/temperature instructions on the can of pie filling. There's only the tiniest bit of cayenne pepper in it, and it's just the right amount. Any less might not have had any effect, any more would be too much. I expected the cayenne to play off the apple flavour, but oddly enough it seems to interact more with the strawberries.

But now I want to try making a real pie. One that doesn't mostly come from a can. I don't expect to equal my mother for a long time (if ever), but I've got something to shoot for.

And for the next couple of days, I can snack on some okay apple pie with just a leeeetle bit of a bite to it and strawberry overtones. Like I need that many calories per snack. But hey, it feeds the belly and satisfies the mouth, until I figure out how much I can afford to spend on groceries this weekend.