Tag: #fail

An Experiment with Apple Pie…

I know it seems like I am never happy when I experiment with baking and, unfortunately, this post does nothing to counter that general opinion.

I had a bunch of apples. I had a brand new pie plate. I made a pie on a day that I had already been baking for 8 hours. I kind of made up the recipe, though I did use the whole-wheat pastry flour short crust I usually like. I cut out some stars to make it pretty.

What went wrong?

The crust was too dry – it broke and cracked. The innards weren’t sweet enough (in my opinion). I only ate a couple of bites of my piece. Michael finished my serving up for me, and then I had him take the remaining pie to his job site… where, supposedly, none of the carpenters had any complaints about being forced to eat 3/4 of an apple pie.

Problem is, my apple crisp recipe rocks and it is less labour intensive, so why make apple pie, at all, ever? Mark this one as a #fail.

Perogies #FAIL

So… I made an attempt at whole wheat perogies last evening… perogies are something I had been craving but, given my white flour sensitivity (as in I can’t seem to digest it without a lot of pain and suffering), I haven’t had them in years.  Ah, cottage cheese and onion perogies… boiled then fried with onions – yum!  Perogies were a dinner mainstay during university (introduced to me by Mr. Barefoot I believe).  Anyway, craving… yes.  So I sourced a bunch of recipes and then pretty much made up my own based on what ingredients I had in the house and what I was craving (i.e. I mashed the potatoes with a ¼ cup of sour cream).  Also, I didn’t have any cottage cheese so I went with cheddar.  I even took a picture right before I got started (in a false sense of anticipated success?):

Perogies Ingredients

So I make the dough, make the filling, roll the dough (perhaps a bit too thickly?), then fill, crimp and boil the perogies.  To finish them off, I fry them up with an onion, try them and I am not pleased… they are doughy enough that some bits stick to my teeth.  Michael suggests frying them until they are almost burnt (in fact the onions were unsalvageable by the time he finished frying)… I attempt another taste with sour cream… nope, the filling rocks (enough that Michael opted to take the remainder of it, cold, for lunch today), but I am not happy with the dough part.

Too much work, not enough pay off, to attempt again I think… Michael now has lunch for all next week – he thought they were tasty, of course.

Not everything is #failing around here.  We are getting ready to launch the trailer for SiftingRealities on Monday and the seeds I planted last Saturday are starting to wake up:

Schizanthus seedlings

Schizanthus aka Poor Man’s Orchid seem very happy in their jiffy pellets even though I was skeptical about germinating them in “complete darkness”, but thousands-of-year-of-gardeners know better than I!  These were supposed to be for the hanging baskets, which I have also decided to fill with strawberries, so something has to give.  I suspect (if they germinate… I see no evidence of that this morning) that the strawberries will win and the Poor Man’s Orchid will be relegated to another part of the garden.