This post is another one about cooking

I've really been enjoying cooking recently. More than usual. I have about a 50% success rate with everything that I make, because as I have disclosed I am a) unexperienced b) pretty truly bad at following basic directions and c) sort of impatient. These are all probably related.


The other night, when faced with either writing my personal statement for grad school applications, sitting on the couch and staring passively into space, or baking something, I opted for baking. I wanted to bake something hard. Something definitely and obviously out of my skill range that would occupy all of my time before bed. And so I set out, in determined silence for the duration of the cooking time, to bake a Lemon Meringue Pie.

This is a pie that is totally out of season. I also started out with probably 2 out of the 7 required ingredients. I can't totally explain why I chose to bake it, except that all the other pastries I wanted to make required large food processors, which I definitely don't own and which felt more daunting in it's procurement than 7 lemons. I used this recipe for the filling and this recipe for crust, both from Heart of Light.

Here are the obstacles I faced:
1) Frannie left our pie tin at someone's house.
2) after initial grocery trip I had to make a second one because I forgot to buy cream of tartar.
3) first pie crust was a failure.
4) and post pie baking: the pie really does need to be consumed the day it's baked to avoid getting soggy and gummy, (bummmmer,) and I finished baking it at 11:45ish pm after both of my roommates had brushed their teeth.

The pie tin was the real setback. I sat down and ate half of one of Frannie's chocolate bars in retaliation and then used a cake pan, which actually worked perfectly well.

Cooking is a pretty prime example of something that you need to do a bunch to actually get better at it. Duh, I guess, but sometimes I am inexplicably good at things on my first try, which makes doing other, more difficult things, feel sort of irritating. I'm aware that that is a terrible reason not do things though, so next stop: souffle???

{Bruce, watching me bake.}

{product}

just call me martha,
(heather.)