Each Sunday, Joanna and I map out a menu of meals for the week. It’s habit we formed a few years back, and it helps us keep our grocery budget in check.
I find that in the fall, our menus are often flooded with comfort food dishes – staples like macaroni and cheese (with bacon or jalapeños!), meatloaf and lasagna. My favorite, and a dish I look forward to all summer long, is chicken pot pie. Continue reading
Growing up we made a lot of pies, especially around the holidays. We almost always used a pre-made Pillsbury pie crust on account of convenience. Pre-made crusts are not terrible, but if you want to elevate your pie to the next level, you have to make your crust from scratch. The good news is that homemade crusts are really very simple and they do not take much time–seriously. The most basic crust only consists of four ingredients: flour, salt, butter, and water. This recipe has a couple more ingredients in it but follows the same concept. I call this “sweet” because it should be used for sweet pies–the Lee Brothers have a dynamite savory pie crust recipe that uses buttermilk that I will share later; it is perfect for quiches and pot pies.
It is easy for a homemade crust to taste fine, but the texture is where it will majorly fail unless you follow some key (as in you cannot break these or you have to throw out the mixture) rules. They are very simple: your butter must be COLD, and your water must be ICE-COLD. The reason for this is because when you make your crust you will cut the butter into the flour until the mixture has pea to blueberry-sized lumps. You want the butter and flour lumps to stay cold – you don’t want the butter to soften or melt; this will cause it to combine with the flour into an irreparable batter. Later, when your crust is baking in the oven, those butter pockets will heat up, expanding and releasing evaporated moisture, thereby separating the layers of crust and providing a tender, flaky crust. You never knew butter was so cool.
Oliver & Marr 