On Cooking Problems

Goodness gracious, I forgot to write about my cooking disasters when Graham came at the beginning of the month. Wanting, of course, to impress him and trick him into thinking I'm a domestic goddess, I cooked a lot. He hadn't, before that visit, eaten much that I'd cooked, aside from a couple of things I'd baked.

Well, I am not especially good at pies and bread. Stearns is the one in the family who does bread. No one really does pies (although after hearing this story, my mother baked Graham both whoopie pies and a pie--I'm quite certain that it was only to assert her superiority to me in the kitchen). Of course, apple pie would be Graham's favorite.

The problem with the apple pie started because I don't actually believe in measuring spoons. It seems like, at least, if you're a good cook, you don't need them. On the one hand, I pretend I'm a good cook. On the other, I'm not. All that to say that I tasted the pie crust as I was rolling it out and it tasted very salty. Frankincense confirmed. Instead of throwing it out and starting over, I thought, "I will be clever. I will make another half recipe of pastry with no salt in it; that will dilute the saltiness and I can use what is leftover for those nice pastries with cinnamon sugar in the middle." That was a clever thought. It went wrong when, per usual, I got lazy. I think that rolling a pastry thin is hard, so when I got the recipe and a half of pastry to the size of a pie crust top, I stuck it on. I promptly decided that that was a bad idea, but at this point sugary apples were already stuck to it.

As Ben the Baptist pastor said, "Emily, this is great apple pie, but why is there a biscuit on top?"

I also made bread to go with the Midwestern chicken soup. The bread didn't rise. Of course, I could have left it to rise longer if I had known it hadn't risen. But alas, I thought you'd stick it in the oven and then it would rise like a big cookie. Anyway, Graham was kind and choked some down and called it, "European." It was hard as a rock after one day. Stearns salvaged it the next weekend by turning it into garlic bread.