Pie and pickles

While I am an above average cook, my baking skills are less than stellar when it comes to anything other than bread. Pie crusts in particular have long baffled me - too crumbly, too dense, too tasteless - and for years I have used refrigerated Pillsbury pie crust dough. So when I saw a pie crust class listed in the local continuing education flyer for OCM BOCES, I decided it was time to give the Doughboy a break and learn to make a decent pie crust.

Chef Ann of The Gingersnap Bakery was the instructor for the evening class, and before demonstrating good pie crust technique, she explained the science that takes place when making a good pie crust. I learned why the flour needs to coat the fat (butter, shortening, or some combo of both), why the water needs to be cold, why you need to handle the dough as little as possible. I really liked that she had us put our hands into the demo dough to experience how the dough should feel, in addition to seeing how it should look. She explained the different types of pie tops, why hot filling should be cooled before being poured into a crust, how to bake a blind (empty) crust, and so on. We then broke into small groups to make our own pie crusts, and tried out a variety of fillings.

When I asked James and Aidan what type of pie I should make first, Aidan immediately said Aunt Tammie's delicious blueberry pie, which he had eaten at their house during his summer visit. Tammie graciously sent me the recipe and I made my first completely from scratch pie in years:

I am proud to say that the pie was delicious, and Aidan even said that it was almost as good as Aunt Tammie's pie! Because the filling is not baked in the pie, I could not do a fancy lattice top. Instead, I made a rope border around the edge and then blind baked the crust. The crust tasted great, although I made the border too thick in places and it was difficult to cut. All in all, I am very pleased with my first pie crust effort and will likely never buy another pie crust again. Take that, Doughboy!

James brought in the last of the peppers and tomatoes before our only frost so far this fall, but most of the tomatoes were green. Our friend Phil suggested that James make green tomato pickles and came over one night to get him started. They sliced the tomatoes along with the various peppers and some onions, layered them with salt and left them overnight with a heavy weight on top to press out the liquid. James then rinsed the produce, made a concoction involving vinegar, water, sugar and various herbs/spices, and packed it into jars:

We will soon be able to sample his first attempt at making pickles and if they are half as good as the ones that Phil gave us, then we will be happily munching pickles all winter.

Selfish knits

Every knitter has at least one story about lovingly knitting an item for a person who then did not appreciate the item. When a person is revealed to be not knitworthy, it is all we can do to keep from shouting in our best Soup Nazi voice: "No knits for you!" While we all have many people in our lives who are knitworthy, the one person I know who will always appreciate what I knit is me, and knitting for ourselves is known as selfish knitting.

The last four projects I have completed have all selfishly been for me. The first was the scarflet I finished in September - see Wrapping Up. The second item was a quick little ballband dishcloth that I had seen in my friend Geri's copy of Mason-Dixon Knitting. I already had cotton yarn in my stash so when we got home from our visit, I knit up a Halloween-inspired dishcloth:

The third item to be completed was a Sunday Market Shawl, which I knit out of Malabrigo:

The colorway is Roanoke and it is a lovely, rich chestnut brown. I wanted a quick, mindless project to get me back into the knitting groove and this shawl kind of did the trick. Because the majority of the pattern is simple stockinette, it is perfect for watching college football games. The openwork of the shawl is achieved by intentionally dropping a stitch on the last row, and then "running" the dropped stitch. While an unintentionally dropped stitch always runs quickly, it was actually a time-consuming and laborious task to run all the rows in this shawl.

As for it being a shawl…it would have blocked wider had I used a stretchier bind off, but it would not have blocked longer. If I ever want to knit this pattern again and actually use it for a shawl, I would cast one more stitches, use more yarn and find the stretchiest possible bind off. In the meantime, it is a pretty scarf.

The last project was my first pair of fingerless mitts. For someone like me whose hands rarely get cold and just need some protection from the wind, fingerless mitts are perfect:

I used the Sirdar Escape yarn that I purchased at Soper Creek Yarn while visiting Geri over Thanksgiving weekend. It is a wool and acrylic blend, so it is easy care and will wear well. Although I was concerned with making the thumb and thumb gusset, they turned out fine. The yarn is variegated so the mitts do not "match" each other but that is okay with me, since I am not a matchy-matchy kind of person.

My streak of selfish knitting is now at an end as I turn my attention to holiday knits.