It has been a somewhat frustrating week in the kitchen here at Barlow Towers. Let me elaborate ...
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| "What? Have I been trying to eat the evidence? ... I don't know what you mean!" |
When I was five or six, I mastered the art of rolling out and used to love using the little fluted pastry cutters to shape the dough into circles and press them into patty tins with a spoonful of strawberry jam to make tarts. No doubt Dad was over the moon when I reached this stage - not that he actually got many though as I seem to recall greedily stuffing them in my little mouth as soon as they had come out of the oven (suffering many a burnt tongue in the process!).
Bear with ... I am getting to the point, honestly ...
At the age of eight, I became totally proficient in the whole process from start to finish, carefully rubbing in fat to flour, all the while heeding Mum's instruction of lifting it high to get as much air in as possible. Over the following years I must have made hundreds of batches of pastry - fruit pies and quiches in the summer, meat and potato pies in the winter (as I have said before, you can take a girl out of the North ...) and of course, mince pies at Christmas. I have always using the traditional recipe of half fat to flour with the fat being made up of half butter/half lard and it always turned out great. Since we moved to Arizona though, I cannot seem to get it right at all! Firstly, I struggled to find lard ... I looked in every fridge in every supermarket for weeks, until a friend told me that I wouldn't find it in the fridge but on a shelf with the cooking oils. That's odd, I thought. Doesn't lard have to be kept refrigerated? Won't it go off ? On the next visit to the supermarket I sought out the oil aisle (try saying THAT after a couple of glasses of wine) and sure enough, on the very bottom shelf beside the olive oil, vegetable oil, canola oil and a whole host of other oils that I have never even heard of, I found lard. Finally! I was a bit suspicious about the quality and still worried about the lack of refrigeration, but purchased the smallest size packet I could find (which was still HUGE) in order to give it a try.
The first batch I made was for mince pies during our first December here. As they were in the oven cooking I kept smelling something strange ... a faint whiff of something kind of chemical ... what did it remind me off? Ah, yes, that's it ... petrol! Ewwww! Where is it coming from? As soon as I opened the oven door to retrieve the pies I immediately knew ... the pastry! Oh my God! I had fully intended to throw them all in the bin, but then once they had cooled the smell disappeared and they tasted OK, so I decided it must have all been in my imagination.
The second batch was for a quiche (you will have no doubt read in previous posts about the various quiche requests I have received from school so obviously they didn't think it was too bad) but once again, the same chemical smell as it was baking. Yuk! What the hell is in this stuff? I inspected the packet ... 'hydrogenated lard' ... that doesn't sound good. I know that lard in general is not exactly a health food, but at least the lard I was used to buying from the butchers was freshly rendered and at least a natural product. What the hell is 'hydrogenated lard'?! Other ingredients:
Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) and BHA (Butylated Hydroxyanisole) ... oh nice. Who doesn't like a few carcinogenic additives with their quiche? What the hell?! Right. The rest of the packet went straight in the bin.
For the next batch, I tried substituting the lard with 'vegetable shortening'. I couldn't even roll it out without it falling to bits every time I tried to turn it despite adding more water (which just turned into a sticky mess), followed by more flour (a gluey sticky mess). This also went in the bin.
Fourth attempt ... I decided to use all butter. Whilst this worked fine and the pastry had a lovely flavor, it was a bit too heavy and not melt in the mouth crumbly like it should be. Bloody hell! Making a bit of pastry should NOT be this difficult!
Last week was The Teen's 15th birthday (I know!! How did THAT happen?) and he had requested a 'birthday quiche' that he could take for his lunches a couple of days. Oh God. Really? Pastry?! Right, well, yes OK, I'll do my best. That, and a chocolate cake. Well, at least that should be simple enough. But first quiche ...
OK so maybe this time if I do 3/4 butter and just 1/4 shortening then it should be fine right? Wrong. Mr B just happened to come home right at the point where as I carefully tried to fold it over the rolling pin to transfer to the tin it disintegrated into a million pieces and wisely made a hasty retreat into the other room before he sustained a nasty blow to the head with a large wooden rolling pin.
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| Bollocks! |
I could hear Mum's voice quite clearly in my ear ... "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again". Well, quite frankly, I was on the verge of 'if at first you don't succeed, open the wine', but as it was The Teen's birthday and he doesn't ask for much bless him, I refused to be defeated. There was nothing for it but to start again. Finally, by adjusting ratios even further I managed to achieve a reasonable pastry and complete the birthday quiche in the nick of time. Phew! I don't think we'll be having pastry for quite a while though.
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| F*!@!!! Seriously?!? |
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| Nailed it! |
OK. Better?
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| apparently candles are not cool when you're 15 ... |
Until next time ...
TTFN
Bev x
