Pie Weekend - Friday Night (Recipes 22-24)

After buying all the supplies and getting the room to a bearable temperature, we started Pie Weekend with dinner - a broccoli quiche. What drew me to this recipe of all the others was that it claimed to have "the perfect crust." As I am a fan of good crust - it can make or break a pie for me - I had to test it.



It was a nice crust. I wouldn't say "perfect," but it was nice. It was flaky and buttery. As you can see in the picture, I didn't spend a lot of time making it pretty, but in my defense, we were hungry. Ugly crust tastes just as good as pretty crust. As far as the egg portion of the pie, I will probably go with more egg and less milk/cream next time, but it was good nonetheless. Dish number one = success.

Our second pie was featured in The Sweet Potato Queens' Big-Ass Cookbook (and Financial Planner), written by one my southern heroes, Jill Conner Browne. It's called It's a Miracle! Pie because it makes its own crust. It tasted similar to chess pie or a buttermilk pie; it definitely had that same custard-y feel. As I am not particularly a fan of chess pie or buttermilk pie, particularly as a texture, this pie was not my favorite. It was, however, easy to make (not much more involved in the process than blending some ingredients and dumping them into the pie plate), and it was really pretty on top (behold the picture).



Our third and final pie of the evening was a Berry Cheesecake Pie. Well, at least the cheesecake part. It had to cool before we could add the berries (something to look forward to on Pie Day 2). I used the crust listed with the recipe, because it was a no-roll crust, and I found this intriguing. You simply mix the ingredients and press the crust into a pan. The dough had a very oily texture, but that also made it easy to work with, which, as the person working with it, I consider to be a hell of a mark in its favor. We baked the cheesecake and let it sit in the fridge overnight to cool.



What I learned on the first day of Pie Weekend:

1. When making quiche, I am of the "More is more" philosophy when it comes to number of eggs.

2. A clever name cannot trick me into liking chess/buttermilk pie.

My writing process

Stolen clean away from chicklet73

Seven things about my writing process:

1. I start by writing dialogue, because I enjoy it the most.

2. I start "writing" by talking. I figure if dialogue doesn't sound right out loud, it won't work on paper either. Of course, this process can be troublesome to the unfortunate souls who happen upon it, since, for all intents and purposes, it merely looks like I am talking to myself.

3. It's hard to stop talking a passage out after the dialogue is finished. I find myself talking through the exposition, too, which is NOT extremely helpful in making it flow on paper.

4. I usually write by hand and then type as I edit. It's very rare that a typed copy is my actual first draft.

5. I have an annoying habit of writing my own internal monologue (usually in parentheses...yes...just like this) during the narrator's voice. As a result, my narrators often are indistinguishable from me or have no discernible personality or are a weird mix of who they are and what they overhear from the peanut gallery in my head.

6. I am really snotty when it comes to choosing the people with whom I share my writing. I have a friend on facebook that has repeatedly asked to read some of what I'm working on to give me feedback, and I have no good reason not to let him. In fact, it's a little dumb that I don't - how often do people go out of their way to offer to edit for someone, free of charge? But I just don't want to. I should probably get over this if I ever want to publish, huh?

7. The more I read, the more I write. I have heard that a lot of people have experienced this phenomenon, though, so maybe it's not so much my process as just good advice.