A Bug's Life

I spent most of yesterday baking, which was a lovely change from my normal computer-based work and hobbies. pseudomonas came to help, and while it is often true that too many cooks spoil the broth, it made a great difference having two pairs of hands, and two brains to address the baking process. There's so much fun sciencey stuff as well - the way egg whites change as you beat them into stiff peaks; the effects of the size of fat granules in pastry; mixing sugar, water, lime juice, cornflour and egg yolks and the weird consistency it comes out with. It's about combining things (often the same things, in different proportions or orders or temperatures) and making a wholly new thing, in a way that my usual stir fries don't. The main thing I learnt is that the important thing about pastry is to do it right the first time. Squodging it up and rerolling, and rerolling, does little to make it elastic and easy to handle, especially as my pastry was coming up very short (I was using a mixture of rice and wheat flour - maybe I shouldn't have!).

I cooked my first lemon meringue pie; I'd never eaten one before (always taking the chocolate pudding, given a choice) so wasn't sure what to expect, but it was lovely! It was quite an effort not to just eat the lemon/lime curd mixture out of the pan. Nom! Sweet, tart, gooey goodness. Ditto with the treacle tart. No, you don't need to fill the pastry case to the brim with the golden syrup. Again, strange chemistry happened in the oven, as the syrup seeps into the pastry and there is toffeeisation and a strange crunchy boundary at the syrup/pastry interface.

pseudomonas made tasty mushroom and guinness pies (I've never seen such a dark and gloopy filling that wasn't full of meat gravy), and instructed on blind baking. I remember how much I learned about cooking by watching other people, learning to tell when hot milk is about to turn, what 'soft peaks' of egg look like, how you can tell if you need to add just a sprinkle more flour or a splash more water to make the dough ready to roll. Recipe books don't tell you all this (neither should they, unless they're being cookery manuals).

Then people turned up and ate pie and it was good! Mrs aeglefinus provided an invaluable third pair of hands and brain for the final meringue-making stage. There is much leftovers.

The game pie I spoke of yesterday took too much prep and I'll finish making it today - it will have had its full 24 hours marinading, now it needs 2 1/2 hours cooking into stew, then baking in a pie.


Today is going to be fairly busy, including unpleasant work stuff, then woolymonkey et al are coming round for Pi+1. With a bit of fiddling (e.g. "mop" instead of "clean and tidy living room and kitchen of post-party debris") I can write my to-do list entirely in 3-letter words.

gymmopjob
piebaggig
esiffgcon
tax

But first - lime meringue pie for breakfast (before I get ready to mop)

EDIT: Why does <font face="courier"> not work to change my font? I wanted to put my 3-letter words into a fixed-width font, to make a nice square block of text.
EDIT 2: Trying <code> instead, thanks del_c