Cooking No. 1

It is a well-known fact–somewhere up there with “The Earth is round” and “Massachusetts will always vote blue”–that my mother makes amazing pies. Incomparable pies. Epic pies. (She also makes soup of neighborhood-wide fame, but that is for another post.)

Her secret is the crust. She makes this perfect crust that’s earned her the honor of “making Thanksgiving Day dessert” for ten years running now. Everyone loves it and no one can duplicate it, so–of course–I decided to try.

Not purposefully, of course. I’ve tried to make piecrusts before. I know better than trying again. (In this case, perseverance would not be considered a virtue.) But sometime last week I decided I wanted to make a quiche. I found an old, college recipe–that I got from someone else and have never actually made before–skimmed it for the ingredients, and started off, willy nilly, without ever realizing the culinary trap that waited for me come Step 4.

“Pour in a cooled crust?” What?! The recipe didn’t say anything about making said crust. Obviously, it forgot my Home Ec teacher hated foreigners and consciously sabotaged my cooking education. (Or maybe that was because I refused to stop cutting things in her Teflon pans. Whatev.) Cue a frantic call to Mama V., who emailed me her top-secret recipe stat.

Said recipe contains a grand total of three ingredients carefully chosen to torture you in every physical, emotional, and spiritual way possible. “Don't overwork it,” she said. “Just until it holds nicely together.”

Uh huh. Okay. This advice created a floury ball of quasi-dough, flakier than, well, a Flake that smelled somewhat like the homemade play dough little Sarah use to make in her craftier moments, i.e. it was going nowhere fast.

Following Mama V.’s supplemental advice, I added more water. It started gellin’ and made it to the pie plate in mostly one–albeit too small–piece. (Why yes, that is a turquoise Fiestaware pie plate! Hello fellow dish snobs!)

Baking the thing was a whole ‘nother issue. Do you grease the pie plate? Do you not? The particulars of crust baking are not covered in architecture school. (I went out on a limb and didn’t. It was fine.) Mama V. said to bake it for 8-10 minutes. I ended up leaving it in there for a solid 15 and still wasn’t sure if that was enough. (It wasn’t quite the called for “golden brown”–more like a “pasty beige.”) But whatev. I figured the second round in the oven with the quiche would kill any remaining germies.

By the time the second oven round rolled around, I was very much looking forward to the simpler meals I’ve planned for the rest of the week. The quiche took about twenty minutes longer than it should have to cook and all my attempts to convince Bert that it DID contain microscopic bits of bacon failed. (But he still gave it the thumbs up. What a dear. :)

The quiche was alright. You could barely taste the crust under the combined clout of four eggs and multiple ounces of cheese. (But I imagine it was delicious!) Will I make it again? Eh, maybe. If I have time. And the bacon. And my mother. :)