The Plaid Pladd

According to my spreadsheet, I’m about 59% done with my cookbook project, despite only working on it once since the last time we talked. How have I accomplished this? By knocking out three in one night!! Okay, so Steven did like half the work, but still.

Lemongrass and Sweet Basil: Traditional Thai Cuisine by Khamtane Signavong

We made the entree out of this book, which is divided up by region and has a lot of great pictures. We chose mussaman beef curry. It was stew-consistency, with rice, and cooked for about 4 hours so our apartment smelled great.

Maybe it looks weird, but it was super tasty!

Then we made a side dish out of Japanese Cooking by Shunsuke Fukushima. It was really simple, but completely delicious and refreshing.

Cucumber pickles!

The name is kind of misleading since there’s no vinegar used at all. It’s just cucumbers, cabbage, seasame seeds and salt, but the salt makes the cucumbers express water if you let it sit for about an hour.

Finally, I decided to try out this book for dessert:

Mini Pies: Irresistible Pies to Make and Bake

This concept is awesome. Pies you bake in cupcake pans? Individual tiny pies? Sign me up! Unfortunately, the subtitle should read “How Many Different Expletives Can You Yell At Your kitchen?”. Nothing about this was really irresistible including, sadly, the finished product.

Look at these freaks

If I had thought about it for half a second, I would have realized this would not be fun. It’s like twelve times the work of a normal pie, and then when you’re done you have less pie. After you make the pie crust, you have to cut little circles of it to smoosh down into the cupcake tin. Of course I didn’t have a round biscuit cutter big enough, so I used the top of a canister. It didn’t go great. Then you have to cut little strips to be the “lattice” on top, which went about as well as you can see. This process took way too long. I am just not into it. Ugh and then I still had to make the filling which involved pitting cherries and a weird mascarpone-yogurt concoction.

It’s possible I picked the wrong recipe to try. Because this filling was weird. It was like it was trying to be cheesecake but didn’t want to make the effort to actually taste like it, and was just settling for being squishy and disappointing. I made Steven take them into work because otherwise I would have punched them, individually, into my kitchen counters, and the one coworker who had any comment about them at all just said “The fillings kind of blah but the crust is amazing.”

Of course I ignored their crust recipe and used mine. So, way to fail, Mini Pies. They’re less messy to eat than a real pie, so maybe they would be good for a picnic or something, but I can’t see myself doing it again ever. It’s just too much work for not enough pay-off. Plus, I now hold an irrational grudge against this book. I made a beautiful delicious pie crust, Mini Pies, and you made me waste it on mediocrity.

Looking at the cookbooks I have yet to complete, they mostly involve desserts or cocktails, so the rest of this year is going to be fun.

Previously: Halfway Update