Introduction

Hello and welcome to my oh so exciting ELI! Well, I'm excited! I happen to love pie; not just eating it, baking it. This ELI I decided I wanted to do something fun, and preferably yummy. Pie just seemed the obvious choice for me. Now I have this cookbook called Williams-Sonoma Pie and Tart (ingenious title I know) with 42 recipes for... well... pies and tarts. The book's kinda self explanatory... Anywho. The point is that I wanted to cook my way through this cookbook. Sound kind of familiar? A girl blogging about cooking her way through a cookbook. Yeah, so this might have been partially inspired by the movie Julie and Julia. Even so, Julie didn't do an entire ELI on cooking her way through that book now did she. Though the Julia Childs Cookbook is pretty much an education in and of itself...  Well in the end I didn't actually make it all the way through the book.  In fact, about a week into this project I realized that there was NO WAY that was going to happen.  Instead I just stuck to doing one to two pies a week and ended up with getting through 14 pies (a long shot from 42 but when you see my posts you'll be glad I didn't do that many... then you'd have to read posts about ALL of them!)

There is actually another part to this ELI. The point of an ELI is for us to learn stuff (shocking right) and so that is what I wanted to do. In addition to cooking my way through that cookbook of mine, I wanted to learn about the history of pie and the chemistry behind pie. The history of pie was pretty fun to look into. I skimmed some stuff about it before I got started and so I knew a little bit about what I was getting into (note I said little). Pies started being made a long long time ago (don't ask me for years yet) and they weren't quite like the pies we have today. These pies had crusts that were sometimes up to four inches thick (now that's a lot of crust). The crust was to protect the meat (that would be what was inside the pie) during the baking process. So basically the crust was the pan... They didn't exactly try for flaky crusts back then. The other good thing about a ridiculously thick crust was that these pies could be put in the storage room and be kept for up to a YEAR! I would not want to eat a year old pie, but hey, pies were different back then... So that's a little glimpse at what I learned there.

Now for the chemistry behind pie. That portion pretty much focused on the pie crusts themselves.  After all, how was I supposed to get good at making something if I didn't even understand how it worked.

So yeah...  Welcome, welcome, welcome.  I already explained to you how to navigate this crazy thing on the home page so feel free to explore.  Oh, and if you need to get back to the home page to look at those instructions again then just scroll down to the bottom of the page and you'll see a home button.  I hope you like it!