In case you didn't know, baking pies takes a LONG TIME. The pie crust alone can take an hour... sometimes two when I'm REALLY distracted. (Bad things tend to happen when I get distracted while trying to bake. Very bad things.) It all just depends on how many pie crusts I'm making at one time and how dedicated I am. In view of the facts that pies take so long, and I plan on baking lots and lots of pies, I have decided on a schedule for when I am going to bake my delicious (I hope) pies. Aka, my Master Plan. One of the nice things about ELIs is that we don't actually have to be on school grounds during the class time (well... except for Tuesdays when we meet as a class and then whenever we meet with Wissner). This means that on days when I don't have to be at the school I have a lovely hour and a half when I can be baking pies! So here's the plan. On Mondays I go home during ELI and make up the pie crusts I will be needing that day. If it's a day when I'm making one crust pies then I'll whip up two crusts. (I typically do two pies at a time.) If I'm making two crust pies then I'll have to quadruple my recipe. This way when I come home from school I'll already have my pie crusts ready (ingenious I know). Then I can just make the filling for whatever type of pie I am making and, tada, two delicious pies ready to be eaten. One pie will be for my family that Monday night, the other will be for my ELI class meeting the next day. It would also be really convenient if I ended up having Mentor Meetings on Tuesday because then I would have pie with me already... Now if I'm going to manage to get through 42 recipes in one semester I'm going to need to do more than one type of pie a week. This has lead me to my Friday plan. It's pretty much my Monday plan all over again. (Why change something if it works, right.) So crusts during ELI time, filling after school. Then my family will be able to have a Friday night pie (my family is going to be having a lot of pie... I wonder if they'll ever get sick of it), and my friends and I will have a pie for our Merlin get-togethers (don't ask). Days when I'm not working on pies I'll be looking into the history and chemistry aspect of my ELI. It seems like a pretty good plan to me!
Part of my goal with this ELI is to improve my baking, right? Well how on earth am I supposed to know if I'm improving or not if I don't have anything to measure with?! Not to worry, I've found a solution to this. I have decided to give a survey to everyone who eats my pies (yes every time). Here's the survey:
So this way hopefully I'll get a pretty good idea of what people do and don't like and what I need to keep working on... I think that's pretty much the plan for now. It feels like the semester is already slipping away and I haven't actually made any pies yet (not a good thing) so tomorrow I start with the first pie in the book: Apple Pie. I've used this recipe at least a dozen times so it should be fairly simple. I'll be sure to post after I make it!
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