food, prepped

If the following photos seem lame, there will be more when we start chowing down at Saturday lunch. I need to tell my boss to get some vanilla ice cream so that people can have pie à la mode and maybe even ice-cream-sandwich cookies. I do hope that both the pie and the quiche have been sufficiently baked. If they haven't, my boss has a full-sized oven, so I might be able to use that. I also need to remember to take along plastic knives.

The pie is a bit ridiculous. I normally cut off the edge crust before I bake the pie. This means there's plenty of raw dough left over, which I would normally use for other things or (before my stroke) would just eat outright. This time around, without even knowing why, I cut off almost nothing, resulting in a hilariously huge crust edge, as you see below. I did try crimping the edge, but after baking, the crimping is barely visible. That's probably the result of too much water originally in the crust. The water bakes out, to be sure, but the crust puffs a lot. I need to learn to control how much water I add to the crust when putting it together.

The quiche, which is really a megaquiche, took a long time to bake, as is usually the case with megaquiches. I did an hour at around 255ºC (491ºF), then lowered the temp a bit, lowered the shelf height, and turned on the top burner for ten minutes. The quiche was still liquid, sloshing around, even after all that, so I re-raised the shelf and left the quiche in the oven for another forty minutes at around 175ºC (347ºF). I might have to bake it even more before leaving tomorrow, but the quiche seems firm now.

Salad prep was a lot of washing, rinsing, cutting, boxing, and bagging. I made two types of dressing, and the salad itself evolved from its original form: I've now added tomatoes, feta, and pomegranate seeds (which I'd forgotten last time). The boss didn't sound too excited about the salad; he mentioned that he's got ranch dressing, so as Uncle Roger might say, if he wants to go all white people with his salad, he's welcome to. Never mind the effort I'd put into making these dressings. The boss is a man of limited tastes. A bit like John McCrarey, he doesn't like to stray outside of his narrow, parochial comfort zone.

apple pie, suntanned in patches, with huge border crust

chickpeas for salad, pan-fried in ME spices and seasonings

quiche filling, dry elements only (no custard)

farro, cooked, fluffed, and fridged

salad, mummy-wrapped

megaquiche for five hungry people

almond-flour cookies, soon to be baked

first batch, smelling awesome

The second batch of cookies was in about thirty seconds longer, making it slightly darker than the first batch. This seems to happen every time I make cookies: it doesn't affect the taste, and with almond-flour cookies, there's never much of a crunch unless you overbake the cookies to the point of nearly burning them. So the second batch is fine—just a bit darker.

Here's hoping the luncheon goes well. I still think the Missus is going to have a lot of her own food prepped for us. Because as Koreans of the Korean War generation know, we meager, stingy Americans never bring enough food. (Younger-generation Koreans are just as stingy and meager and portion-measuring as their American brethren. Older Koreans, remembering wartime, still often begin conversations with, "Did you eat?"/"밥 먹었나?") Truth be told, the boss's wife is probably younger than I am, but she has always struck me as old-school.

That quiche smells really awesome, by the way, as do the cookies. When I left the apartment to do a bit of shopping and came back down the hallway toward my apartment, I could smell the quiche's seductive fragrance from all the way down the hall. Strangely, the apple pie didn't produce that sort of smell as it baked. Because of the super-buttery crust, the butter drippings escaped the pie tin and slightly burned on the floor of the oven, producing an unpleasant odor. This happens all the time, and I need to find a way to catch the drippings (maybe tin foil, which I used with the quiche). I'm glad I baked the quiche second, not first, to rid the hallway of unpleasant, pie-related smells and replace them with lovely aromas to entice my neighbors.

Fingers crossed for the luncheon.