i have just spent the last 4 hours making 1 silly little pumpkin pie. this is in addition to the 30 hours i spent yesterday and the day before baking 2 loaves of bread.

i was always afraid of bread. afraid of over-kneading. afraid it wouldn’t rise. my experience with sourdough starter (and lots and lots of flour and a couple of fearless mistakes later) has taught me that bread is a lot more forgiving than i had previously estimated. i must say, it also helps to document everything (down to how much oxygen i breathe in while kneading the dough…just kidding…almost). as an aside, i think my oven has lost 50 degrees. this might explain why yesterday i baked my loaves longer than usual and they didn’t turn as dark as usual – but with the proper internal temperature.

but i digress…i am a sous chef. not a chef. i enjoy measuring, chopping, putting everything in little bowls all lined up; i enjoy having everything at the ready.

this is a compensatory mechanism as i hate *hate* scrambling at the last minute to get and measure ingredients and have my food burn. i am like this with the rest of my life, too. i have finally diluted my everyday bag into a reasonable quantity of necessary items that also don’t break my back every time i carry it. take, for example, the paella and entertaining mise en place photos above. i took a leisurely afternoon getting everything ready – primarily because there was some doubt as to whether m would be home to participate in the cooking. i have never cooked paella by myself before so i was damn well gonna be prepared. as it turned out, m did get home with plenty of time to spare, but was the hostess goddess while i prepared the paella (which, thankfully, turned out well despite my anxiety and application of too much heat at first).

how does this relate to pumpkin pie? i’m making it for mp and ss (ellie’s parents) for christmas because ss *loves* pumpkin pie and mp doesn’t – i love torturing him in this way. the last time we made this was years ago for thanksgiving. m decided she would try her hand at goat cheese cheesecake and a cooks illustrated recipe for pumpkin pie which included sweet potatoes in the recipe. we were up until 3 am thanksgiving morning making our 2nd and 3rd attempts, respectively, of the two desserts. i remember running to ralphs at 1am to get more canned sweet potato. ahhh, good times. i am not a better baker than m, but i’m certainly more disciplined with a recipe and disciplined at following instructions.

which is why this silly little pumpkin pie deserves such a lengthy introduction and backstory. essentially, i screwed this pie up from the very beginning and failed to follow some crucial instructions. please let me elaborate via photos and witty text:

this is my first pastry crust. i made a crust for a leek and mushroom savory tart and we made the crusts for the thanksgiving tarts/quiches so i felt confident (or, at least, feeling fearless) i could make a homemade crust for this pie. for the goat cheese cheesecake and pumpkin pies made eons ago, we used store bought graham cracker crusts. i always regretted doing that but, looking back, am also grateful i didn’t have to make this crust 5 times. baby steps. if you look carefully, you will see it is incredibly uneven and doesn’t spread to the edge of the pan. this is because i didn’t add enough water to the dough before i chilled it so it was crumbly before chilling and just as crumbly after. i rolled it out – still crumbly. i gathered it up, ready to toss it into the garbage and start over but then it wadded itself up into a nice ball. i refloured my surface and rolled it out and was relatively happy with the result, despite my inability to roll dough into a circle.

next step: chill it again and then poke it full of holes:

this i am very good at – why doesn’t my fork acumen translate to the rolling pin?

next is to bake the crust while i prepare my other ingredients. i was supposed to remove it just as the center interior started to darken, but i think i may have been 45 seconds too late. literally. i gave it an extra minute and this is what happened:

not a disaster, but not accurate, either.

about preparing those other ingredients…i gathered them up all nicely measured into my food processor (also fudging on the brown sugar which should be dark, but i insisted on using light – i do that a lot). i probably have never used the proper brown sugar in any recipe.

at some point in this process – exactly after all the ingredients were combined, i realized i was using the wrong recipe. the recipe which calls for the sweet potatoes does not call for the pastry crust i just made and it doesn’t have a grain of brown sugar in it. f***!!!

breathe. regroup. (i *thought* i needed fresh ginger. and i thought it was weird the recipe called for ground dried ginger. but obviously i just chocked it up to my fudging on the ingredients as i am fond of doing.)

i proceed to talk to myself trying to pull myself together. ok, so you’ll make the filling for the wrong recipe tomorrow – all you need is another can of pumpkin filling. this crust you have? it’s missing the vodka, but it still makes a 9-inch pie and it still cooks for the same amount of time, even if it’s not supposed to look like it was in a forkfight and lost. ok, good. start adding the wet ingredients to the saucepan and keep on truckin’…

i proceed to follow the instructions for the (wrong) crust that i have, i don an oven mitt and gently press down on the crust that may be bubbling. and i burn my arm on the oven rack that i didn’t remove.

why didn’t i remove the rack?!? why make my job more difficult? because i’m soooooo good at it.

meanwhile, i’m also getting tiny burns all over myself as i vigorously stir my wet ingredients in a saucepan, essentially cooking them to yield a nice dry pie, and flipping them all over myself and the kitchen at the same time. with that finished and my pie crust a little too dark (remember?), i proceed to pour the filling into the crust – that uneven crust – and the filling overflows into the pie pan. i also have too much filling because my crust wasn’t pressed against the pan as strongly as it should have been and if it had stretched edge to edge, it would’ve probably contained all the filling.

at this point, all i can do is quickly put the pie in the oven and hope for the best. if nothing else, everyone will know this was a homemade pie. as i told someone yesterday: the desire to make tasty food already gives you a headstart in having it turn out ok. but even as i tell myself this, i can see the filling seep over the edge of that weak spot in the crust. please, oven, please bake the leaky filling quickly.

and now i present the fruits of my labor, nearly 48 hours worth…the pie didn’t turn out as bad as i thought it would:

epilogue: as for the leftover filling, i poured it into a cheesecake pan, baked it at 400 for 5 minutes and then at 300 for 10 minutes. it also appears edible even though i overcooked it by 10 degrees.