Inadequacy
Oct. 31st, 2010 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceTonight, I am mostly making chicken pie. And demonstrating to my own satisfaction, once again, that I am physically unable to make pastry.
Leastways, I have to find a work-around. Which does not involve buying it pre-made, because I read once where nobody can call themselves a good cook until they are a good pastry-cook, so I'm too damn proud to give it up. Besides, y'know, I wouldn't. I don't. I buy ingredients, not foods.
But: I cannot rub fat into flour. I just can't. I know all about keeping it cold, and I have read instructions on technique, and I had a childhood of watching my mother do it effortlessly; but my mother is at the other end of the country, besides being ninety and retired-from-cooking, and I am here and incapable. There is all the pain thing, of course - it hurts my hands, and my forearms up to the elbow, and that's when my shoulders aren't bad - but I can work through pain. Hell, I can knead dough and whisk egg-whites if I have to. But I cannot rub fat into flour. It doesn't go. I work away, all fingertips and lightness, and I still have lumps of fat in flour, it never ever resembles bloody breadcrumbs. So I end up giving up and tipping it into the food processor and giving it a whizz. Which does the job just fine, and then I can take over and pull it together with a dash of water and make an okay pastry. But I always feel that I cheated, damn it; and I really don't know what I'm doing wrong.
Also, I want to bake pie and heat the residue of potatoes-and-cabbage at the same time, in the same oven; and the little casserole dish I need to make this happen is utterly inaccessible, on account of contents-of-cupboard heaped high between me and it. I can see it, but I cannot reach it. Grr.
Leastways, I have to find a work-around. Which does not involve buying it pre-made, because I read once where nobody can call themselves a good cook until they are a good pastry-cook, so I'm too damn proud to give it up. Besides, y'know, I wouldn't. I don't. I buy ingredients, not foods.
But: I cannot rub fat into flour. I just can't. I know all about keeping it cold, and I have read instructions on technique, and I had a childhood of watching my mother do it effortlessly; but my mother is at the other end of the country, besides being ninety and retired-from-cooking, and I am here and incapable. There is all the pain thing, of course - it hurts my hands, and my forearms up to the elbow, and that's when my shoulders aren't bad - but I can work through pain. Hell, I can knead dough and whisk egg-whites if I have to. But I cannot rub fat into flour. It doesn't go. I work away, all fingertips and lightness, and I still have lumps of fat in flour, it never ever resembles bloody breadcrumbs. So I end up giving up and tipping it into the food processor and giving it a whizz. Which does the job just fine, and then I can take over and pull it together with a dash of water and make an okay pastry. But I always feel that I cheated, damn it; and I really don't know what I'm doing wrong.
Also, I want to bake pie and heat the residue of potatoes-and-cabbage at the same time, in the same oven; and the little casserole dish I need to make this happen is utterly inaccessible, on account of contents-of-cupboard heaped high between me and it. I can see it, but I cannot reach it. Grr.