Pie and Proverbs

5:30 am. Wake up, make coffee, pack lunch, cereal to bowl, add some milk, kiss goodbye, back to bed. 11:00 am. Spend the next hour trying to wake up again, make coffee, cereal to bowl, add some milk, read bible, try to write, run some errands, make dinner, go to work. 1:30 am. Come home from work, shower, sleep. Repeat. This little routine reaffirms my hatred for the foodservice industry. Good thing I didn't spend seven years of my life and two degrees on it...After years of slaving away working hard, I finally finished my BA in Hospitality Management. I thought, maybe someday I'll open a little French Cafe and spend my days baking pastries and sipping cappuccinos with Bille Holiday playing in the backgroud. People would be sitting in cozy armchairs indulging in one of my sweet treats, reading an old Jane Austin novel or talking about life with friends, the comforting sound of the crackling fireplace lulling us all into a sugary haze saturated with happiness and warmth. Sounds lovely doesn't it?

I had so many different dreams as a kid of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Dentist, mountain woman, owner of a maple syrup farm, housewife, owner of a french bakery. I tried to go with the last one only to realize that working with crazy foodies makes me want to gouge out my eyes and kill myself cry. The housewife option sounded pretty awesome too until I didn't work for a few months after getting married and spent my days pathetically binge watching so many TV shows that I could no longer differentiate between the characters' struggles and my own. Rough life, I know. A stay at home mom is the next path I want to try and walk down but that requires kids and I know my hubs wouldn't be too stoked on babies just yet. Not to mention I've got a bet to win and popping out a bunch of little nuggets would mean only one thing: I would lose the bet. Not gonna happen Lisa. Although I hate my current career path, when I do make that triumphant leap from disgruntled pastry person to #1 mom, I'm sure my kids will be fat and happy from all of the butter-filled, high-cholesterol-laden, sugar-infused goodies I'll be pumping out on the regular.

If there's one thing I've learned so far from living a slow-paced life in Montana it's this: at the end of this fleeting life, I don't want to look back at the wasted days spent sitting on the couch or chasing this stupid American Dream that's been force-fed into all of us since we could roll over and manage to mutter out a form of the word 'mom.' I want to look back on how I impacted the world, how I loved my husband the way God loves me and how I lived a life striving to do his will, not my own. I want to live the life of a Proverbs 31 woman, being a light to those in desperate need of a little sunshine and making delightfully delicious desserts along the way...like pie.

World's Best Pie Dough
Normally I wouldn't share this with anyone but now that I've decided to ditch my dreams of opening a cafe, why not give the world the gift of unbelievably mind-blowing pie dough?

Yield: 1 9" pie, bottom and top crusts
Time: roughly 10 minutes

1 lb pastry flour
1 tsp salt
10 oz butter, chilled
3/4 C ice water, about
1 Tbs fresh lemon juice or vinegar
2 Tbs sugar

1) Cut your chilled butter into 1" cubes. The butter must be chilled, like cut up and sitting in the fridge all night chilled, not like you stuck it in there for 30 minutes thinking that would be good enough. If the butter isn't super cold then the pie crust won't be permeated with little flakes of heaven.

2) Put the pastry flour, sugar and salt in a large, seriously large, unless you want flour all over your kitchen, bowl and mix it up a little so the sugar and salt are distributed throughout.

3) Measure out your ice water, literal ice water...with chunks of ice floating around.

4) Add the butter to the flour mixture and with your index fingers and thumbs, flatten out the chunks of butter, making sure they are all coated with flour. This step is what causes the super flakey crust.

5) Add the lemon juice or vinegar (I like to use organic apple cider vinegar) to the flour mixture and slowly add the ice water. I hardly ever use all of it so don't just dump it in, you want the mixture to be wet enough to create a ball of dough but not super sticky.

6) Form the dough into 2 balls, wrap in plastic wrap and store in the fridge.

Note: When making pie, use chilled dough, roll out the bottom dough first and place the pie plate with the rolled out dough in the freezer until you are ready to bake it off, this will maintain its shape. If the dough is warm when it is put in the oven then the dough will fall and it won't look pretty, but it will still taste amazing so do with it what you will. I like to pre-bake my bottom crust first. If you do this, make sure to poke holes in the bottom of your crust with a fork and put parchment with dried beans on it as well so it doesn't puff up. I also like to brush my top crust with egg wash (1 egg, a pinch of salt and a splash of water mixed together) and sprinkle it with organic cane sugar.

Chicken Pot Pie I made last week