Three Pie Crusts, One Sad Afternoon

On Saturday, I decided that I wanted to make a pie for a cookout Martin and I were going to on Sunday. What inspired me was a video of Martha Stewart making pate brisee. "Easy!" she said in the video. "Use that food processor, make that pie crust!"

"I have a food processor,"I thought. "And I like pie!" Surely these two would combine together. However, to echo the sentiments of my mother after she attempted a Martha recipe and spectacularly failed, "Well. Shit."

(I apologize to all G-rated viewers for my mother's eloquence).

I faithfully followed the "cold rules!" rule of pie crust making and stuck everything in the freezer, to get it nice and chilled. My water was iced. Heck, my salt was iced.

I halved the recipe, because I wanted a pre-baked shell for a cream pie. I stuck it all in my 3-cup food processor, pressed pulse and woah! Why am I covered with flour? Oh, right, I forgot to cover the feed tube.

I forge on. I should have taken that for the sign it was and run. I added a bit of water, pulsed and coarse-meal sized pieces stuck together when pinched. I took it out and tried to form it into a disk. It would not. :( So I put it all back in the food processor and added yet more water. And now ... it's sticky. That's bad. But I was mad. I didn't care. I formed my disc and stuck it in the fridge overnight.

Rolling it out wasn't so hard. Baking it, easy peasy. Eating it? Not so great. It tasted wonderful and had some awesome flavor going for it - a stick of butter will do that. But it was crispy and definitely not flaky the way I wanted.

So I decided to try again but this time, using a whole new recipe. I don't know why I decided I had to shake things up, but I did. My favorite blog used this recipe. Surely it would work for me!

Because I'm getting depressed all over again, thinking of the three pie crusts I made yesterday, I will summarize:

Made an all-shortening crust instead of all butter. Destroyed the second crust when it baked wrong in the oven (shriveled up and collapsed). Rolled out a third crust, which collapsed when I attempted to move it to the pie plate. Burst into tears. Martin made me re-roll out the third crust again, even though I just knew (KNEW!) it would not work. It worked. Damn him for being right all the time. Made a chocolate cream filling, which did not taste so good. So, in the end, I had two ruined pie crusts and one decent pie crust filled with an overly-sweet chocolate filling. It was not a good Sunday morning.