Pie is such a gift. My wife died nearly ten years ago and soon afterwards, I took up pie baking, which is something that she loved to do (I just loved to eat it — since childhood I've had a birthday pie instead of cake). I had all the stuff, after all. I got good at it and love to share them with friends at gatherings, or even just give them away entirely. Right before COVID, I did a Friday Pie Day thing where I gifted a pie to someone in town based on social media discussions. One time, someone got it for her coworkers who had just shipped a tough release.
When everyone got into baking early covid I couldn’t understand why no one was baking anything, like, good. No pizza or pie or cake or muffins or banana bread or even a damn focaccia. The world collectively just decided the end-all be-all of baking was… sourdough.
Sourdough is fantastic, I have two loaves finishing their overnight chill in my fridge right now, will bake them after dinner.
I was baking sourdough since before the pandemic, and will continue baking in the future. It's a bit of work, but it's not too much work and the results are pretty damn fantastic.
Focaccia though, if I baked that regularly I'd have to go back on a GLP-1. Focaccia taught me to read the seals on olive oil in the supermarket and actually pick the right one for the break.
I do find it kind of wild how intimidating most people I know find baking. Get a food scale and follow the directions and you're good to go and will have something respectable and delicious. As with anything, you can dive deep and go extreme with it. But baking delicious food is not rocket science.
It wasn't for no reason at all though. There were concerns about availability of yeast, which isn't used in sourdough. (Valid concerns or not, I have no idea.)
When I graduated from university, my dad had just died, my mom had cancer, and there was no employment for a year. I made a lot of pies and got really good at making crusts. Yep, it was always great when I brought in a real pie, homemade.
Totally. I started baking pies because it was a tradition in my family and my wife can’t cook. To make sure my kids had the family food tradition I learned to bake. Once you get a system down, like anything else, it’s not that hard. Plus pie filling has time to bloom if you make it day before. Pie dough can be made ahead and freezes well. Individually these things aren’t hard or time consuming.
I started making my own simple bread and now I can’t eat store bought bread. Just takes like sawdust to me. It’s not really all that hard. Add a little rosemary and some olive oil and it’s delicious. No need to fuss over sourdough (over rated in my opinion). Over time you learn how ingredients work and what ratios work. So becomes easier and easier. I can throw together amazing corn bread and be eating it a little more than half hour later.
Yes, me too. Reading the caveat "– and she would give each pie away" made a lot more sense.
It's a social commitment at least as much as a creative/culinary one, and since there aren't a lot of people you'd want to give a pie minus a slice to, that keeps the extra calories under control.
There are some old 18th century pies they cooked in boiling water inside a bag which could be quite spherical. Townsends on youtube has some videos on it.
The first two things that spring to mind are pasties from the UK (which are not usually spherical but can get quite hemispherical), and the "UFO-Döner" from Germany (which are more oblate spheroids). Maybe by combining these ideas, your friend can get closer to their dream?
I’m of the belief that doing just about anything every single day for a year will change your life! A key for me has been to “lower the bar” so that I can keep the promise to myself and maintain momentum through days of low energy or enthusiasm, e.g. playing the guitar for 1 minute, or writing 1 sentence.
a stranger i once talked to at the gym told me "every workout is better than the workout you are not doing" and that kinda changed my perspective on that topic.
Yeah I go bouldering even on off days to “stay in the rhythm”. And I do have honestly terrible days where I feel I’m struggling climbs of even a grade below my comfort level, but at least I went lol.
Yeah, doing a small thing daily can add up so fast.
When I started my niche-musueums.com website I bootstrapped it by posting a new museum I had been to every day for a month. It took 15-30 minutes a day and within a few weeks I had a site I was really proud of.
I think the key is to give yourself permission to stop without feeling guilty about it. Any time I start a new streak like this I deliberately tell myself that it's not going to be forever and I can stop any time for any reason.
I took a 20-minute walk every day for a year. I don't know that it changed my life, but I think it kept me healthier than I otherwise would have been at the height of the pandemic, and it also gave me a point of pride in saying that I had the resolve and discipline to do something every day for a full year, come what may (did?).
It taught me the importance of ritual, and it also taught me how... incredibly imperceptive a lot of people are. (I was living with a family member at the time, who was constantly asking me if I was "getting out of the house" regularly. Yes. Every day. For a month, and then 3 months, and then half-a-year, and then almost a full year, and then more than a year. On that note, it's essential to not let others' expectations cloud your appreciation for what you're doing. Somehow, it had wormed its way into my subconscious rationale that part of the reason that I was taking my walks was to live up to their expectations. When it became clear that they didn't really care - at least not enough to notice - that kind of deflated things a bit.)
I decided to make rotis every day for a month (am male of Indian origin who hadn't ever cooked breads), AND eat them. The first one was completely inedible. The 30th day's rotis were edible, but nothing like what women in my family make. But still, edible.
Eventually had the confidence to experiment with making Naan.
This led to experimenting with Asian-style Pot-Stickers.
The main benefit to me was confidence, and belief in pmarca's "you can just do things".
Why didn't you just ask the women in your family what they did to make them? It shouldn't take 30 attempts to get a basic flatbread recipe to be edible. It's not like all the women in your family devised recipes on their own - they just watched other women make them and learned how to do it that way.
This is like asking why someone built a text editor as a hobby project when Microsoft Word exists. There is value in experimentation and play, in trying to understand things from first principles. It would often be faster to just ask others, but if everyone did that, we would miss out on a lot of innovation.
In my experience, dealing with flour is an art, not a science. You just have to do it over, and over, and over, until you internalize the parameters and can adjust to them on the fly. The look, the feel, the temperature, the smell, etc.
I challenge each and every one of you to make a pie by the end of the month.
I made one, for the first time in my life, last week. It brought me tremendous joy not only to make it, but to have something nice to share with friends.
My grandma made Platonically Ideal Pies, and I took up the art years ago. Mine, if I say so myself, are quite good, given that with Grandma's example I know what I'm shooting for.
I haven't made one for a few years, though - having a pie in my house is a recipe for me eating 5000 calories of pie and vanilla ice cream over the next few days.
When my grandma died a few years ago, I asked my aunts if I could have one of her pie pans. Apparently none of her other 17 grandkids thought to ask that - so I got all three (philistines!). Those basic metal pans are among my most cherished possessions.
In case you did not actually nail perfect, flaky crust the first time, that's a fun parameter to try to optimize. I finally got it at some point, and when I did, I realized that all those old cookbooks that said things like "use little water" and "keep the dough cold"---all the tricks where I thought "that has to be a myth"---turned out to be essential. The Joy of Cooking is full of old wisdom like this that has taken me ages to appreciate.
The "trick" to baking all kinds of things well for the first time is to follow the recipe fanatically. It says high protein flour? Use that, not all purpose flour. It says 500g caster sugar? Don't think that's going to be too sweet and add 400g, the sugar is where the texture comes from (and there's plenty of less sweet recipes to choose instead). It says make sure the dough is chilled? Chill the damn dough!
Once you've baked it perfectly to the exact recipe a few times, then you can start adapting.
Of course, there will come a point in your skill level where you will have the intuition to adapt recipes that you've never cooked before. But many people assume they can do that immediately, fail, then assume they can't cook and give up.
I will say though that the other biggest area where people fail is having a janky oven that can't maintain a stable temperature, or where you set it to 200C but it only reaches 160C. So an oven thermometer is a useful tool to buy.
I did this recently, and you know what I really loved about it? It's a great entry-level baking activity where the upside is that you have a pie (something you can gift or just eat!) and the downside is that you have a sort of cobbler.
You really can't !@#$ up a pie. Omelette is another good one. At worse you have scrambled eggs.
I mean, yes, at worse you burn your neighbourhood down and your dog runs away. But in terms of the more likely failure modes like screwing up the dough, breaking it, messing up how watery it is, etc. you can mostly just keep baking until it's done, mix it up, put into bowls, serve with ice cream, down the hatch.
Even broader, honestly. Make something culinary! It's amazing what the simple tactile experience of making something can bring when so much of our existence is doing things by proxy.
A fun hobby I picked up during Covid was trying to cook food from countries I had never been to - since traveling anywhere wasn't an option.
Pick a country, research what food it has that you've never tried, find a few online recipes and YouTube guides and give it a go.
This was a ton of fun. I have no idea if anything I cooked was even remotely like the authentic original, but it was still a very rewarding exercise.
If you live somewhere with a lot of international supermarkets (the SF Bay Area is great for those) it also gives you an excuse for a shopping adventure for ingredients.
Not to take anything from any other activity that someone embraces, but I imagine that for the majority of people in the developed world, taking a 1 hour walk every day would be the most "life changing" thing you could do.
The point of the pies was the connections it forced her to make with people in her life and then ultimately strangers. Finding 365 people to give pies to is probably harder than baking them all.
Taking a walk alone would be missing the main point.
The sarcastic individual in me saw the title and thought "heh, and you got diabetes?" But I was pleasantly surprised after reading it about how wholesome this was.
She is obviously a sweet lady that you would like to have as a neighbor. But I would not include garden variety pie in the wholesome category. The indulgence won't kill you, but it isn't healthy. Apples from her backyard tree are wholesome.
These kinds of stories may seem silly to some (certainly it would seem silly to my past self), but I think these narratives of personal journeys are going to become more and more important to humanity as AI and automation take over most jobs.
As someone who loves pie and has far fewer friends and family than the person this story is about, baking a pie every day for a year would also change my life.
If you just place the pie to cool on your window sill, the smell will cause some nearby hobos to float over, or so cartoons have lead me to believe. Then you'll have some friends.
Also neighbours tend to be very glad to receive free stuff :) I usually end up with way too many Basil plants every season and give them away, gotten to know some new neighbours that way!
Beautiful. I recently saw a youtube video [1] on radical neighboring that really inspired me. Led me to another book on the gift economy [2]. All which to say, I now always bake two loaves of bread. One I keep for the family, the other I give away.
I am hearing rumors that B2B sales is rebounding back to more in-person meetings. Cold emails don't work anymore. I've heard similar tales of current teens early-twenties that there is a trend of doing things in real life again. But... more likely if you start measuring it people are more reclusive than ever, and doing things that used to be normal is now considered "niche and trendy". Our sales process at least is very online-meeting oriented...
Baking everyday as a way to keep a professional identity is an interesting idea. Being semi-retired, I’ve noticed that I am starting to struggle the curiosity and motivation that kept me going when I still worked. This article makes me think I should pick up a habit of doing some “work” daily.
> Hardin Woods would bake [...] using fresh ingredients local to her home in Salem, Oregon
> She baked her first pie, a lemon meringue
> The next day Hardin Woods made a peach pie
> After that came a chocolate cream pie
Does lime, peach and chocolate ripen within the same season in Oregon? Vickie cooking for is community is already touching, this claim about freshness and locality is skimmed by people who are already convinced, spotted by those who disagree and raise critics of the skeptics.
Right, the location is off too! The ingredients probably aren't sourced in Oregon after moving to California, but anyway the season ("fresh") and location ("local") point stands. I guess she use local eggs.
It is something hard wired in our brains. Cooking, social connection, giving, all in one. We evolved to cook for each other. No wonder she is damn happy. Being 60 helps too.
Christmas 2013 my mom gave me a nice stand mixer. She knew I like to cook and bake and owned a bread maker but she knew I always felt bread makers were good but just fell short or being great. This gift also changed my life forever.
Days later on New Years I decided my resolution would be to not buy bread for an entire year and make it all myself. Also I was a father or 3 and funds tight back then so buying bread for school lunches all the time really added up.
So I started making bread and did not buy any for months. Slowly it became better and slowly I started making other items like pizza dough and bagels and cinnamon buns. I got to a point where I no longer needed to measure and could just free pour ingredients and my baking was really good.
Then soon into 2014 I decided to buy a huge stock pile of flour and several other ingredients from Costco so had like 200lbs of flour and lots of oil and pasta sauce and chicken and suddenly work laid half of us off until things picked up. Having all those ingredients saved me and my kids. Never did they go hungry. We ate lots of pizza and always had bread and bagels and if I had to buy it already made there is no way I would have made it.
I did not achieve my resolution on July 14 2024 me and my wife split up suddenly after some shenanigans on her end and I was suddenly the primary care giver for 3 kids and the stress was too much and I did not have it in me to continue making bread but kept strong for my kids and never let on my struggles.
Lastly even though I did not achieve my resolution I did make it almost 7 full month's making bread and I never lost it. I still make bread but my biggest hit is homemade pizza. My kids struggle to eat store bought stuff as my home made is just so much better. If anyone would like some simple pointers on how to make amazing pizza dough comment and I would be happy to give a few quick tips.
Yes please! I'm getting pretty decent at bread now, I've been making a loaf every three days or so for a few months. But I would love to add pizza dough to my skills.
My biggest tip is so easy and after starting it the difference was immediately noticable. And this applies to pizza or bread dough.
There are many factors that will change how your dough tastes, feels and bakes. Texture is a massive factor on how people rate your bread or other doughs. Two big factors that massively help with that are as follows.
First knowing how long you must knead the dough for. I won't get into too much detail for this just look up dough window pane test on YouTube and there are lots of videos. The TLDR is you knead until you can take a small ball of the dough and gently spreading it with your thumbs should be able to make a thin pain that lets light through easily without ripping. If it rips you need more kneading. Again look at some videos.
The BIGGEST improvement to my doughs was when I started adding powdered milk. I use about half cup to 3/4 cup when making enough pizza dough for about 3 large pizza. For a couple loafs of bread probably half cup is plenty. Again lots of information on why powdered milk helps but will let you research if you want to know more.
All I can say is that my dough was always good before milk powder but the day I saw the suggestion to use it and did I can't go back. I have had friends say my pizza is the best they ever had. Last year my ex asked me if I wanted to come meet her friends and some girls but also would I mind making some pizza dough lol!
Honestly there are lots of tips for good bread and dough but just adding milk powder will up your bread huge. Good luck I hope you give it a go if so also hope you come back and comment how it went. Cheers!
Sweet potato pie is at least as good as a pumpkin pie if you've never tried it. If you're making filling from scratch, it's easier too. I learned not too long ago that the "pumpkin pie" my mom made every year was actually a sweet potato pie... that kind of blew my mind.
Is it just me or since The Guardian left twitter/X they've really been ramping up their paywalls/nagwalls? Love or hate X/Elon, that was really a dumb move on their part.
Pie is such a gift. My wife died nearly ten years ago and soon afterwards, I took up pie baking, which is something that she loved to do (I just loved to eat it — since childhood I've had a birthday pie instead of cake). I had all the stuff, after all. I got good at it and love to share them with friends at gatherings, or even just give them away entirely. Right before COVID, I did a Friday Pie Day thing where I gifted a pie to someone in town based on social media discussions. One time, someone got it for her coworkers who had just shipped a tough release.
When everyone got into baking early covid I couldn’t understand why no one was baking anything, like, good. No pizza or pie or cake or muffins or banana bread or even a damn focaccia. The world collectively just decided the end-all be-all of baking was… sourdough.
Sourdough is fantastic, I have two loaves finishing their overnight chill in my fridge right now, will bake them after dinner.
I was baking sourdough since before the pandemic, and will continue baking in the future. It's a bit of work, but it's not too much work and the results are pretty damn fantastic.
Focaccia though, if I baked that regularly I'd have to go back on a GLP-1. Focaccia taught me to read the seals on olive oil in the supermarket and actually pick the right one for the break.
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Sourdough is the bomb though. I agree about the lack of variety, but in its defense, sourdough starter can be used for a variety of other baked goods.
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I do find it kind of wild how intimidating most people I know find baking. Get a food scale and follow the directions and you're good to go and will have something respectable and delicious. As with anything, you can dive deep and go extreme with it. But baking delicious food is not rocket science.
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It wasn't for no reason at all though. There were concerns about availability of yeast, which isn't used in sourdough. (Valid concerns or not, I have no idea.)
For one thing, yeast was in short supply, so if you wanted to bake regularly, sourdough was a good option if you could keep it going.
I baked a Napoleon cake. It was amazing, took 11 eggs and it was the one and only.
Not trying to gain weight when being stuck inside, maybe.
Maybe because the large time investment and trial+error in making good dough provided something to focus on when stuck inside.
Well, as a less-advanced baker, I get the most pleasure from baking bread.
Plus, I can eat it without getting fat.
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well, i love the smell of sourdough bread in the morning
When I graduated from university, my dad had just died, my mom had cancer, and there was no employment for a year. I made a lot of pies and got really good at making crusts. Yep, it was always great when I brought in a real pie, homemade.
Totally. I started baking pies because it was a tradition in my family and my wife can’t cook. To make sure my kids had the family food tradition I learned to bake. Once you get a system down, like anything else, it’s not that hard. Plus pie filling has time to bloom if you make it day before. Pie dough can be made ahead and freezes well. Individually these things aren’t hard or time consuming.
I started making my own simple bread and now I can’t eat store bought bread. Just takes like sawdust to me. It’s not really all that hard. Add a little rosemary and some olive oil and it’s delicious. No need to fuss over sourdough (over rated in my opinion). Over time you learn how ingredients work and what ratios work. So becomes easier and easier. I can throw together amazing corn bread and be eating it a little more than half hour later.
I'm so sorry for your loss.
What a wonderful way to keep your wife's memory alive.
For me the change would be to become spherical. That would simplify some calculations.
Yes, me too. Reading the caveat "– and she would give each pie away" made a lot more sense.
It's a social commitment at least as much as a creative/culinary one, and since there aren't a lot of people you'd want to give a pie minus a slice to, that keeps the extra calories under control.
Yep. And if one gives away the "QC Passed" pies - then as your skill improves, you're eating an ever-shrinking fraction of your output.
And you feel like you're growing ever-thinner, as all your friends & neighbors eat more and more pies. ;)
Do I exercise and eat healthy?
"Yes, I am in shape (round is a shape)"
A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).
I heard circles are also related to pi but have not had the time to confirm yet.
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There are some old 18th century pies they cooked in boiling water inside a bag which could be quite spherical. Townsends on youtube has some videos on it.
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The first two things that spring to mind are pasties from the UK (which are not usually spherical but can get quite hemispherical), and the "UFO-Döner" from Germany (which are more oblate spheroids). Maybe by combining these ideas, your friend can get closer to their dream?
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I wonder if they could look to dim sum for inspiration? A apple dumbling is basically just a round apple pie right?
> A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).
Could also do it on pi approximation day (July 22), then one doesn't have to be so exact about it.
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Heating the middle has to be a pain. And cutting it…
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half way there, now you just have to find the frictionless vacuum
The pie calculation for spherical you would be 3*volume / 4*radius^3.
Eating enough pie could help with that
I’m of the belief that doing just about anything every single day for a year will change your life! A key for me has been to “lower the bar” so that I can keep the promise to myself and maintain momentum through days of low energy or enthusiasm, e.g. playing the guitar for 1 minute, or writing 1 sentence.
Similarly, just showing up at the gym/hobby/sport is huge. Even if you do next to nothing.
a stranger i once talked to at the gym told me "every workout is better than the workout you are not doing" and that kinda changed my perspective on that topic.
Yeah I go bouldering even on off days to “stay in the rhythm”. And I do have honestly terrible days where I feel I’m struggling climbs of even a grade below my comfort level, but at least I went lol.
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Atomic Habits is a great book for little things like this that make a big difference when compounded with time.
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The best form of exercise is the one you can consistently stick with.
For me, that got shot down in flames over the winter because I kept getting sick. :/
Someone said it, I forget who: 90% of life is just showing up
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Yeah, doing a small thing daily can add up so fast.
When I started my niche-musueums.com website I bootstrapped it by posting a new museum I had been to every day for a month. It took 15-30 minutes a day and within a few weeks I had a site I was really proud of.
I think the key is to give yourself permission to stop without feeling guilty about it. Any time I start a new streak like this I deliberately tell myself that it's not going to be forever and I can stop any time for any reason.
I love your website! Your url has a typo, here's it fixed in the meantime https://www.niche-museums.com
It's basically a form of meditation. It's a great way to get your life back on track
I took a 20-minute walk every day for a year. I don't know that it changed my life, but I think it kept me healthier than I otherwise would have been at the height of the pandemic, and it also gave me a point of pride in saying that I had the resolve and discipline to do something every day for a full year, come what may (did?).
It taught me the importance of ritual, and it also taught me how... incredibly imperceptive a lot of people are. (I was living with a family member at the time, who was constantly asking me if I was "getting out of the house" regularly. Yes. Every day. For a month, and then 3 months, and then half-a-year, and then almost a full year, and then more than a year. On that note, it's essential to not let others' expectations cloud your appreciation for what you're doing. Somehow, it had wormed its way into my subconscious rationale that part of the reason that I was taking my walks was to live up to their expectations. When it became clear that they didn't really care - at least not enough to notice - that kind of deflated things a bit.)
I decided to make rotis every day for a month (am male of Indian origin who hadn't ever cooked breads), AND eat them. The first one was completely inedible. The 30th day's rotis were edible, but nothing like what women in my family make. But still, edible.
Eventually had the confidence to experiment with making Naan.
This led to experimenting with Asian-style Pot-Stickers.
The main benefit to me was confidence, and belief in pmarca's "you can just do things".
Why didn't you just ask the women in your family what they did to make them? It shouldn't take 30 attempts to get a basic flatbread recipe to be edible. It's not like all the women in your family devised recipes on their own - they just watched other women make them and learned how to do it that way.
This is like asking why someone built a text editor as a hobby project when Microsoft Word exists. There is value in experimentation and play, in trying to understand things from first principles. It would often be faster to just ask others, but if everyone did that, we would miss out on a lot of innovation.
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In my experience, dealing with flour is an art, not a science. You just have to do it over, and over, and over, until you internalize the parameters and can adjust to them on the fly. The look, the feel, the temperature, the smell, etc.
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I challenge each and every one of you to make a pie by the end of the month.
I made one, for the first time in my life, last week. It brought me tremendous joy not only to make it, but to have something nice to share with friends.
My grandma made Platonically Ideal Pies, and I took up the art years ago. Mine, if I say so myself, are quite good, given that with Grandma's example I know what I'm shooting for.
I haven't made one for a few years, though - having a pie in my house is a recipe for me eating 5000 calories of pie and vanilla ice cream over the next few days.
When my grandma died a few years ago, I asked my aunts if I could have one of her pie pans. Apparently none of her other 17 grandkids thought to ask that - so I got all three (philistines!). Those basic metal pans are among my most cherished possessions.
In case you did not actually nail perfect, flaky crust the first time, that's a fun parameter to try to optimize. I finally got it at some point, and when I did, I realized that all those old cookbooks that said things like "use little water" and "keep the dough cold"---all the tricks where I thought "that has to be a myth"---turned out to be essential. The Joy of Cooking is full of old wisdom like this that has taken me ages to appreciate.
The "trick" to baking all kinds of things well for the first time is to follow the recipe fanatically. It says high protein flour? Use that, not all purpose flour. It says 500g caster sugar? Don't think that's going to be too sweet and add 400g, the sugar is where the texture comes from (and there's plenty of less sweet recipes to choose instead). It says make sure the dough is chilled? Chill the damn dough!
Once you've baked it perfectly to the exact recipe a few times, then you can start adapting.
Of course, there will come a point in your skill level where you will have the intuition to adapt recipes that you've never cooked before. But many people assume they can do that immediately, fail, then assume they can't cook and give up.
I will say though that the other biggest area where people fail is having a janky oven that can't maintain a stable temperature, or where you set it to 200C but it only reaches 160C. So an oven thermometer is a useful tool to buy.
Do it! Making a pie might seem unapproachable, but it will all work out. I have never failed to make a pie that brought some happiness into the world.
I did this recently, and you know what I really loved about it? It's a great entry-level baking activity where the upside is that you have a pie (something you can gift or just eat!) and the downside is that you have a sort of cobbler. You really can't !@#$ up a pie. Omelette is another good one. At worse you have scrambled eggs.
I mean, yes, at worse you burn your neighbourhood down and your dog runs away. But in terms of the more likely failure modes like screwing up the dough, breaking it, messing up how watery it is, etc. you can mostly just keep baking until it's done, mix it up, put into bowls, serve with ice cream, down the hatch.
[delayed]
My "pie" is barbecue ribs. I've made them many, many times, and I've never eaten them all by myself.
Once I fed about 20 friends--one of the best days I've lived.
Even broader, honestly. Make something culinary! It's amazing what the simple tactile experience of making something can bring when so much of our existence is doing things by proxy.
A fun hobby I picked up during Covid was trying to cook food from countries I had never been to - since traveling anywhere wasn't an option.
Pick a country, research what food it has that you've never tried, find a few online recipes and YouTube guides and give it a go.
This was a ton of fun. I have no idea if anything I cooked was even remotely like the authentic original, but it was still a very rewarding exercise.
If you live somewhere with a lot of international supermarkets (the SF Bay Area is great for those) it also gives you an excuse for a shopping adventure for ingredients.
(My favorite recipe we tried with this was Doubles from Trinidad https://www.africanbites.com/doubles-chickpeas-sandwich/)
I already did for October, November (twice), and December. Does that count?
It would have if you hadn't asked. But as it stands now, I regret to inform you that you'll need to make another pie.
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Being intentional in what we do and learn, and practicing it consistently, inevitably changes our lives.
We mostly live on autopilot, without thinking about what we love to do or what we might love to do.
Every day, we read about people whose lives have been changed by jiu jitsu, CrossFit, or learning a foreign language.
It is dedication, focus, goal setting, and practice that change our lives, not so much the activity we devote our time to.
Although pies are delicious and I love making them.
Not to take anything from any other activity that someone embraces, but I imagine that for the majority of people in the developed world, taking a 1 hour walk every day would be the most "life changing" thing you could do.
Or just even think or look out of the window I feel like would do the world some good. Maybe I’m being negative I really don’t know at this point.
What does that have to do with the article? It is not about 'the most life changing thing for everyone', it was what was life changing for her.
Nothing at all. Just a comment on the internet. Taking a walk AND and baking a pie is even better.
I'm just making a slight point that walking is probably the simplest most effective thing you can do to improve almost every aspect of your life.
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The point of the pies was the connections it forced her to make with people in her life and then ultimately strangers. Finding 365 people to give pies to is probably harder than baking them all.
Taking a walk alone would be missing the main point.
Move to San Francisco!
The sarcastic individual in me saw the title and thought "heh, and you got diabetes?" But I was pleasantly surprised after reading it about how wholesome this was.
She is obviously a sweet lady that you would like to have as a neighbor. But I would not include garden variety pie in the wholesome category. The indulgence won't kill you, but it isn't healthy. Apples from her backyard tree are wholesome.
I started practising guitar every day and it didn't change my life but I have a lot of fun doing it.
There's still time, my friend. Keep it up.
These kinds of stories may seem silly to some (certainly it would seem silly to my past self), but I think these narratives of personal journeys are going to become more and more important to humanity as AI and automation take over most jobs.
As someone who loves pie and has far fewer friends and family than the person this story is about, baking a pie every day for a year would also change my life.
If you just place the pie to cool on your window sill, the smell will cause some nearby hobos to float over, or so cartoons have lead me to believe. Then you'll have some friends.
Friends are always attainable via purchase.
Also neighbours tend to be very glad to receive free stuff :) I usually end up with way too many Basil plants every season and give them away, gotten to know some new neighbours that way!
Do you have neighbors?
Beautiful. I recently saw a youtube video [1] on radical neighboring that really inspired me. Led me to another book on the gift economy [2]. All which to say, I now always bake two loaves of bread. One I keep for the family, the other I give away.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dynQV-oKM0E [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208840291-the-serviceber...
A very timely article when many of us are wondering if AI will eventually push us out of a digital career into something else.
I am hearing rumors that B2B sales is rebounding back to more in-person meetings. Cold emails don't work anymore. I've heard similar tales of current teens early-twenties that there is a trend of doing things in real life again. But... more likely if you start measuring it people are more reclusive than ever, and doing things that used to be normal is now considered "niche and trendy". Our sales process at least is very online-meeting oriented...
Baking everyday as a way to keep a professional identity is an interesting idea. Being semi-retired, I’ve noticed that I am starting to struggle the curiosity and motivation that kept me going when I still worked. This article makes me think I should pick up a habit of doing some “work” daily.
Because it’s the guardian I assumed she was British and therefore making meat pies, gave me a different vibe for some reason.
Lovely story but the beautification is a bit off.
> Hardin Woods would bake [...] using fresh ingredients local to her home in Salem, Oregon
> She baked her first pie, a lemon meringue
> The next day Hardin Woods made a peach pie
> After that came a chocolate cream pie
Does lime, peach and chocolate ripen within the same season in Oregon? Vickie cooking for is community is already touching, this claim about freshness and locality is skimmed by people who are already convinced, spotted by those who disagree and raise critics of the skeptics.
Between "The Guardian" and it being a warm/fuzzy-type story, I'd read that as "fresh local ingredients when available".
Vs. too many pies have fillings straight out of a can.
I mean, the first pie was in California, per the text right before that. She was visiting family.
Right, the location is off too! The ingredients probably aren't sourced in Oregon after moving to California, but anyway the season ("fresh") and location ("local") point stands. I guess she use local eggs.
Pie - specifically pie crust - is my specialty. I'm in a constant quest for the best (and simplest) method. It's also a very tasty hobby.
It is something hard wired in our brains. Cooking, social connection, giving, all in one. We evolved to cook for each other. No wonder she is damn happy. Being 60 helps too.
https://archive.ph/6YBoH
Refreshing. There truly is an almost mysterious bliss hidden in giving.
Nah, that's not a pie! [brandishes a Yorkshire meat and potato pie] Now, that's a pie.
Apologies to Crocodile Dundee.
If AI continues like this, we can all retire and bake pies all day long.
Christmas 2013 my mom gave me a nice stand mixer. She knew I like to cook and bake and owned a bread maker but she knew I always felt bread makers were good but just fell short or being great. This gift also changed my life forever.
Days later on New Years I decided my resolution would be to not buy bread for an entire year and make it all myself. Also I was a father or 3 and funds tight back then so buying bread for school lunches all the time really added up.
So I started making bread and did not buy any for months. Slowly it became better and slowly I started making other items like pizza dough and bagels and cinnamon buns. I got to a point where I no longer needed to measure and could just free pour ingredients and my baking was really good.
Then soon into 2014 I decided to buy a huge stock pile of flour and several other ingredients from Costco so had like 200lbs of flour and lots of oil and pasta sauce and chicken and suddenly work laid half of us off until things picked up. Having all those ingredients saved me and my kids. Never did they go hungry. We ate lots of pizza and always had bread and bagels and if I had to buy it already made there is no way I would have made it.
I did not achieve my resolution on July 14 2024 me and my wife split up suddenly after some shenanigans on her end and I was suddenly the primary care giver for 3 kids and the stress was too much and I did not have it in me to continue making bread but kept strong for my kids and never let on my struggles.
Lastly even though I did not achieve my resolution I did make it almost 7 full month's making bread and I never lost it. I still make bread but my biggest hit is homemade pizza. My kids struggle to eat store bought stuff as my home made is just so much better. If anyone would like some simple pointers on how to make amazing pizza dough comment and I would be happy to give a few quick tips.
Yes please! I'm getting pretty decent at bread now, I've been making a loaf every three days or so for a few months. But I would love to add pizza dough to my skills.
My biggest tip is so easy and after starting it the difference was immediately noticable. And this applies to pizza or bread dough.
There are many factors that will change how your dough tastes, feels and bakes. Texture is a massive factor on how people rate your bread or other doughs. Two big factors that massively help with that are as follows.
First knowing how long you must knead the dough for. I won't get into too much detail for this just look up dough window pane test on YouTube and there are lots of videos. The TLDR is you knead until you can take a small ball of the dough and gently spreading it with your thumbs should be able to make a thin pain that lets light through easily without ripping. If it rips you need more kneading. Again look at some videos.
The BIGGEST improvement to my doughs was when I started adding powdered milk. I use about half cup to 3/4 cup when making enough pizza dough for about 3 large pizza. For a couple loafs of bread probably half cup is plenty. Again lots of information on why powdered milk helps but will let you research if you want to know more.
All I can say is that my dough was always good before milk powder but the day I saw the suggestion to use it and did I can't go back. I have had friends say my pizza is the best they ever had. Last year my ex asked me if I wanted to come meet her friends and some girls but also would I mind making some pizza dough lol!
Honestly there are lots of tips for good bread and dough but just adding milk powder will up your bread huge. Good luck I hope you give it a go if so also hope you come back and comment how it went. Cheers!
I would love a pumpkin pie right now. But I'd settle for pecan.
Sweet potato pie is at least as good as a pumpkin pie if you've never tried it. If you're making filling from scratch, it's easier too. I learned not too long ago that the "pumpkin pie" my mom made every year was actually a sweet potato pie... that kind of blew my mind.
Waffle House pecan pie can hit the spot. ... cup of black coffee, damn fine.
This reminds me of "The Artist's Way".
I was worried that this is sone LinkedIn post. Thank god that was not it. Wholesome.
Is it just me or since The Guardian left twitter/X they've really been ramping up their paywalls/nagwalls? Love or hate X/Elon, that was really a dumb move on their part.
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One of the most Guardian headlines of all time. I'm old enough to remember when they were a newspaper.
All went downhill when Rusbridger went. Viner turned it tabloid, clickbaity, embraced more of the Lifestyle section etc.
To be more precise: she baked breadbowls and calzones. :)
I didn't even read the article, but the headline made me smile.
Government job. Retired at 61. But I made a pie everyday!
Some people find meaning in ways other than the prestige of their employer.
Software developer isn't a very prestigious title either. The only thing it has going for it is the pay.