For reasons lost on me now, I decided that I should make a fancy-pants heirloom tomato cheddar pie featured in the NYT cooking section. When the instructive video took me a solid morning to get through, I should have been wary, but Retirement Liz knows no bounds. I’m not actually going to give you the recipe here, because the finished product was unremarkable, but I do want you to have a sense of what you may be in for if you, too, decide to make bougie pie. Here is how you should plan to spend your day:
- Watch the video for how to make the pie, preferably with the volume off so you can squint at the closed captioning and curse the fact that you are growing older (exponentially, it would seem) with this experience.
- Commit. Start mixing the dry ingredients for the pie dough.
- Discover that you are out of unsalted butter. Leave the kitchen like a crime scene and go to the grocery store to secure needed butter.
- Return, triumphant, with the butter, and finish making the dough, minced fresh chives and all.
- Disregard the instructions about personally connecting with each lump of butter by squeezing it just so between your finger tips and stacking the dough in four squares to roll out. Return to your Mennonite roots of knowing not to add body temperature to the scene or overwork the dough, and do what your mama taught you.
- Form the dough into a disk, wrap it, and place it in the fridge.
- Enroll in couples counseling for yourself and that pie dough. The next few hours will be fraught with tension.
- Open a Netflix account.
- After an appropriate period of time during which you can’t actually get anything else done because, you know, the pie dough, pull the disk out of the fridge and roll it out. Ease it into a pie pan, crimp the edges, and place it in the freezer. Why? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.
- Cancel the Netflix account.
- Unsuccessfully search your drawers for pie weights, then remember that you don’t own them because you aren’t bougie enough. Settle for pinto beans in foil. Blind bake the crust. Bougie pie love is blind. Disregard the concerns of friends and family members that maybe this pie crust is a little too controlling and demanding of your time. In an appeasement strategy, form leftover scraps of pie dough into a wee crust to make a pulled pork pie for the bougie pie nay-sayers.
- Pull the crust out of the oven, remove the “pie weights” and return the crust to the oven, because by now you actually have nothing left to live for.
- Prepare the pie filling (tomato, cheese, egg, mayo, buttermilk, mustard, herbs, etc.)
- Assemble the pie and bake.
- Cool on a rack until it is somewhere between warm and room temperature – let’s say tepid.
- Serve the bougie pie to tepid reviews.
- Vow never again to be taken in by the false promises of bougie pie.
Obviously, I should have had some supervision from Ben for this cooking session, but I was going it alone on a weekday. He would have counseled me to sub in a caprese salad for the bougie pie so I could focus on the homemade baked chicken nuggets, which were delicious! They took mere minutes to prepare and only had 6 ingredients (including salt and pepper!) Lesson learned. Next time, I’ll channel my inner-Ben and keep it simple.
