Labor Day!
Sep. 2nd, 2024 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickLabor day is for not-working. Like, that was the original point of the thing. But now Labor Day is for getting shit done that you didn't get done during your regular not-three-day-weekend life. And so I have gotten some things done today.
Early: Got up and hiked out the road with Trys, 35 minutes of sweaty uphill walking. We also walked on Sunday, but we did up and down, which is an hour and 20 minutes at our currently shit level of fitness.
Next: Gathered stuff for black raspberry hand pies, drove to Lala's house.
Next: Lala was walking for fitness (she walks with Bethie) so I fed the boys (horses) and moved hay for them (new hay, how exciting!) and put the wheelbarrow away.
Lala got back home by then so I made Black Raspberry Long Hand Pies. I've been thinking of late about the nature of hand pies and while they are a delightful food item, I have been thinking for a couple of months that they could be better.
Ordinary hand pies are like pies only hand sized and made flat on a cookie sheet. Imagine maybe a pop tart style thing but with home made pastry and real fruit filling that is not at all cloying or chemical. I am lazy and do not want to faff about making real pies. So it's been hand pies up in here for the last five or more years. Quick. Low-effort. Delicious.
The only real problem with hand pies is that they are not the ideal proportion of pastry to fruit. There's typically too much pastry and not enough fruit. This is not, in and of itself, bad. I make great pastry. I like pastry. Hand pies are fine but... if there was MOAR FROOT it would balance the pastry better.
If you're doing small pastry-enclosed treats, there is almost always too much outside and not enough inside, this probably is some sort of topological problem with fancy maths. But trust me, it's damn hard to do small faux pop tarts or hand pies and have them be not-dry. They're almost always overly pastry-ish. Even if you have good pastry. Believe me, I have tried just shoving more fruit glop inside the small pastry-enclosed things and that does not work. It bubbles out and is messy and failboat -- left, right, and center.
Pie (real pie like in a pie pan and stuff) is not ideal either because there is honestly too much fruit for the amount of crust. I make good enough pie crust that I want there to be a pie crustier balance of flavors but not so much pie crust so that it's... dry. Hand pies are a bit too far in the pastry direction, particularly if you do them dainty.
And so today was experimental: the LONG hand pie. Quicker, even lower effort, and even more delicious than ordinary hand pies because of an IMPROVED FRUIT TO PASTRY RATIO. Like they're fucking perfect. This is the way. I can't really explain how to make these any better than how to make hand pies. Like, just do them, only longer. One pie crust makes 2 long hand pies. Bake, slice, and serve.
Here's a pic:
Following Long Hand Pie Victory, we went up town to the hardware, the garage at 629, and the grocery. These were Lala errands but I went along because she needed a tool out of the garage at 629 (one of my tools) and so I had to open that up and locate the tool and stuff.
Then I went home. I mowed the lawn, go me. It looks nice. I have some weeding to do but that's not for today's slate of objectives.
Next, I finished the fucking baseboard trim for the plant room remodel project. (Remembering to bring the miter saw home is not something I am good at. It's heavy and unwieldy and I have failed at this for literally months.)
With the baseboard done (needs to be caulked and touched up with the paint but that is not urgent), I took off the door stop for the plant room and cut new, weatherstrippy door stop (to keep the heat/humidity inside the plant room during winter) to replace it. I forgot the caulk and the small nails so I just dry fit it and will take care of actually attaching it later this week. Almost done on the plant room project!! (I bet you thought I'd forgotten about it or abandoned it or just wandered off to new horizons. Nope.)
After that, I went up to the lodge and removed the trailer light hookup thing from my diesel pickup. Waylon broke it last weekend during the disastrous Friday night playing hay because the seven blade plug in for Lala's gooseneck flatbed is not right and he just... shoved harder when he was trying to plug it into my truck? And so he mashed one of the blades on the connector thingie in my truck and it broke off. I yelled at him at the time and he was all "It's like ten bucks, super easy to replace. Quit whining." The OEM part that matches the one he broke costs $46.63, not ten dollars, and I had to borrow a socket set from Brother the Elder to get the old one off. It was not "easy", it was "lie on my back under the truck, brace feet on front of gooseneck horse trailer and crank on that sucker". (It's home from the shop, brake line fixed, $360.00 because I drove it in with no brakes because towing is $200 and driving it in with no brakes is pretty free.)
I have, however, ordered a new one to match so we're good there and it will be here on Thursday so that I can install it before the DLB extravaganza next week (Friday, Saturday).
And now I am working on shelving for the living room closet. There is an agenda, here. It's not a great agenda and it's certainly not orderly progress towards singular goals, but there is an agenda.
Early: Got up and hiked out the road with Trys, 35 minutes of sweaty uphill walking. We also walked on Sunday, but we did up and down, which is an hour and 20 minutes at our currently shit level of fitness.
Next: Gathered stuff for black raspberry hand pies, drove to Lala's house.
Next: Lala was walking for fitness (she walks with Bethie) so I fed the boys (horses) and moved hay for them (new hay, how exciting!) and put the wheelbarrow away.
Lala got back home by then so I made Black Raspberry Long Hand Pies. I've been thinking of late about the nature of hand pies and while they are a delightful food item, I have been thinking for a couple of months that they could be better.
Ordinary hand pies are like pies only hand sized and made flat on a cookie sheet. Imagine maybe a pop tart style thing but with home made pastry and real fruit filling that is not at all cloying or chemical. I am lazy and do not want to faff about making real pies. So it's been hand pies up in here for the last five or more years. Quick. Low-effort. Delicious.
The only real problem with hand pies is that they are not the ideal proportion of pastry to fruit. There's typically too much pastry and not enough fruit. This is not, in and of itself, bad. I make great pastry. I like pastry. Hand pies are fine but... if there was MOAR FROOT it would balance the pastry better.
If you're doing small pastry-enclosed treats, there is almost always too much outside and not enough inside, this probably is some sort of topological problem with fancy maths. But trust me, it's damn hard to do small faux pop tarts or hand pies and have them be not-dry. They're almost always overly pastry-ish. Even if you have good pastry. Believe me, I have tried just shoving more fruit glop inside the small pastry-enclosed things and that does not work. It bubbles out and is messy and failboat -- left, right, and center.
Pie (real pie like in a pie pan and stuff) is not ideal either because there is honestly too much fruit for the amount of crust. I make good enough pie crust that I want there to be a pie crustier balance of flavors but not so much pie crust so that it's... dry. Hand pies are a bit too far in the pastry direction, particularly if you do them dainty.
And so today was experimental: the LONG hand pie. Quicker, even lower effort, and even more delicious than ordinary hand pies because of an IMPROVED FRUIT TO PASTRY RATIO. Like they're fucking perfect. This is the way. I can't really explain how to make these any better than how to make hand pies. Like, just do them, only longer. One pie crust makes 2 long hand pies. Bake, slice, and serve.
Here's a pic:
Following Long Hand Pie Victory, we went up town to the hardware, the garage at 629, and the grocery. These were Lala errands but I went along because she needed a tool out of the garage at 629 (one of my tools) and so I had to open that up and locate the tool and stuff.
Then I went home. I mowed the lawn, go me. It looks nice. I have some weeding to do but that's not for today's slate of objectives.
Next, I finished the fucking baseboard trim for the plant room remodel project. (Remembering to bring the miter saw home is not something I am good at. It's heavy and unwieldy and I have failed at this for literally months.)
With the baseboard done (needs to be caulked and touched up with the paint but that is not urgent), I took off the door stop for the plant room and cut new, weatherstrippy door stop (to keep the heat/humidity inside the plant room during winter) to replace it. I forgot the caulk and the small nails so I just dry fit it and will take care of actually attaching it later this week. Almost done on the plant room project!! (I bet you thought I'd forgotten about it or abandoned it or just wandered off to new horizons. Nope.)
After that, I went up to the lodge and removed the trailer light hookup thing from my diesel pickup. Waylon broke it last weekend during the disastrous Friday night playing hay because the seven blade plug in for Lala's gooseneck flatbed is not right and he just... shoved harder when he was trying to plug it into my truck? And so he mashed one of the blades on the connector thingie in my truck and it broke off. I yelled at him at the time and he was all "It's like ten bucks, super easy to replace. Quit whining." The OEM part that matches the one he broke costs $46.63, not ten dollars, and I had to borrow a socket set from Brother the Elder to get the old one off. It was not "easy", it was "lie on my back under the truck, brace feet on front of gooseneck horse trailer and crank on that sucker". (It's home from the shop, brake line fixed, $360.00 because I drove it in with no brakes because towing is $200 and driving it in with no brakes is pretty free.)
I have, however, ordered a new one to match so we're good there and it will be here on Thursday so that I can install it before the DLB extravaganza next week (Friday, Saturday).
And now I am working on shelving for the living room closet. There is an agenda, here. It's not a great agenda and it's certainly not orderly progress towards singular goals, but there is an agenda.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-04 02:21 am (UTC)Also, that was a lot of work.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-04 03:53 am (UTC)Not a labor-free labor day, but it IS nice to have a chance to get things done.
Big ugh on the auto stuff. I hate car repairs. But at least it's back and fixed!