Rotate the foodstuffs!

Oh, honestly!  I just finished reading Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything.  The last chapter is about his quest for the perfect pie crust.  As it turns out, he sucked at making pie crust, too, and resorted to all the myriad little superstitions and old wives' tales, in addition to reading scientific articles on crust composition (yes, these sorts of thing do exist) -- all to no avail.  So, he called up the formidable Marion Cunningham, which I guess you can do on a whim if you're the food editor for Vogue.  Under her heterodox tutelage, and with minor changes to adapt to his personal style, he got around to a point where he can effortlessly make pie crust in 12 minutes flat, and he graciously provided his recipe.

I was excited.  The chapter had made me food-lustful, and I had this absolutely wonderful idea for empanadas using the venison pan sausage I got from the Kulhavys over Christmas.  So I started on the filling, since I needed to let it have time to cool so I wouldn't melt the crust.  The sausage browned up nicely, with an ambrosial scent (sage, red pepper flakes, and the delectable odor of Bambi).  Eventually I ended up adding crumbled hard-boiled egg and some queso fresco.  The filling, I'm proud to note, is an unmitigated success both hot and cold.

Which brings us to the pastry.  I had these great visions of being able to say to Mom and Dad, who can both turn out a pie crust without difficulty, "See?  It wasn't me, I can make a pie crust no problem!  It's just that your method sucks."  This, of course, required me to conveniently forget that they both use their "Perfect Pie Crust Every Time" recipe with no difficulty all the bloody time, and have passed it on to others who have raved.  Well, it turns out that I'm the problem.  My first batch got thrown in the garbage can (thank god I made a half batch).  My second batch... was questionable.  It wasn't as supple as I would have liked, and it tore when I tried to fold over the empanadas (some of this may be a problem with my filling technique, I'll admit, but that's still a me problem in that case).  I managed to make four empanadas before I got rather annoyed and made a giant roughly circular empanada-pie-thing, like a giant baked ravioli.  Face it, my pastry-fu continues to lack.  I was supposed to have helped Dad make some pies over Christmas to try to learn, but somehow schedules intervened and it didn't happen.  So I labor on in stupidity, and I can now, officially, not make 4 different pie crusts (my parents', Cunningham/Steingarten's, AB's, Emeril's).  What the hell?

Now, that having been said, it wasn't a complete wash.  The empanadas that I did make came out with a pretty nice crust, nice and flaky if a trifle crumblier than ideal.  The cinnamon-brown sugar scraps I made were similarly nice.  So the Cunningham/Steingarten recipe isn't bad, I just haven't a deft touch.  Or even just a neutral, no-modifier touch.  Bah.

Ow.  Ow ow ow.  So... For the longest time, I've been wanting a mandoline slicer, right?  Perfect even slices of all kinds of veggies, so wonderfully wonderful.  So then over Thanksgiving I was sitting in the waiting room at my ophthalmologist's, flipping through a Gourmet magazine (I was surprised to find it there as you are to hear that a practice catering to old people in backwoods East Texas had it), and the editors of the magazine had done a comparison of a number of mandolines on the market, and had ranked OXO's the highest: under "Cons" they put "we can't think of anything to put here."  High praise, especially from a notoriously frou-frou nit-picky mag.

Before I informed my parents of what they could get me for Christmas if they decided I'd been a good little chef, I decided to go on Amazon and read the reviews on the product.  In doing so, I got a little confused.  Half the reviewers seemed about ready to canonize the entirety of the OXO company for their amazing product, and the other half said that the blade was crap and wouldn't cut worth two shits.  Hmm.  I finally decided to go with the OXO product on the basis of the good half of the reviews plus the Gourmet write-up.

Fast-forward to this evening, when I finally had a good reason to break out the maniacal little thing.  Now... I can understand the negative reviewers.  If you try and go slow and gentle, the blade doesn't cut so well.  This... should be logical if you consider some of the physics involved in slicing versus chopping (lateral motion of the blade, basically), but apparently it wasn't to those people.  Whatever.  I can now certify to you that if you slide the object to be sliced briskly down the runway and over the blade, it will glide through a potato like butter.  And if you are doing those first few slices without the handguard because it's a little tall and unwieldly, I can further certify to you that the slicing goes so smoothly that you'll slip down into the danger zone without realizing it and the mandoline will remove the bottom (*checks*) 1/16th of an inch of your index finger without you really feeling anything painful, just a sort of sudden pressure.  And then you'll start to bleed.

You had better be glad that it's hard to take in-focus close-range pictures with your non-dominant hand, because if it weren't so you'd be getting an icky picture right below.

I never did find that bit of my finger... I bet it ended up in the skillet.  *shrug*

On a related note, it's damn hard to type with impaired usage of your dominant index finger.  Also hard to use standard flatware.  Or to clean dishes.  At least I masturbate off-dominantly.  Oops, TMI.