Third Time's a Charm Challah

Sunday, November 9, 2008

I've tried making challah twice before. Both times it tasted fine, but it looked ... well, I'm not going to remind you of how it looked. Suffice it to say that if you looked at pictures of my first two attempts, you would advise me not to give up my day job.
I happened upon a group of a dozen or so bloggers who call themselves Bread Baking Babes. Their October project was a challah from The New York Times Bread and Soup Cookbook, a book I don't have but which sounds like a good idea. I think it must be out of print, though, because I've browsed many a book store's cookbook collection, and I don't remember ever seeing it.
October's recipe was from Sara at iliketocook.blogspot.com, and I thank her for this simple, delicious, and apparently foolproof recipe.
It's a shiny, sticky dough, made with a half-cup of butter, four eggs, and a touch of saffron to give it a rich, yellow hue.


It only has to rise an hour or so (I used up my first monster package of yeast mail-ordered from King Arthur on this bread, by the way, and what an economy that turned out to be! Even baking bread nearly every week, it took me two years to go through the entire bag, and, kept in the freezer, it was still going strong after all that time), and Sarah and I had a date to go shopping at the Mall of America. I just put it in the refrigerator to slow it down, and it was ready to braid three hours later, when we came home.

This is where trepidation really set in. Last time I tried challah, I attempted a four-strand braid, but I got so confused I had to keep unbraiding it and trying again. It didn't look pretty. This time I was going to practice with Play-Doh, but that turned out to be unnecessary. This challah is a double-decker version: a bottom three-plaited layer, topped by the same thing, only smaller. It looks fancy, but it's easy.

Brushed with an egg wash and sprinkled with poppy seeds, it looks like someone who knows what she's doing made it, rather than all-thumbs BBC.

After I stacked the layers neatly, I slid the pan in the oven. 18 minutes later, I turned on the oven light, afraid of what I might see. Had the top layer fallen off? Had the whole thing exploded? (I do have an abnormal fear of things exploding, even though, as far as I know, challah is not in the habit of exploding).
Anyway, no and no. It still looked pretty.

Maybe not perfect, but pretty. As a bonus, this recipe makes two loaves of bread. I made the second one without poppy seeds, just to be devil-may-care.

To be perfectly honest, the top layer of the second loaf slid to the side while baking, so it can only be viewed from one angle. From its best side, though, it still looks shiny and pretty. Not to be too pleased with myself, but I do like the way they turned out.
We had the lopsided one for dinner, with a very good beef and wild rice soup with root vegetables. My cameraman forgot to take pictures of the soup, but he ate it up, along with the bread, which he pronounced quite satisfactory.

Election Day Apple Cake

Or: "The Laziest Baker Finally Gets Around to Making Smitten Kitchen's Mother's Best Apple Cake in the World."
Tuesday, November 4, 2008

It was Evil Cake Lady's turn to choose a project for The Lazy Baker's No Rules Club. She went to prolific blogger SmittenKitchen for inspiration and found Mom's Apple Cake.
Pinknest tried her hand at the apple cake first; then Evilcakelady. Finally, came Melinda's version, which she tarted up a bit with a homemade caramel sauce and a fancy pan she bought in Bruges. Melinda expressed great happiness at beating me to the apple cake punch, but I have finally caught up with the crowd.
This is an easy cake. The only thing that takes any times is peeling, coring, and chopping the six apples. (SmittenKitchen's mom used Macintosh--an odd choice for baking, I thought--and I thought I'd use a couple of those old favorites as a tribute to her mother, but my local grocery didn't even have any.) I used a combination of Yellow Delicious and Honeycrisp.

The batter is thick, made with flour, sugar, oil, vanilla, cinnamon, orange juce, and eggs. I nearly rebelled at the cup of oil. Why can't I use butter? I asked myself. Butter would make it so much more flavorful. But I decided to ignore the Butter-is-better voice and use canola oil because, after all, we are supposed to be making the same recipe.
The cake is layered in a tube pan:
Batter, apples, batter, apples.

If you are wondering what that pink thing on the tube pan is, it's a Rose's Heavenly Cake Strip, which acts as an insulator for a cake pan and keeps the cake from over-browning. I got it from the real Rose herself.

It was a good thing to have because this cake is supposed to bake for 90 minutes, and I was afraid that there would be more than a few burned apples on top of the cake by that time, but I took the cake out of the oven after about 75 minutes and it was fine.

So why did it take me so long to bake this cake--a relatively simple project--when I am normally so obsessive about getting things done promptly? I had a plan for this cake. I really did not want to be faced with an entire cake, and the prospect that Jim and I might greedily devour it ourselves, as we often do with a loaf of bread. This cake called for a potluck. Like, say, an election party. What is more American than an apple cake, after all (except for apple pie)? Surely a substantial amount of cake would be eaten while we were watching the returns, limiting the potential damage to me and my desire to emulate the skinny French women wearing fashionable suits.
It was an exciting night. One of the people at the party declared herself too excited to eat. I personally have never reached such a state of excitement, and, fortunately, it was not shared by others.

We ate the cake. No homemade caramel sauce at this party, but a choice between an accompaniment of cinnamon or vanilla bean ice cream, dished out at about the same time that CNN called Ohio for Obama. The cake would have tasted sweet even if I had forgotten the sugar.
It was a wonderful night. And remainders of the cake were taken into work on Wednesday, where they were happily devoured.
Now, was this really the best apple cake ever? It is comfort cake--cinnamony, moist, and tender, with the apples retaining a bit of texture and with the crunchy counterpoint of walnuts. But I still think it might be better with butter.
In my newfound spirit of nonpartisanship, however, I can generously praise this cake, made without a hint of butter.

King Arthur Semolina Rye Bread

Sunday, November 2, 2008
Sarah and I have been back from Paris for a few weeks, but I haven't gotten around to blogging. For one thing, I saw all those beautiful women in Paris, none of whom seemed to have an extra ounce on her, and I got enthusiastic--briefly--about losing some of my own extra ounces, not to mention pounds. So no baking. Although, I have to say that none of those beautiful, thin French women seemed to be dieting.

That is not a beautiful French woman; it's my beautiful daughter, looking very French.
I had good intentions of taking pictures of food. But then I got so enraptured with eating it that I never wanted to bother taking pictures. And it did not escape my intention that no one else was taking pictures of their food. After I had already caused some raised eyebrows with my mangling of the French language, it seemed a little gauche to bring out the camera.

This is the best I can do--numerous wine glasses, and, if you look very carefully, you can see a basket of bread.
We had a fabulous time, and it was so much fun seeing the city with Sarah, who had never been there before, is very enthusiastic, and loves to eat good food and drink good wine, both of which we had in abundance. I was musing about how if something happened to Jim, maybe I would like to find a nice Frenchman who had a lovely apartment in Paris and who spoke good English.
"Um, but Mom," Sarah said, "aren't French men supposed to be sort of ... jerks?"
"Maybe as a rule," I said, "but not this one."
"Are you sure?"
"Sarah, do you know what he says to me?"
"What?"
"He says, "'Marie, tu est parfait.'"
Well, she had to admit he sounded pretty good. I was getting a little irritated at Jim, who has never once told me I was parfait, or even perfect, but then I realized I had to cut him a little slack since I'd made up my French second husband out of whole cloth.

But after a while, the memory of all those svelte French women faded away, and I decided I would lose weight at some later time. Anyway, would eats more bread than the French? It's clearly not bread that is the culprit.
(I wasn't totally away from my oven last week--I baked a big pan of brownies and three dozen oatmeal raisin cookies for the volunteers at the Minneapolis Obama headquarters, but I forgot to take pictures. They were good, though). The King Arthur brownie recipe is excellent.
In fact, it was the King Arthur brownie recipe that led me to the bread I made this weekend. I had been trying to decide whether to bake a rye bread or a semolina bread, so when I saw the recipe for Chewy Semolina Rye Bread, I knew that was the Bread of the Week.
The bread calls for three flours: rye, semolina (I used durum--maybe the coarser semolina would have worked better here), and bread flour, along with a little sugar, olive oil, water, yeast, and vital wheat gluten. The only change I made was to substitute caraway seeds for dried onion flakes. (Because rye bread isn't rye bread without caraway seeds, in my opinion, and I have a food-snobbish objection to dried onion flakes).
This is a much easier bread to make than Rose's rye bread recipes or her recipes using durum wheat flour, but the extra steps in her recipes more than pay off. This bread was good--it's pretty hard to have a loaf of freshly baked bread that doesn't have something to recommend it--but it's definitely not a great bread.
All the ingredients are mixed together and kneaded briefly. (Rose's recipes generally call for longer kneading, less yeast, slower rising, and more periods of rest). It rises only once in the bowl, for only about an hour.
Then it's shaped, and it rises again for another hour or so. (Rose's breads usually have a total of three rises).

Then, after it's risen, you cover it quickly with an egg wash, slash it, and bake it.

After I made my first slash, I realized that the bread already was forming a natural slash lengthwise down the middle of the loaf, and that I should have just emphasized that. But it was too late for thinking.

It was nice to have a loaf of fresh bread again. But the delicate taste of durum flour, which is what I love about it, was totally overwhelmed by the rye flour and caraway seeds, which is, after all, what I love about rye bread. But, as it turned out, there seemed to be no particular advantage to mixing the two; I was hoping that the combination would somehow be synergistic, but no such luck. Even though I used my burst-of-steam gadget, this loaf was not a good crusty loaf of bread--its crust was more like that of a sandwich loaf than a peasant loaf. It was chewy and it tasted good, but it was not the spectacular bread I was hoping for.

Cranberry Walnut Bread

Sunday, October 4, 2008

I wasn't planning to bake anything this weekend because my daughter Sarah and I are going to Paris for a week on Tuesday, and I had 28 things on my list of things to do this weekend. Not one of them was baking bread. But then I thought that I remembered Rose writing about a bread she'd baked so she'd have something good to eat on a flight, and I thought that if there was a bread that was flight-worthy, Rose would certainly know about it.
When I went back and read about it again, I realized there was no way I could compete with her organization. She baked the bread, gilded it lightly with mayonnaise, and made lovely chicken sandwiches. Brownies for dessert. Naturally, she not only baked the bread and the brownies, but probably made the mayonnaise and roasted the chicken. Maybe she went out and killed the chicken, too, for all I know. I didn't do all that, but I did bake a fabulous loaf of bread. If I made this bread before every flight I took, I'd feel a lot friendlier toward Northwest Airlines.
This is not a difficult bread to make, but the directions are lengthy, even by Rose's standards, and there are a lot of steps. Last night, while Jim and I were watching Episodes 1 and 2 from the first season of Mad Men (watch it and you'll see why everyone is crazy about this series!), I roasted the walnuts, soaked the cranberries, mixed about a quarter of the walnuts and two kinds of flour in the food processor, and made a sponge with the same two flours (bread and whole wheat), the water the cranberries had soaked in, some barley malt syrup, and some sourdough starter. Amazingly, I had everything on hand. Even the barley malt syrup.

By the time we were done with the second episode, the walnuts were chopped, the cranberries were soaked, and the flour mixture was atop the bubbling dough starter.
This morning, I took the flour and starter out of the refrigerator, and, after I'd had a few cups of coffee--so I was able to read the directions--I mixed up the flour and starter and added the walnuts.

It's so shiny and rich it almost looks like chocolate ice cream (inexplicably resting on a floured counter).
This dough gets shaped into a rectangle and spread with cranberries,

rolled up like a jelly roll,

shaped into a ball, and slipped into a bowl to rise.

After two risings, the dough is shaped into a torpedo, and put into a makeshift couche--this is a stiff linen towel sent to me all the way from England from my blogging buddy Melinda. I closed it with a clothespin, and let it rise again.

I think this must be Rose's only bread that is not baked on a baking stone. I happened to read this warning just as I was about to put the baking stone into the oven. By the bye, my theory has always been that if you can read, you can cook. I think that I've forgotten to read some critical direction in my last three or four baking forays, and I've found that the other side of the coin is that if you can't read, you can't cook. I don't think that I screwed this recipe up, for a change.

No baking stone because the cranberry water has sugar and and the malt syrup also has sugar, both of which make the bread vulnerable to burning. You further protect it by draping aluminum foil over the bread after it's baked about 20 minutes.
I sliced two pieces for each of us and we were both faced with the butter-or-no-butter dilemma. Jim opted for none, and swore that it needed none (although he spread some on, none too thinly, on his next piece and didn't seem unhappy), but I volunteered to taste-test it with butter added. (In the spirit of The Mad Men--set in the day when food and drink had not yet turned into our enemies). This bread is so tasty that it doesn't need butter. But it's not harmed by it either. I highly recommend this bread, although you might want to try it on a weekend where you to-do list is not quite so daunting. Or you might want to ignore your to-do list, and just bake the bread.

Rose's Best Basic Loaf as Rosemary Flat Bread

Sunday, September 21, 2008

After baking Rose's spectacular lemon bars on Thursday, it occurred to me that I hadn't made a bread from Rose's repertoire for a while, so I looked on the recipe section on her blog. I found this bread, which she posted in February of 2007 and is a variation of the bread she created for General Mills' Harvest King flour. I like the Harvest King flour, but even though Minneapolis is the home of General Mills, it's difficult for me to find it, so I used King Arthur bread flour. (Sorry, Rose).

This is the third bread I've made recently that's got mostly white flour with enough whole wheat flour to add flavor and give me the chance to feel mildly virtuous. I love the combination.
This focaccia is much, much easier to make than the rosemary focaccia in The Bread Bible. It's not nearly as wet, and it handles far more easily. Also, it doesn't require that 20-minute spin in the KitchenAid--the one that tests its motor to the limit. About 30 minutes into the dough's 90-minute rising period, you stretch out the dough and give it a business-envelope turn or two. You can see how manageable it is.

It's just a little bit sticky, but nothing to get excited about.
It's perfectly tractable when it comes time to pat it out into a rectangle. No cursing going on here.

I had so much confidence in this bread's ability to bake itself that I left the kitchen while it was baking to work on the Sunday crossword. Bake for five minutes, then turn it; another ten minutes and I went back into the kitchen. There was the focaccia, all brown and puffy.

Probably a little too puffy for authentic focaccia. It's definitely an Americanized version, but that's not meant as a criticism. The crumb is more even than an Italian focaccia, and there are fewer big, random holes.

But it was quite toothsome and delicious. We ate it, still warm, for a snack with a glass of Tempranillo in the afternoon; with grilled turkey breast and sliced tomatoes for dinner; and with leftover turkey breast and lettuce for a lunchtime sandwich today. Delicious as is, it requires no butter or olive oil to gussy it up. If I can ever find a bag of Harvest King flour, I'll try it again--just for the sake of science, of course.

Food for an Obama House Party

Thursday, September 18, 2008

My friend Mary and I, along with the other members of Mary's Grassroots Political Therapy Group, decided to throw a house party/fundraiser for Barack Obama. Our division of labor: Mary would supply the house, and I would supply the food. Betty brought many bottles of wine; Pat made signs and greeted people; Pam and Linda were the bartenders; Karen and Sandra arranged the food artistically on platters and served. Our representative from District 60B, Frank Hornstein, was there to fire up the troops, and playwright-storyteller (and neighbor) Kevin Kling wrote a political allegory devised just for this occasion. Eighty to ninety friends and neighbors came to eat, drink, talk, cheer each other up, and put checks in the hats. We had a fine time.
I stayed home from work on Thursday to bake and assemble. My menu was miniature biscuits with ham and hot honey mustard, palmiers Provencale, toasts with cream cheese and Spanish olives, figs stuffed with blue cheese and nuts, and granola-dipped brie and grapes on toothpicks. Dessert was brownies and lemon bars. At 8:00 a.m., the whole day spread out before me, and I started the palmiers in a leisurely manner.

The palmiers (from First Impressions, Betty Rosbottom's book of appetizers) were fun to make, especially if they were the only thing you were making all day. It sounded easy--after all, it's not like you made the puff pastry dough yourself. You just take some Trader Joe's frozen all-butter puff pastry dough, roll the dough out with a little Parmesan, spread each piece with a mixture of chopped Kalamata olives, sundried tomatoes, garlic, basil, thyme, and fennel seeds, roll the dough up from each side until it meets in the middle, cut off little slices, and bake them. Easy, right? And it was, except that every step took longer than I thought it would, and I could only bake one pan at a time, and I was making about 100 of them. But I finished by 10:30.
Then the brownies, a doubled recipe of "Classic Brownies" from Dory Greenspan's Baking From My Home to Yours.

These are really good brownies: made with butter, bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate, eggs, sugar, vanilla, plus a little instant espresso powder and lots of walnuts. What's not to like? The espresso powder just brings out the intense chocolatey-ness, and there are walnuts in every rich bite.
At this point I should mention that my intrepid photographer-husband kind of fell down on the job here. As we left the house to go over to Mary's house, I said, in my encouraging wifely way, "What is wrong with you Jim? You haven't taken pictures of everything I baked! How do you expect me to blog about this if you don't take the pictures!" "Dammit," he said in his sweet husbandly way, "why didn't you say you wanted pictures before now?" So he managed to snap a few photos, but they are not up to his usual standard as he would be the first (well, maybe the second) to admit.
On a dessert bender, I decided it was time to bake the lemon bars. This recipe is from Rose's Christmas Cookies, my first Rose Levy Beranbaum cookbook and one of my favorites. I had never made this recipe, but I knew that if Rose promised that these lemon bars were "the ultimate lemon butter bar," she wouldn't let me down. And she didn't. Although there was a moment, when I was cooking the lemon curd, which I was instructed to cook until thickened but not to boil or it would surely curdle, that I was reminded of the infamous rum cream pie. I was thrown into a tizzy. I had lost my custard confidence. "This isn't going to thicken," I said to myself. "I'm going to have to take bowls along for the lemon bars, and no one is going to speak encouraging words to me, like they do on the blog." And, when I took the pan off the stove and poured it on top of the buttery shortbread base, it was not very thick. "I'm doomed," I said. (I was doing a lot of talking to myself at this point). But bless her heart, Rose's instructions were 100%. I baked it and put it in the refrigerator. After a half-hour, I tested it, fully expecting the lemon curd to be in a liquified state, but it was perfect.

These lemon bars looked stunning cut into tiny squares and arranged carefully on a shiny white platter. I realize they don't look so stunning in the cakepan, but if I could have stood around this platter all night, surreptitiously eating lemon bars, I would have.
By the time I took the lemon bars out of the oven, it was past 1:00, and I was getting a little nervous about the things I still had to check off my list. I decided to take a break from baking, and make the stuffed figs. Very simple. Just cut a whole bunch of little baby figs in half, stuff each half with a little tiny piece of blue cheese, and artistically arrange a candied walnut half atop the cheese. Or, if you run out of candied walnut halves, artistically arrange a pecan half on top. I figured I could cross this baby off my list in ten minutes. Except that I was making about 150 of them. By #75, I had completely given up on the "artistically arranging" part, and was smooshing cheese into the damn fig and throwing a nut on top.
No pictures of the figs. Jim didn't think they counted as things to be photographed. Fortunately, Sandra and Karen made them look impressive on the platters.
Back to the oven. I had little biscuits to bake. I was planning to use Rose's recipe from The Bread Book, but when I read the directions, I realized that the recipe wouldn't work well for miniature biscuits because you don't use a cutter, so I quickly switched to Dorie Greenspan's Basic Biscuit recipe, using a 1 1/2" biscuit cutter instead of a standard 3" cutter. I ignored the instruction to mix the cold butter in the flour with my fingers--no time!--and used the food processor instead. These little biscuits were so much fun to make! But I was beginning to feel like I was in one of those movies where the clock keeps ticking and the hero has only a few hours left to save all of humanity. When I took the last tray of biscuits out of the oven, it was after 4:00, and I still had two appetizers left.

"Jim!" I yelled. "I need you!" I think he could tell I wasn't speaking in the Valentine's Day card sense, because he came running down the stairs. "What can I do?" "Cut brie in squares!" I barked. "Roll in granola. Put on frilly toothpick with a grape! Capisce?"
Meanwhile, I was cutting baguettes in slices, brushing olive oil on them, and making toasts. Then I quickly mixed up some cream cheese, Spanish olives, roasted red peppers, scallions, and smoked paprika. As the toasts came out of the oven, I spread a little of the cream cheese mixture on each toast and sprinkled with Parmesan. Then they all went under the broiler. Jim stabbed the last brie cube at the same time I removed the toasts from the oven.

It was 5:30. I had just enough time for a quick shower before changing my clothes and attempting to look presentable. Jim and I trotted over to Mary's house carrying buckets, baskets, and trays of food.
"Marie!" Mary cried. "How did you make all this?"
"Oh," I said modestly. "It was nothing."

Turkish Ridged Flat Bread (Pide)

Sunday, September 14, 2008

First, let me say how happy I am to be baking bread again, instead of pie in a cereal bowl, especially when Pinknest made the same pie and it turned out perfectly. Not that I begrudge her this pie success. Not at all.
Second, I didn't blog last week, but not because I was in a jealous snit. Although perhaps I was. I was visiting my daughter, who's in her first year of residency at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. (Yes, that's a Frida Kahlo picture). Detroit is not only famous for Henry Ford and his eponymous hospital, but also for the Diego Rivera room at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
But back in Minneapolis, there was bread to be made.
Jim and I were invited by a friend for a "turkey dinner." At first I thought she was going to have Thanksgiving early, but she and another friend had spent three weeks in Turkey last spring, and they wanted us to experience some authentic Turkish food, at least as authentic as it could be several thousand miles away. I said I'd bring bread. I'd already made simit, alternately called a "Turkish croissant" or a "Turkish bagel," but I'd already made that and I wanted something different.
So I Googled Turkish bread, and got this great recipe from Paula Wolfert from the May 2007 edition of Food and Wine.
How could you not like it? It starts with a sponge that rests and rises overnight,
so you know it will have great flavor;

it's a recipe from Paula Wolfert, who is the queen of Mediterranean cooking, and it's a flat bread that puffs up during baking.
Also, it's got a white flour to whole wheat flour ratio of about 7 to 1. (I'm sorry, I know that I should be a bigger fan of 100% whole-wheat bread, but I really like this better. It makes a stiff dough, but not too stiff to handle.

After the bread slowly rises, it's divided into four pieces, each weighing 267 grams. (Well, that part's not in the directions, but when I weigh things, I feel like I'm in charge. Maybe if I'd weighed the pie dough? No--forget the pie dough, already!)
Each piece of dough is flattened into a shape more or less oval and more or less eight inches by ten inches. Then you make ridges with your fingers and sprinkle the top with sesame seeds (or nigella seeds, if you have them, which I didn't). The ridges are very definite in the unbaked dough,

but it puffed up enough during baking to make them less so.



I'm sure this bread has a name other than Turkish Ridged Flat Bread, and I wish I knew what it was, but it was quite good--crispy and chewy at the same time. (Thanks to knowledgeable reader Aparna, I now know it's called pide). The recipe made four loaves of flat bread, and each of them had a different shape and slightly different texture because of the differences in length and height.
Okay, so it's bread and not pie. So it'll never make it on a dessert tray, unlike Pinknest's beautiful rum cream pie. But it's an honest loaf of bread, with good, honest American small-town values. (Never mind. I forgot for a minute that the Republican National Convention has left town. I don't have to say that any more).

Rum Vanilla Cream Pie (or Why Breadbasketcase Should Stick to Bread)

Monday, September 1, 2008
It was Pinknest's turn to choose the project for The Lazy Bakers' No-Rules Club. Even though there are no rules, we still sort of take turns. And she chose a rum-vanilla cream pie. From Martha Stewart no less. Martha Stewart is the antithesis of everything I stand for.
I can't blame Pinknest for this fiasco. I suggested that she might want to choose a pie because she is so good at them. It's because she's so good at them--and because Melinda has taken cake decorating classes and she knows how to pipe icing and because Evil Cake Lady is always willing to try anything, with good results--that I figured I'd be the weak link in this recipe's chain. But I was determined to be a good sport about it.
Frankly, I don't amount to much as a pie baker. And this recipe didn't just have pie crust, it had pate brisee, made with an ungodly amount of butter and sure to be hell to roll out.
I brightened when I remembered that I have an Emile Henry pie dish, which has nicely scalloped edges. I figured maybe I could just layer the pie crust in the pan, trim it off, and the pan would make the scallops itself. A self-scalloping pie.

As it turned out, the crust was the easy part. It rolled out nicely, more or less into a circle (instead of the odd geometric shapes that my pie crusts are wont to take on);

it didn't stick to the counter; and I folded it up into a triangle without swearing. (Usually there is at least one swearing episode per pie).

The pie crust came out of the oven looking pretty good.

I thought I was home free--I didn't even think twice about the custard. It was just a custard. I boiled the milk, cornstarch, vanilla (thanks, Evil Cake Lady, for the tip about using your fingernails--clean, of course--to get the vanilla seeds out of the pod), sugar and salt until it was nicely thickened. I beat the egg yolks and carefully added the hot milk mixture (thanks, Julia Child, for beating it into my head that you must do this very carefully lest you end up with scrambled eggs). Then I added butter, a tablespoon at a time, and let it cool.
As I poured it into the pie, I thought to myself, "This is runnier than I think it should be."

Because, I then realized, I had forgotten an important step. And, lazy bakers, if you bake this pie, you should be careful not to omit this step: after you beat the eggs and milk together, you must return it all to the heat and let it boil for another minute or so.
If you do not do this, let me assure you, it doesn't matter that your original milk mixture was the perfect texture. It will all fall apart.
Every hour or so, I hopefully touched the pie dish in the refrigerator, hoping that it wouldn't wobble. No luck.
Finally, I decided just to whip the cream and spread it on top of the liquid pie, thinking that a layer of whipped cream would at least hide the runny nature of the filling. Guess what I found out? Whipped cream doesn't spread on water, or other watery substances. It looked a little like floating island.

Except that it also looked like the islands might sink at any time. Jim muscled me out of the way, "Quick--let me get a picture before it sinks!"
Here it is: pie in a cereal bowl.

The crust, which I was most worried about, was fine. It was actually better than fine: tender, buttery, and delicious. The filling? Well, it's kind of hard to judge a filling that looks like it's been pureed to within an inch of its life. Even imagining that the filling would have turned out the way it was supposed to, I'm stilll not so sure I'd think it was worth making again.
In fact, I have another disk of pate brisee in the freezer, and I'm not going to use it for this. I think--after the trauma of this pie-baking event has worn off--I'll turn to The Pie and Pastry Bible, not to Martha Stewart, for inspiration.