Pastry Mixed by Hand?

Is this for real? No knives, no pastry blender, no careful tossing of crumbs with drops of water? I have to check this out. I am the world’s worst pastry maker. Unless I use a food processor, my pie crusts could be mistaken for disposable aluminum pie plates. But, hey, I own a dough scraper and I even have a cold counter. The results couldn’t be worse than my normal pie crust, right?

The Kichn Blog has a few comments on fine-tuning this technique and mentions that Ruhrman’s book, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, uses the proportions 3-2-1 (flour – fat – water) for pastry. I’m going to engrave that information somewhere handy, like my tiled backsplash. I really prefer using weights to volume measurement for cooking.

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Update: Here’s the recipe.

White Lilies Update

I’ve still got a cold. This is a good day for dragging out a mindless project, my never-ending White Lilies from Golden Kite. This pattern, which I won in a trivia contest when I belonged to a cross-stitching list, is a “mini” version of one of their larger designs. It is 90 stitches wide, 130 stitches high, and has 98 colours and blends. Yes, 98. It requires quite a good system of floss organization. DMC floss on 18-count Aida.

I thought it would be a fairly quick project, but often weeks go by when I don’t look at it. I’m finding that it’s much faster to work now because the colours are paler and the watercolour original is a wash. The detailed areas with the flowers required a lot of confetti (isolated stitches of a single colour) stitches. This was before I’d figured out how to work them by starting the thread in the square to be stitched and ending it in an adjacent square where it would be covered by a different colour.

When I finish this piece, the next one in the queue is Lady and the Unicorn: Sense of Hearing. I chose the smaller version (318 x 410, 133 colours) so that I would have a chance of finishing it in this lifetime. It’s a good thing I like red.

• Pin stitch tutorial, parts 1 and 2