An Odyssey in Pies

I ended up consulting Mrs Molokhovets in all earnest last night, having stimulated a small bowl of my sourdough starter into life as a substitute for the continuously-unavailable dried yeast, then discovered that the pie recipes in my English-language Russian cookery book all expected the cook to have eggs and butter available as well. So I had the idea of trying to find the section on Lenten cookery, from which a shortcrust dough recipe had been quoted, on the assumption that raised pie dough would feature there as well( Read more... )

But the pirozkhi actually came out quite nicely, despite taking over 24 hours to make; the sourdough pastry behaved perfectly, stretching up around the filling without breaking or leaking, and then puffing up when baked. I cooked them seam-upwards, so they ended up looking rather like miniature Cornish pasties... and some did split!


Now I need to find something to do with a largish volume of meat-and-veg stuffing/pie filling. Stuffed cabbage leaves with sour cream, maybe?

Verbose

I've spent the afternoon transcribing one of my letters home from university. All afternoon -- it was seven thousand words long, plus sketches interpolated in the text.

I mention casually on about page seven that writing fiction seems to take on average an hour per A4 page; apparently at that age I was also producing stories at the rate of 500 words/hour. I wonder at what point I lost the ability to write with that complete unthinking facility? The young don't even know they are born :-(