Nasty Pasties

If you want to see some beautiful food, you'll need to go to one of those serious food blogs, where people only show you their best successes. That's not how we roll here at the Three Cats Ranch. We show you the good, the bad, and the ugly...because that's the spice of life, folks. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn't.

The day started out pretty well. I finished up my latest quilting snowlady. I was thinking this was block #7, but it's actually block #8. Four more to go before I'm ready to sew these into a quilt. Isn't she looking smashing in her stylish blue hat?

I'll be linking this post to:

When I had that finished, I did a little stitching on my latest embroidery project, and then made the dough for the pasties. Recall that we had these while we were traveling in Michigan, and I'm seeking a good recipe for them. I chose a recipe entitled "Michigan Pasties" mainly because it had the word "Michigan" in the name. Also, the filling looked pretty good. 

Anyway...I made up the dough, and then put it in the refrigerator until closer to dinner time. That went well enough, although the recipe called for a full cup of water. After I'd added about 1/3 of a cup, I had a big wet mess. It all worked in eventually, but I'm afraid a cup would have been too much.

After that I did a few housekeeping chores, and then went to work in my sewing room. I managed to add the prairie points and finish up the Cornflowers table runner on my list of goals for the month. I've never done prairie points before, and they were super simple. I think this turned out cute.

Here's how it looks from the back. This is one of those quilts that has the back sewn directly to the front, and then it's turned inside out, so there is no binding.

I started the quilting, but it isn't finished. I'm just doing as the pattern suggested, which is to stitch around all of the appliques. It looks good from the back, and I wasn't sure what else to do with it. The flowers are close enough together, that no other quilting is really required.

So once I had a start on the quilting, it was time to go back to my pasties. I made the filling. Looks good enough. It has onions, carrots, rutabagas, potatoes, parsley, ground beef, and a little pepper. I added a little salt to mine too.

Then I went to roll out the dough. The recipe said to divide the dough ball into 6 pieces approximately 5 oz. each and then roll each piece into an 8-inch round. I weighed my dough ball and found it to be 22 oz. Now I'm not math whiz, but I'm saying that 22 oz. isn't going to divide six ways to equal 5 oz. each. 

If I was really frugal, I could maaaaaybe get five rounds, but I think four rounds would have been more realistic. And I didn't want to overstuff them, which meant I ended up with about 30% more filling than I needed. Still, I forged on.

Aside from the count being off, things were going pretty well up until now. When I tried folding the dough over and sealing them, the dough turned out to be very dry and it wanted to crack. (Maybe they really did need a full cup of water.) When they were all finished, I wasn't feeling good about this at all. About that time, Mike called to say he was on his way home. I warned him in the morning that we were either having pasties or take-out pizza for dinner. He offered to pick up some pizza, but I wasn't ready to give up yet.

They were looking pretty ugly...all patched and cracked as they were. Still, when I baked them off, they only looked about half bad.

I served them up with a pear salad (consisting of a blop of cottage cheese, two pear halves, a blop of mayonnaise and a sprinkling of cheese...sometimes when I'm feeling really fancy, I sprinkle them with paprika) and some packaged brown gravy on the side. Yeah, packaged brown gravy...salt with a melted brown crayon in it. It actually didn't taste bad.

So, the best I can say for this pasty attempt is that it was edible. I was ready to throw out the leftovers, but Mike wanted me to save them. The crust was quite dry, and we ended up dousing ours in the salt/brown crayon mixture. Needless to say, I'm not linking to the recipe.

Still, my quest to make pasties is not over. I will forge on, searching out other recipes, and I'll keep you posted. Don't try this at home...not yet, anyway.

Today I'm getting my hair permed. My hair. Oy. I hate my hair, but I keep trying to find a way to like it. Today's attempt will be to ask my hairdresser to perm it a little tighter. Maybe more curl will help. Do you have permanently bad hair like I do? And aside from that, I'm just continuing on with quilting my table runner. I'm hoping to get it finished today.

What's on your Wednesday list?