Pie Sale

When I first signed on as a volunteer at Ade's Place (the organization I mentioned here), I agreed to work a couple of days a week focusing on fundraising and marketing, and I have done a bunch of work so far towards those broad goals - I've started a website for them (my first! It has been humbling - no, humiliating. The "user-friendly" wordpress template continues to confound and frustrate me).  Mostly I've worked in the office doing tedious administrative stuff, and I've also made many really shitty flyers with hilariously bad clipart.  This week, though, I've been completely consumed with organizing a pie sale to benefit the center. [One thing to note, here: the term "pie" in St. Kitts refers to not only the round, crusted, possibly lattice- topped confection we know, but also to any kind of casserole. So, for example, lasagna is called a "pie". Macaroni and cheese is "macaroni pie".  Totally weird.]

To say that we received more orders than we expected would be a huge understatement. We thought that we would make a few pies - maybe twenty? Maybe we'd get just an overwhelmingly positive response and have to make, let's say, thirty - but we could do it! It'd be fun, even! Well, people were awesome and kept calling and emailing orders until we finally decided to cut it off when we reached 107 pies. We were freaking out a little and Michelle, a younger staff member, was discussing ways we could cut corners: the chicken pot pies, for example, didn't need a sauce - you could just throw the chicken (thigh, not breast!) in there with some (frozen!) mixed vegetables (with corn and lima beans!) and some (gasp!) bell peppers and make a "short crust" with flour and water! Now, a normal person would have maybe thought the above sounded pretty gross but oh, well, and then - I don't know, thought about something else. I couldn't behave like a normal person, of course: I was obsessively horrified and blurted, "I can do the pot pies! Yeah, it'll be no big deal, I'll do them."

So, I made 26 chicken pot pies in a dorm kitchen, which sucked as much as you think it would. I borrowed pots from friends, made chicken stock from chicken necks (they sell those everywhere here) and I cleared off the desk downstairs for rolling out the pastry.  I used Ina Garten's recipe, substituting butter for the shortening in the crust because shortening is gross.

I shouldn't talk too much about how, when I thought I was finally done and baking the pies off at the center, Michelle went to rotate the many tins on the bottom rack of the oven and TIPPED THE WHOLE EM-EFFING RACK OVER,  and then I had to go home and spend four more hours doing the whole thing over again. No, let's not get into that (suffice to say rage is a good motivator for the "faster runs" of the race training schedule, and that the almost entire bottle of wine since getting back from that run has helped, too).

two of four giant pots of filling. i rouxed the day.

I had to sit outside the student union three times this week to collect money for pie orders. 

half of 'em