bandwagoner.

I am a thief. Plain and Simple. If you post a recipe on your blog it can be guaranteed that I will indeed be stealing it. Sometimes I confess-not often however. One day as I was confessing to the blog owner where I usually steal recipes from, she inquired as to why I never post any. I responded that although I consider myself to be a kitchen expert and a genuine betty crocker, I rarely remember to capture the images of my kitchen adventures. One thing led to another, as it always does, and I found myself promising to post pictures and a DIY on the pies I was to make for the hubb's birfday. I have officially joined the recipe bandwagon. Here goes nothin.

First and foremost let me say that YOU WILL GET DIRTY. Get over it. Mentally prepare yourself, throw on your apron, and get your crap out. Large bowl, ingredients, blah blah blah... You will need:

3 Cups of UNBLEACHED flour
1 1/2 Cups of Butter flavored Crisco
1 1/2 tsp. of salt
3/4 Cups ICE COLD WATER

Oh I forgot a very important step. Go turn on your jams. Seriously. All good kitchen endeavors have appropriate tunes. Get to it. I like a nice mix of country, American Idol, and sometimes throw in a little Alanis Morsette. Anything works, just make sure you can dance to it. I like to dance around the kitchen sometimes. Kind of a little guilty pleasure if you will, and it freaks Dewy out. Now back to the recipe. Combine Flour, Crisco, and Salt into a LARGE BOWL (trust me on this), roll up your sleeves, and get to diggin. A key to pie crust is to mix it with your hands. I don't know why. Mom just said so. You will get messy, and you will probably get nastiness on your faucet unless you have one of those cool touch ones, which my trusty rental does not. No big. It does however suck when you are trying to take pictures. Whatev. You want to mix everything until it resembles a nice little crumb mixture.

Mix it all up until it looks like a crumb mixture. I love this part. After you have the crumb mixture perfected add in the water. IT HAS TO BE ICE COLD. I put water in a small bowl and put ice cubes in it. Yes it will freeze your fingers. Toughen up. Stick your hands back in there and get to mixin. When you are done it looks like this. Viola.

Now flour up your counter (mom always says you can never have too much flour in your crust so this helps make it not stick and make the crust flakier, and as everyone knows flakier is always better) and grab some dough and your rolling pin (flour that puppy too) and get to rolling. You want the dough to be thin. Like a little bit thicker than cardstock mom says. And just for fun here is a picture of that too. Oh and don't judge me. These are from my phone cause my camera was dead.

Here is the tricky part unless you are a genius like me. Fold the dough in half, carefully pick it up, and set it in the pie dish so it only covers half the dish. I should have taken a picture. Blast. Anyway... unfold the dough to make it cover the whole dish and push the dough against the bottom and sides making it form to the dish. It should look like so:

Next you want to trim down the dough that hangs off the sides. Take a knife and leave about an inch hanging over the edge around the entire dish. Now pause and make your husband lunch because thats what wife of the year would do everyday, but since I don't and it IS his birfday I might as well stop and throw together a dang quesedilla. Ok now that he has given me a thank you kiss, and is eating and watching ESPN, back to the pie shell...

After you trimmed off the excess flaky goodness, start tucking! You want to fold the extra inch back behind the dough, leaving a little bit above the dish to make it all sorts of fancy.

Once the dough is all tucked in nice like a kid in bed, its time to use your hands again--not as messy this time I promise. All your need is three knuckles, so if you are missing some fingers its ok. Though the mixing part earlier may have been hard. You want to push one knuckle from your left hand between two knucks from your right hand to make this fancy pants design.

Ok so I was makin banana cream pie, and I was too lazy to take pictures of that stuff so sorry about that... Its pretty easy though and you could look it up. One little tip I discovered though was you HAVE GOT TO STIR THE CRAP OUT IT WHILE ITS ON THE STOVE. I'm serious. I about burnt the stuff. Anyway back to the shell... so after you have it all fancied you want to bake it on the bottom rack of your oven. 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes for the shell 1 hour for a whole pie. Before you pour the cream filling in the shell make sure both are ENTIRELY COOLED. I stuck mine in the freezer. Had to remove the wedding cake sitting in there... I hate that tradition. Ours is comin out. Here is the finished product. On the second one I put the banana slices on the bottom and up the sides of the shell and I liked it better, but alas did not take a picture. Woops.

Betty Crocker I tell ya... Maybe even better.