Apple Pie with All-Butter Crust

I've been less and less satisfied with the pie crusts I've been producing. They've been getting more and more complicated to put together. Do I have Crisco? (I never have Crisco, since I only ever buy it once a year.) Wet the flour with vodka...no, not vodka, calvados! With a spray bottle! With ice cubes in it! Dig out the food processor. Pulse process--is the butter pea-sized yet? (You can look back at my original post for apple pie to see all the steps I'm talking about.) And it would take me forever to roll out the dough, and it was cracking, and it never seemed flaky. Maybe I just suck at pastry, I thought.

So, I was looking for something else to try. I found Smitten Kitchen's recipe for all butter, really flaky pie dough. She [Deb Perelman] had been using the same Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen recipe that I had been working with. One by one, she enumerated all the problems she had with what she'd been doing. And she proposed ditching the shortening, the vodka, the food processor...all the things that had made pie crust such a pain. That left just five ingredients--flour, butter, sugar, salt, and water--and minimal equipment. Could it be that easy?

Guinness Beef Stew

I adapted this recipe from a few sources (Miliken and Feniger's recipe at FoodNetwork.com, Kathy Maister's recipe at Startcooking.com) and love it enough that I've revived my food blog to bring it to you!

I really wanted a single-pot dish with a long, slow cooking process, so my neglected Dutch oven can get its much-needed autumn workout. Accordingly, I went for beef chuck (a tasty, not too fatty option that can stand up to long cooking), and decided to buy a full roast and trim it down into stew pieces myself. If you go that route, be prepared to buy at least a three-pound roast, since you'll lose some fat or connective tissue when you trim. Pre-packaged stew meat would be absolutely fine.

Serve this stew with a nice hearty bread--a soda bread would be great! (The bread in the photo is actually a sweet sourdough bread with a great chewy texture.) If you prefer to serve with mashed or cooked potatoes, feel free to leave the potatoes out of the stew itself.

Recipe after the jump!