I baked a pie every day for a year and it changed my life
theguardian.com171 points by NaOH 3 days ago
171 points by NaOH 3 days ago
Pie is such a gift. My wife died nearly ten years ago and soon afterwards, I took up pie baking, which is something that she loved to do (I just loved to eat it — since childhood I've had a birthday pie instead of cake). I had all the stuff, after all. I got good at it and love to share them with friends at gatherings, or even just give them away entirely. Right before COVID, I did a Friday Pie Day thing where I gifted a pie to someone in town based on social media discussions. One time, someone got it for her coworkers who had just shipped a tough release.
When everyone got into baking early covid I couldn’t understand why no one was baking anything, like, good. No pizza or pie or cake or muffins or banana bread or even a damn focaccia. The world collectively just decided the end-all be-all of baking was… sourdough.
Sourdough is fantastic, I have two loaves finishing their overnight chill in my fridge right now, will bake them after dinner.
I was baking sourdough since before the pandemic, and will continue baking in the future. It's a bit of work, but it's not too much work and the results are pretty damn fantastic.
Focaccia though, if I baked that regularly I'd have to go back on a GLP-1. Focaccia taught me to read the seals on olive oil in the supermarket and actually pick the right one for the break.
Sourdough is the bomb though. I agree about the lack of variety, but in its defense, sourdough starter can be used for a variety of other baked goods.
Plus bread itself is used in other recipes, like sandwiches or toasts or for mopping up sauced dishes.
It wasn't for no reason at all though. There were concerns about availability of yeast, which isn't used in sourdough. (Valid concerns or not, I have no idea.)
For one thing, yeast was in short supply, so if you wanted to bake regularly, sourdough was a good option if you could keep it going.
Maybe because the large time investment and trial+error in making good dough provided something to focus on when stuck inside.
Well, as a less-advanced baker, I get the most pleasure from baking bread.
Plus, I can eat it without getting fat.
When I graduated from university, my dad had just died, my mom had cancer, and there was no employment for a year. I made a lot of pies and got really good at making crusts. Yep, it was always great when I brought in a real pie, homemade.
I'm so sorry for your loss.
What a wonderful way to keep your wife's memory alive.
For me the change would be to become spherical. That would simplify some calculations.
Yes, me too. Reading the caveat "– and she would give each pie away" made a lot more sense.
It's a social commitment at least as much as a creative/culinary one, and since there aren't a lot of people you'd want to give a pie minus a slice to, that keeps the extra calories under control.
Yep. And if one gives away the "QC Passed" pies - then as your skill improves, you're eating an ever-shrinking fraction of your output.
And you feel like you're growing ever-thinner, as all your friends & neighbors eat more and more pies. ;)
A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).
There are some old 18th century pies they cooked in boiling water inside a bag which could be quite spherical. Townsends on youtube has some videos on it.
I wonder if they could look to dim sum for inspiration? A apple dumbling is basically just a round apple pie right?
The first two things that spring to mind are pasties from the UK (which are not usually spherical but can get quite hemispherical), and the "UFO-Döner" from Germany (which are more oblate spheroids). Maybe by combining these ideas, your friend can get closer to their dream?
Beef Wellington could be spherical if you so chose.
I suspect that deep-fried-battered haggis might exist which could be very spherical.
British steak and kidney pudding (a steamed pie of suet pastry) is a truncated cone shape, could go spherical with the right pastry case.
> A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).
Could also do it on pi approximation day (July 22), then one doesn't have to be so exact about it.
Now I'm considering making a Matt Parker pie: a spherical pie made from a normal pie + calling it close enough in 2 out of 3 dimensions.
I didn't get it, so I looked it up.
22/7 ~= 3.14
Actually closer to π and matches the more sensible date format.
(Yes this is worth fighting over!)
Heating the middle has to be a pain. And cutting it…
Well if you insert metal rods through it you can help with the heat transfer, then you can lattice over the holes. If you pumpkin pie it, you might even be able to have it hold up under its own weight. Plus a bit of stiff whipped cream in the holes would help.
I would make them fairly small (personal pie-sized) and use a filling that doesn't need to be cooked in the oven to set. The main limiting factors, I think, would be structural integrity and heating the filling to the center. You could set it on a ring (like the rim of a spring-form pan) to support it better during cooking. Now, a four dimensional hyper pie, on the other hand...
If you’re not cooking the filling, then do a teflon ballon that you put the crust on. Cook. Remove balloon. Then pipe in ready to ready to set chocolate cream.
One of those spherical ice cube makers but made of cast iron, a little like those little waffle makers.
I would bake it on a pizza stone to ensure an even bake.
Has nobody here ever done this? It comes out perfectly cooked.
A pie like this, to the face of a problematic politician, would add drama and help resurrect the profile of pies as activists!
I’m of the belief that doing just about anything every single day for a year will change your life! A key for me has been to “lower the bar” so that I can keep the promise to myself and maintain momentum through days of low energy or enthusiasm, e.g. playing the guitar for 1 minute, or writing 1 sentence.
Similarly, just showing up at the gym/hobby/sport is huge. Even if you do next to nothing.
a stranger i once talked to at the gym told me "every workout is better than the workout you are not doing" and that kinda changed my perspective on that topic.
Yeah I go bouldering even on off days to “stay in the rhythm”. And I do have honestly terrible days where I feel I’m struggling climbs of even a grade below my comfort level, but at least I went lol.
How do you stay injury free climbing every day? I feel like at even twice week I am entering the danger zone with ligamentisis.
I suspect they mean "days that I deal off" rather than "every day". Even elite climbers struggle with ligament issues climbing every single day
The best form of exercise is the one you can consistently stick with.
For me, that got shot down in flames over the winter because I kept getting sick. :/
Someone said it, I forget who: 90% of life is just showing up
Especially true for friendship. If you want friends, all you have to do is be in the same place with the same people regularly.
Atomic Habits is a great book for little things like this that make a big difference when compounded with time.
I imagine reading a book about habits every day for a year would be life changing. :)
Yeah, doing a small thing daily can add up so fast.
When I started my niche-musueums.com website I bootstrapped it by posting a new museum I had been to every day for a month. It took 15-30 minutes a day and within a few weeks I had a site I was really proud of.
I think the key is to give yourself permission to stop without feeling guilty about it. Any time I start a new streak like this I deliberately tell myself that it's not going to be forever and I can stop any time for any reason.
I love your website! Your url has a typo, here's it fixed in the meantime https://www.niche-museums.com
It's basically a form of meditation. It's a great way to get your life back on track
Being intentional in what we do and learn, and practicing it consistently, inevitably changes our lives.
We mostly live on autopilot, without thinking about what we love to do or what we might love to do.
Every day, we read about people whose lives have been changed by jiu jitsu, CrossFit, or learning a foreign language.
It is dedication, focus, goal setting, and practice that change our lives, not so much the activity we devote our time to.
Although pies are delicious and I love making them.
I decided to make rotis every day for a month (am male of Indian origin who hadn't ever cooked breads), AND eat them. The first one was completely inedible. The 30th day's rotis were edible, but nothing like what women in my family make. But still, edible.
Eventually had the confidence to experiment with making Naan.
This led to experimenting with Asian-style Pot-Stickers.
The main benefit to me was confidence, and belief in pmarca's "you can just do things".
Why didn't you just ask the women in your family what they did to make them? It shouldn't take 30 attempts to get a basic flatbread recipe to be edible. It's not like all the women in your family devised recipes on their own - they just watched other women make them and learned how to do it that way.
This is like asking why someone built a text editor as a hobby project when Microsoft Word exists. There is value in experimentation and play, in trying to understand things from first principles. It would often be faster to just ask others, but if everyone did that, we would miss out on a lot of innovation.
It's more like taking 50 attempts to design a scalable font format instead of looking up how TrueType works.
In my experience, dealing with flour is an art, not a science. You just have to do it over, and over, and over, until you internalize the parameters and can adjust to them on the fly. The look, the feel, the temperature, the smell, etc.
I challenge each and every one of you to make a pie by the end of the month.
I made one, for the first time in my life, last week. It brought me tremendous joy not only to make it, but to have something nice to share with friends.
My grandma made Platonically Ideal Pies, and I took up the art years ago. Mine, if I say so myself, are quite good, given that with Grandma's example I know what I'm shooting for.
I haven't made one for a few years, though - having a pie in my house is a recipe for me eating 5000 calories of pie and vanilla ice cream over the next few days.
When my grandma died a few years ago, I asked my aunts if I could have one of her pie pans. Apparently none of her other 17 grandkids thought to ask that - so I got all three (philistines!). Those basic metal pans are among my most cherished possessions.
My "pie" is barbecue ribs. I've made them many, many times, and I've never eaten them all by myself.
Once I fed about 20 friends--one of the best days I've lived.
Do it! Making a pie might seem unapproachable, but it will all work out. I have never failed to make a pie that brought some happiness into the world.
I did this recently, and you know what I really loved about it? It's a great entry-level baking activity where the upside is that you have a pie (something you can gift or just eat!) and the downside is that you have a sort of cobbler. You really can't !@#$ up a pie. Omelette is another good one. At worse you have scrambled eggs.
I mean, yes, at worse you burn your neighbourhood down and your dog runs away. But in terms of the more likely failure modes like screwing up the dough, breaking it, messing up how watery it is, etc. you can mostly just keep baking until it's done, mix it up, put into bowls, serve with ice cream, down the hatch.
Even broader, honestly. Make something culinary! It's amazing what the simple tactile experience of making something can bring when so much of our existence is doing things by proxy.
A fun hobby I picked up during Covid was trying to cook food from countries I had never been to - since traveling anywhere wasn't an option.
Pick a country, research what food it has that you've never tried, find a few online recipes and YouTube guides and give it a go.
This was a ton of fun. I have no idea if anything I cooked was even remotely like the authentic original, but it was still a very rewarding exercise.
If you live somewhere with a lot of international supermarkets (the SF Bay Area is great for those) it also gives you an excuse for a shopping adventure for ingredients.
(My favorite recipe we tried with this was Doubles from Trinidad https://www.africanbites.com/doubles-chickpeas-sandwich/)
I already did for October, November (twice), and December. Does that count?
It would have if you hadn't asked. But as it stands now, I regret to inform you that you'll need to make another pie.
OK then... let's see, it's citrus season -- meyer lemon meringue it is, with a swiss meringue[1] of course.
Baking everyday as a way to keep a professional identity is an interesting idea. Being semi-retired, I’ve noticed that I am starting to struggle the curiosity and motivation that kept me going when I still worked. This article makes me think I should pick up a habit of doing some “work” daily.
Not to take anything from any other activity that someone embraces, but I imagine that for the majority of people in the developed world, taking a 1 hour walk every day would be the most "life changing" thing you could do.
What does that have to do with the article? It is not about 'the most life changing thing for everyone', it was what was life changing for her.
Nothing at all. Just a comment on the internet. Taking a walk AND and baking a pie is even better.
I'm just making a slight point that walking is probably the simplest most effective thing you can do to improve almost every aspect of your life.
Sure, but it's random and unrelated to the discussion at hand.
I bake pies but I also like mushrooms and grilled cheese sandwiches. Every other individual here has random associations they can make.
In person, this is seen as commandeering a linear discussion to your personal topic and repeated violations get you uninvited from conversations for being selfish.
On the internet we can just ignore a thread, which is what I should have done here but I've typed this far so I'll go ahead and post it.
I don't think it's off-topic at all. The story is not as much about baking pies as it is doing something every day.
The point of the pies was the connections it forced her to make with people in her life and then ultimately strangers. Finding 365 people to give pies to is probably harder than baking them all.
Taking a walk alone would be missing the main point.
These kinds of stories may seem silly to some (certainly it would seem silly to my past self), but I think these narratives of personal journeys are going to become more and more important to humanity as AI and automation take over most jobs.
The sarcastic individual in me saw the title and thought "heh, and you got diabetes?" But I was pleasantly surprised after reading it about how wholesome this was.
She is obviously a sweet lady that you would like to have as a neighbor. But I would not include garden variety pie in the wholesome category. The indulgence won't kill you, but it isn't healthy. Apples from her backyard tree are wholesome.
I started practising guitar every day and it didn't change my life but I have a lot of fun doing it.
As someone who loves pie and has far fewer friends and family than the person this story is about, baking a pie every day for a year would also change my life.
If you just place the pie to cool on your window sill, the smell will cause some nearby hobos to float over, or so cartoons have lead me to believe. Then you'll have some friends.
Friends are always attainable via purchase.
Also neighbours tend to be very glad to receive free stuff :) I usually end up with way too many Basil plants every season and give them away, gotten to know some new neighbours that way!
A very timely article when many of us are wondering if AI will eventually push us out of a digital career into something else.
I am hearing rumors that B2B sales is rebounding back to more in-person meetings. Cold emails don't work anymore. I've heard similar tales of current teens early-twenties that there is a trend of doing things in real life again. But... more likely if you start measuring it people are more reclusive than ever, and doing things that used to be normal is now considered "niche and trendy". Our sales process at least is very online-meeting oriented...
Lovely story but the beautification is a bit off.
> Hardin Woods would bake [...] using fresh ingredients local to her home in Salem, Oregon
> She baked her first pie, a lemon meringue
> The next day Hardin Woods made a peach pie
> After that came a chocolate cream pie
Does lime, peach and chocolate ripen within the same season in Oregon? Vickie cooking for is community is already touching, this claim about freshness and locality is skimmed by people who are already convinced, spotted by those who disagree and raise critics of the skeptics.
Between "The Guardian" and it being a warm/fuzzy-type story, I'd read that as "fresh local ingredients when available".
Vs. too many pies have fillings straight out of a can.
I mean, the first pie was in California, per the text right before that. She was visiting family.
Right, the location is off too! The ingredients probably aren't sourced in Oregon after moving to California, but anyway the season ("fresh") and location ("local") point stands. I guess she use local eggs.
It is something hard wired in our brains. Cooking, social connection, giving, all in one. We evolved to cook for each other. No wonder she is damn happy. Being 60 helps too.
Refreshing. There truly is an almost mysterious bliss hidden in giving.
This reminds me of "The Artist's Way".
Nah, that's not a pie! [brandishes a Yorkshire meat and potato pie] Now, that's a pie.
Apologies to Crocodile Dundee.
If AI continues like this, we can all retire and bake pies all day long.
I would love a pumpkin pie right now. But I'd settle for pecan.
Is it just me or since The Guardian left twitter/X they've really been ramping up their paywalls/nagwalls? Love or hate X/Elon, that was really a dumb move on their part.
[flagged]
One of the most Guardian headlines of all time. I'm old enough to remember when they were a newspaper.
To be more precise: she baked breadbowls and calzones. :)
I didn't even read the article, but the headline made me smile.
Government job. Retired at 61. But I made a pie everyday!
Software developer isn't a very prestigious title either. The only thing it has going for it is the pay.