So the weekend's food hoarding didn't really amount to much. I did make a lemon tart, and I tried baking crunchy chickpeas. The lemon tart filling came out smashingly. It's soft, custardy and really lemony. I was glad I cut down on the sugar in the recipe for this. One and a half cups of sugar for a 9-inch pie filling just sounded dastardly, even with a whole lemon blended in, which I pared back to one cup. I wished I'd followed my instincts for the other things I tried to make. The pie crust, for example, was a new recipe I was trying out. It was a more moist dough than I was really prepared for or used to working with, which took far longer to shape and knead. I got a very sturdy pie crust out of it, really old-fashioned crust you could pour a very wet filling in, like liquid custard.

The downside of this is that I got a really sturdy crust. My instinct said that since my oven is tragically 50 degrees off everything, at least, I could probably get away with not blind baking the crust. I followed the recipe and blind baked the crust, albeit quite briefly. The resultant crust is kind of hard on forks, and hard to fork (or cut with kitchen knives) for that matter. The pie is still good though, and the leftover sturdy crust dough may still have some function as the base for meat pasties. Another upside is that I learned one way to crimp. Crimping is usually my enemy.

I didn't trust my insticts with the chickpeas, at all. The recipes I found were very specific about crunchy, crispy chickpeas. Up until perhaps roasting my chickpeas, I'd done everything right. The dried chickpeas were soaked for 18 hours, cooked for another hour and a half, and were lovely and creamy out of the pot. I threw on garlic oil I'd made from scratch, salted and peppered, and baked them in the oven for the amount of time the recipes said to bake them for. I got roasted chickpes, with lovely roasted skins and creamy insides, which I couldn't stop picking out of the pan and munching. Unfortunately, I was certain the recipe said I'd get crunchy, crispy chickpeas, and these weren't close even after cooling. Into the oven they went again, and when they came out, they were crunchy, crispy chickpeas. Quite tasty while warm. Except they're now too crunchy, verging on hard little teeth breakers. Still quite tasty, but what on earth was I thinking?

I am vaguely worried about what would happen when I attempt my next major experiment, which are tea cookies with actual tea in them. My oven still by and large dislikes cookies in general, though I did get fairly good results with small jam tarts once. Or I might just get so sugared out finishing off the lemon tart, I won't really want to make sweet cookies for another month, or something. In spite of how it looks, I'm really not a good sweet tooth. Lemon tart got made, mind you, because it's got lemons in it, and it is tart.

I need savory foods! Chicken! In salt water!