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Shortcrust pastry

After discovering how to make Portuguese tarts, I figured that the method of lining the muffin tin for the tarts can also work with lining individual pie tins. So instead of rolling the pastry into a large sheet then cutting it to fit the tins, I'd roll it out into a log, cut rounds out of it like for the Portuguese Tarts, then roll these discs for the tins.

I set out to test that, and made Chicken and Leek pies. I made the shortcrust pastry, aka Pâte Brisée. The word brisée is French for broken. I guess that describes how short or how easily breakable the pastry is. This recipe works for sweet pies too, but I prefer using a different pastry for sweet, the one I made in the Apple Frankenpie video.

Shortcrust pastry can be made ahead of time, up to a week, as long as it is well wrapped in the fridge. For these pies, I made the pastry on day one, then made the chicken filling on day two and stored it in the fridge overnight, and assembled the pies on day three.

Linking Your Thinking

Linking Your Thinking cohort 8 is coming to an end. This week is filled with the showcases, where we open the door and show people into our vault. By the time you read this newsletter, I would have presented my showcase. I am pleased with the system that I designed for myself.

This is my favourite cohort-based course so far. The community is so welcoming. My biggest takeaway is how to make atomic notes and develop maps of content for my personal knowledge management (PKM).

The key word here is personal. My system only needs to make sense to me (and future me). In a breakout room, we likened this to a kitchen. I know where everything is in my kitchen. But if I had to work in somebody else's kitchen I'd be a bit lost.

While Nick Milo talks about notes as boats, that didn't resonate with me. Instead, I'm referring to my notes as crumbs🍞. I then used different cooking stages for where ideas and notes are. Prep🔥 is the stage of the note that needs developing. Cook🥘 is where I am combining crumbs🍞 or atomic notes to create something new. Slice🍰 is where I take a relatively large note and cut it up to smaller pieces. Now that I have a system, I need to use it for a few weeks and tweak as needed.

See you next week :)

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