Natchitoches Meat Pies; Pita Pizza; Maiden's Blush

     At first, I was going to pick a drink to match our entrees (at least theme-wise), like I did last week.  However, I scoured my two drink books and could find nothing referring to Texas, which I find very strange.  Do they not drink hard alcohol in Texas?  I did find some interesting recipes on the Internet, but since I have waited until the last minute to decide what I am going to make, I was limited to what I had in stock at home, so I scrapped the themed idea and went for the Maiden's Blush.

MAIDEN'S BLUSH

2 measures gin

1 measure absinthe

¼ measure grenadine

Shake all ingredients together in a shaker filled with ice.  Strain into a cocktail glass and serve.



     With that decided, I started in on the pita recipe.  Easy enough - once the yeast had sat in the water for 5 minutes or more, I threw it into the Kitchen Aide with the rest of the ingredients and let the machine do the work.  While the pita dough was rising, I began working on the no-yeast dough. 

PITA BREAD

2 cups unbleached all-purpose white flour

1 pkg. dry yeast

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. sugar

3/4 cup luke warm water

     Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the warm water and set aside for 5 minutes.  Sift the flour and salt into a bowl.  Make a depression in the flour and pour in the yeast mixture.  Mix well and turn out onto a floured board.  Knead the dough for 8-10 minutes.

     Dust the top of the dough with flour and place it in a clean bowl, cover with a clean dish towel and set it in a warm, draft-free place to rise for 1½ hours.  Punch the dough down and let it rise for another 45 minutes.

     After the second rising period, knead the dough for 2 minutes and form it into 8 balls of equal size.  Cover the balls and let them  rise for another half hour.  Preheat the oven for 15 minutes to 500º (or the highest setting your oven has).  After they have risen, flatten the dough balls with the palm of your hand.  They should be about 1/4" thick.  Lightly flour a baking sheet and back 1 or two of the pieces of dough at a time for 3-4 minutes on each side.

     Pita will be light brown in color when it is done.  The loaves will puff as they bake.

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NO YEAST CRUST

5 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup lard

1½ teaspoons salt

½ cup ice-cold water

1 egg, beaten

     In a large bowl, pour flour and whisk to break up any lumps.  Add lard and salt and work into flour with a pastry blender.  Continue combining until mixture resembles small peas.

     Add cold water and egg to the mixture and stir.  Work with hands until mixture is well-blended and holds together in a ball.  Divide ball into four equal portions.

    

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     It sounded a lot like a pie crust to me.  I opted for the lard substitution option, since I had lard (lots of it, and some in the freezer, too), and I had no vegetable shortening.  I added the cup of lard to the flour, and it hardly made any change.  Once I had worked it all into the flour, it still looked like a bowl of flour.  I added the egg and the 1/2 cup of water.

     It took quite a bit of water to get the dough to come together.  I think I ended up adding at least an additional quarter of a cup.  Once I finally got it to a consistency that allowed me to form it into a ball, I put half of it into a bag in the fridge and the other half I halved again and put them into the freezer.
     By this time, the pita dough was climbing out of the bowl I had set it in. I divided it into 8 pieces and rolled them into little circles.  I hastened the recipe a little bit by skipping a second rising of the whole dough, and just letting the disks have another go at rising.

     I probably didn't let them go as long as I should have.  I let them sit for moments while I browned the hamburger.

    

     The pita breads looked pretty, they had some nice browning spots, and they looked almost fluffy, but I was really sceptical that we would be able split them as instructed.  With the bread done and the meat browned, I figured I could quit for the evening.  The rest of the recipes were chopping and mixing and building.

     On Thursday, I was going to start in on the filling for the meat pies, when I read Parsley on the ingredient list.  I started explaining to Jennifer that I didn't remember seeing that on the ingredient list and therefore didn't buy any this week.  I told her I was going to skip it.  Then, I reached in my vegetable drawer to get the green onions out, and found a bag of some kind of herb.  I pulled it out.  It tuned out to be some gargantuan parsley that I must have purchased last week and forgotten about. 

     I chopped up the parsley and worked on the rest of the ingredients while Jennifer worked on the pita pizzas.  I gave her the option of splitting 4 of the pitas, as was the recipe's intent, or just using all 8 pitas as they were.  She tried to split one and was unsuccessful, so she scrapped that idea and went for the whole pita option and worked on rolling the dough for the meat pies, instead.
     I was going to leave the seeds in the jalapenos, but I was afraid Roger wouldn't eat it if it were too spicy.  I asked Jennifer, just to make sure, whether the kids would eat it either way.  She said they wouldn't.  She had brought a wonderful chicken Alfredo pizza that she had made out of a Cooking Light magazine, so they wouldn't be interested in the "weird" things I was making.

     Of course, we had to sample her pizza while we were working on the rest of the dinner.  It was lovely.  The crust was crisp and buttery, and the sauce creamy and garlic-laden.  The chicken was tender and the bacon on top just added a perfect amount of saltiness and crunch.       I decided to take out half of the seeds of the jalapeno.  I added that to my container of meat from the day before.  When I had gotten home from the grocery store earlier in the week, I looked at my ingredient list again and realized it didn't call for barbecue sauce - I was supposed to make my own.  I decided I was just going to skip that step this time and had zeroed in on the sauces we bought on Sunday.  I chose vidalia onion barbecue sauce from Sweet Baby Ray's.  I poured that into my hamburger along with some minced garlic, the chopped green onions and the cumin.

  

     I handed the filling off to Jennifer, since she had all of the little circles rolled out for the meat pies.  I let her continue with loading them up and sealing them, while I worked on the little pitas.  They went together quickly, and we able to take a moment before I fried up the meat pies.  Jennifer was our bartender that night while Roger supervised.

     Pam didn't waste any time with hers, even though she said she really didn't care for the licorice undertones.  I really liked that aspect of the drink.  It was zingy, almost numbing my tongue as it went down.  The sweetness of the grenadine smoothed it out and left me wanting another sip.

     The meat pies came out a beautiful golden brown.  The exterior was crisp and flavorful (go, pork fat!).  The filling was almost sweet on the first taste, but the subtle hint of green onion peeked through, and the heat from the jalapeno reared up after the bite was already gone.  They were delicious.

  

     The pita pizzas were also a big hit.  Again, they just proved to me how sometimes the simplest ingredients can really come together to create something amazing.  The crusts were pillowy but sturdy.  The cheese browned almost uniformly on all the little pies, adding that brown toasty flavor to the whole thing, not to mention holding it all together.  I had skipped adding the Parmesan to the mix, simply because I had forgotten to prepare for that ingredient, but I don't think it was missed.