I have a long history of turning to elaborate baking projects in times of stress. In college, my roommate and I fell into the practice of Midnight Baking: when we found ourselves heading down the spiral slope to an all-nighter, we’d pull some dough out of the freezer and get started on a pie.
Roomie mixing up pumpkin pie innards on the radiator, circa 2006.
If you’re going to be up all night anyway, a pumpkin pie that doesn’t come out of the oven until 2am isn’t a problem; it’s just short of lifesaving.
In the grad school slog, term paper and presentation deadlines have nearly always translated into treats for friends and office-mates. Once, near the end of the term, as deadlines loomed and all my colleagues were looking increasingly wild-eyed in the hallways, I showed up to a friend’s birthday party having made several dozen of these mini apple pie cookies.
Clearly, when my adviser was expecting a final draft of a major paper and summer research grants were coming due, cutting 6 dozen circles out of handmade dough and crimping them closed around 3 dozen wafer thin perfectly concentric apple slices dredged in cinnamon sugar was an excellent use of my time. (Cue the eye roll.)
So when I was in the grips of a particularly bad bout of fieldwork-induced self-doubt several weeks ago, I knew what I needed: serious baking time. Just me, flour, and butter, meditatively convincing myself that if I can smooth the wrinkles out of my ideas even half as well as I can roll out a beautifully smooth, round ball of dough, it’ll all be okay.
The problem?
I have no oven.
I’ve been considering building myself a solar oven, but as is often the case with crippling incidents of self-doubt, this was nighttime; a solar oven wouldn’t have done me any good. Going back in time to develop really satisfying stress-reduction habits that don’t rely quite so heavily on impractical bulky appliances was also, sadly, out of the picture.
So instead…I made myself some stovetop fried apple hand pies. Natch.
As confectionary tales go, this one was a bit of a disaster: the combination of margarine in place of butter (curse you, ambiguous gold foil wrapper!), inexact ingredient ratios in the absence of cup measures, olive oil for frying, tropical humidity, and a decidedly non non-stick pan meant most of my gorgeous little dough pockets turned into gnarled torn mush the instant they hit the pan. They weren’t the most aesthetically appealing sweets I’ve ever cooked up, but that wasn’t really the point: the process itself was mostly what I needed. I might not have solved all my dilemmas, but I certainly felt calmer and more in control when folding down those lovely creases of dough.
And as is always the case when individual ingredients are delicious, the sugary buttery apple dough mush was still pretty tasty.
Here’s the tweaked recipe I’ll be using the next time I get walloped in the doubt department:
fieldwork food 