Crust!

We love homemade pie crust but it is much easier to just be lazy with the frozen store-bought version.  This week, we went fresh.  It is hard to determine if it's cheaper or not, since butter and lard is involved, and half the flour is white whole wheat -- costlier ingredients for sure.  Our batch of crust was for a boys lunch -- quiche and an apple pie for dessert.

Quiches seem to turn out better if the crust is pre-baked.  A big broken rock from the lake makes a great pie weight.  The foil tin is from a set of frozen crusts from another lunch.  A box or bag of two crusts runs about $1.99 on sale, but not on sale, over three bucks.  So, maybe it's worth it to cheat when there is a sale.

But maybe it's better not to cheat.  This is how the crust looked out of the oven.  It was brown and super flaky.  Admittedly, it was thin and sparse as far as the over-all size, but the goal was to have enough for dessert too.

This is the broccoli, ham and cheese filling.  Lunch the previous day was grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, so this was a bit of a money saver for a second meal.  The broccoli is frozen -- only a half bag was needed.  The rest went into veggie slop for the pup.

Without a lot of extra crust, the top layer needed to be a large lattice.  It turned out really well.  There was one apple, four cores, and a bunch of skin left over.  That was whizzed along with cauliflower stems and leaves and mixed with the broccoli for a big batch of veggie slop.  No matter how many legs you have, you're going to eat well at the Microcosm!