#RecipeUpTop (details below):
- Puff pastry scraps (recipe here);
- 2 tablespoons butter;
- Cinnamon-sugar, to taste;
Method: place the scraps on a baking sheet lined with parchment or a silicone mat. Melt the butter, and brush the strips, then apply cinnamon-sugar to taste. Bake at 400F for twenty (20) minutes, and remove to a cooling rack.
The Details
In my childhood, our next door neighbors were a couple of old-Maine retirees who may have been the two best neighbors to ever walk the earth. They weren’t overly friendly, which isn’t to say they weren’t caring or nice, but they radiated a depression-era stoicism that didn’t lend itself to flowery displays of affection. They also kept to themselves, but were quick to lend a hand whenever we asked (which, admittedly, was a frequently. My parents were not native Mainers, and the challenges of living in an 1800’s farmhouse on a shoestring budget were… bedeviling, to put it mildly).
The husband spent his summers culling trees from the forest and splitting firewood by hand (in his seventies), and tending to his meticulous vegetable gardens which produced an astonishing bounty of food to be canned and preserved for the winter. The wife handled the cooking and the sewing, but also was often found hunched over in the gardens as well. And whenever she baked a pie, we would get a phone call to “come getcha treats.”
In this house, we still call these treats by her name, as a tribute. They are absurdly simple, free, and delicious. I make puff pastry or pie crust frequently, and every batch yields these flaky remnants. They rarely last longer than a day, and are wonderful with fresh-brewed coffee in the morning, or atop a scoop of homemade ice cream at night. Most importantly, these (maybe more than anything else we make) embody the spirit of our life philosophy: waste nothing, but try to make it fun.
Step one: get your strips to a baking sheet lined with parchment or silicone mats, brush them with melted butter, and sprinkle with the cinnamon-sugar:
Step two: bake at 400F for twenty (20) minutes, move to a rack to cool, and get ready to play defense against a wife and two children.
That’s it. Really. If (somehow) these make it past the first day, they can be stored in air-tight containment, but be warned: they WILL get soggy eventually, so really it’s best to just eat them now (or maybe in the morning).
If you’ve been following this little mini-series, we made pot roast Friday night, then puff pastry for leftover pot-roast turnovers, and now these puff pastry scraps for a Sunday morning treat. This is the hallmark of our plan: buy or grow quality ingredients, and use every damn molecule.
Now, come getcha treats.
10 Chickens to Maine 