Amazing Amazon, cheese powder edition

A few weeks ago, I decided to make a King Arthur Flour recipe recommended to me by my friend Joyce, an excellent cook. The galette sounded delish - zucchini, tomatoes, ricotta - but the crust called for cheese powder.

Cheese powder? I'd never even heard of cheese powder. It was an optional ingredient, but I thought I'd give it a whirl.

I couldn't find it at my grocery store, but I may not have been looking in all the wrong places. E.g., baking needs. 

So I turned to Amazing Amazon. 

I'm a regular Amazon user. Not insanely so. Just regular regular. Most of the time, I try to find the object of my desire locally, brick & mortarly. Sometimes it's just not there. Other times, the object of my desire can be ordered by my locally, brick & mortarly outlet. But it just won't arrive as quickly as I need to get my needy little hands on it. 

So, cheese powder.

I wanted to make my galette the next morning, so I wanted it - not really needed it: optional ingredient, after all - the next morning. Early. Arriving at 10 p.m., the typical Amazon Prime guarantee, wasn't going to cut it. But for a few bucks extra, Amazon could get it here early early. One window was 4 a.m. to 8 a.m., the other was 8 a.m. to noon. Although I didn't like the idea of the delivery person buzzing my buzzer at 4 a.m., I grabbed the early slot. 

This meant that within 12 hours of when I ordered it, I was going to have my cheese powder.

This is absolutely amazing. 

Amazon, like Walmart, is a company that most of us love to hate and/or hate to love. With me, with Walmart, it's love to hate, even though I have been in a Walmart exactly one time in my life. With me, with Amazon, it's hate to love. And a lot of time I do hate to love it. 

My local indie didn't have an oldie-but-still-goodie collection of Heinrich Böll short stories. Ordering it through them would take forever, and I wanted it more quickly than forever. It wasn't available next-day-at-4 a.m. from Amazon, but it arrived (through a third party) in plenty of time to gift a friend. 

Ditto for the adapter I needed for a recent impromptu trip to Stockholm. I couldn't find my most-of-Europe adapter, and didn't have time to run to TJ Maxx and see what they had. So Amazon it was!

And I don't know where I would have gotten the bulk packages of granola bars and salty snacks we needed for the Juneteenth goody bags we gave to the guests at the homeless shelter where I volunteer. Thank you, Amazon...

Amazon may be ruining the world. Jeff Bezos may have way too much money for anyone's damned good. But you have to give the company (and, I guess, Jeff Bezos) credit for having set up such a brilliant logistics system, capable of the instant consumer gratification that all of us are sometimes looking for.

King Arthur Cheese Powder in hand - I wanted to stay brand consistent, and I was using King Arthur Flour - I went ahead with my galette. 

Surprisingly, for someone who loves to bake, I have never made a pie crust before.

Oh, I've made pies. And I've made quiches. But I've used pre-fab crusts.

My mother was a terrific pie-maker, and many decades ago, she tried to show me how to roll out a pie crust.

She attacked her ball o' dough with vigor, and with just a couple of swipes with the rolling pin, she'd have a near perfect crust rolled out.

In short order, my ball o' dough was sweaty, globs of it attached to the rolling pin. After I while, I'd had enough.

So I gave up on pie-crust making.

Until the galette recipe.

And the crust came out just fine. It was maybe a tad uneven. But fine. Just fine. (From a crust-use point of view, galettes are pretty forgiving.)

I'm not sure what the difference was. 

My mother used Crisco, I used butter?

My mother didn't let her dough stand covered in the fridge for a half-hour before rolling out?

I'm my pie-making mother's daughter, and I just got to be pretty good at this?

Whatever the reason, pie crust and galette success!

I'm thinking of making my mother's blueberry pie recipe this summer, only using a real crust rather than the pre-fab Grahman cracker crust I've gone with in the past. Then there's my Aunt Margaret's pecan pie for Thanksgiving. My next quiche will have homemade crust.

Of course, none of these crusts will call for cheese powder, so I hope that's not the secret to the latter-day emergence of my dough-rolling skill. (I think the stand in the fridge might have made the dough easier to handle.)

But none of this is to take away from the amazing logistics of Amazing Amazon. It's really quite something.