Marie Callender’s makes a great frozen chicken pot pie. When you cook it in a conventional oven, as I do, the instructions demand wrapping the edge of the crust in a strip of aluminum foil.
This is easy to do, and I’ve always followed the directions before. On the other hand, it takes two strips of aluminum foil to achieve, given the circumference of the pie and the width of my aluminum foil.
I decided to run a controlled experiment: what would happen if I wrapped only half the crust in foil? Would the two sides be indistinguishable, rendering the extra 20 seconds of foil-wrapping effort unnecessary?
Yeah… that step turns out to be rather important. Half the edge of my freshly baked chicken pot pie is now deliciously flaky. The other half is in my garbage can.
(Pot pie, refactored.)
Here are some other controlled experiments you may want to try:
1) Go halfway to work to see if the half is really important
2) Throw away half a loaf of bread to see if it’s better than none.
3) Act half your age to see if the other half makes a difference
4) Only half bake your ideas (assuming you’ve been using fully baked ideas).
Or as David Mamet wrote in State and Main:
Walt: What does he like?
Bill: Fourteen-year-old girls.
Walt: Well, get him something else. We want to get out of this town alive. Get him half a 28-year-old girl.