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Let it be known that I did not forget the July pie. It was most definitely made and eaten in the month of July. However, since this happened just a few days before embarking on our cross-country drive, I haven’t had time to write a post about this pie until now, most of way through August. Oh, well.

This is why I kept the language vague on the “Year of Pies!” gift certificate I initially gave Evan. One pie a month. No mention of blogging about the pies in a timely manner. This has not stopped Evan from looking for loopholes whenever possible, in an effort to argue his way into getting an extra pie.

Okay, so as of early July, we were trying to eat up the remains of what we had left in the kitchen in Ann Arbor. Among these items was a nearly-full jar of peanut butter. It was also very, very hot during some of those days. I saw this recipe for a frozen peanut butter pie and decided it sounded perfect for our situation.

The finished pie, fresh from the freezer.

The main challenge I had with this one was the graham cracker crust. The way this recipe has it, the crust is formed by basically mashing together a few egg whites with the graham cracker crumbs. This sounded weird to me (isn’t there usually butter in graham cracker crusts?), but I’d never made such a crust before anyway, so I gave it a try.

Turns out that egg whites combined with graham cracker crumbs is an extremely sticky mess. The suggestion to coat my hands with cooking spray didn’t help much; I even had to reapply a few times. Eventually I got it into a state that seemed workable (mostly by adding more dry graham cracker crumbs to the top and then pressing down on those), but if I were to make this again, I would honestly look for another recipe for that crust. It tasted good, but it was a pain.

I had to do some sawing to get this first frozen piece out. Slicing and serving is a lot easier once the pie reaches fridge temperature, rather than being totally frozen.

The filling, by contrast, came together with very little trouble. The assembled pie then spent about eight hours in the freezer, and I learned that 30 minutes of refrigerator time following that isn’t really quite enough to thaw it out before serving. While it’s supposed to be served cold, it gets pretty hard in the freezer, and it’s a lot easier to eat at fridge-temperature.

August 25th, 2012 | Category: food | Leave a comment

This recipe came together from another Smitten Kitchen find, her peach blueberry cobbler. This isn’t the first of her cobblers I’ve turned into a pie. However, this one came with a few added complications.

Completed pie in all its biscuit-topped glory.

Looks great, though, right? That’s a biscuit topping, which I tried to sort of seal the outer edges with to make slicing easier, but the original recipe does stipulate that you’re supposed to just scatter drops of it around the top. They puff up during baking, so you end up getting more coverage than is initially apparent pre-baking.

Complication #1 of this pie: I didn’t have enough ripe peaches to add in. I made up for this by just adding more blueberries. Done.

Complication #2: the filling was going to be too juicy to stand up in a pie slice. The original recipe calls for 2 Tbsp flour to be mixed in with the filling as a thickener of sorts; I added 2 Tbsp of tapioca instead, hoping that it would have slightly more absorbing power than the flour. It was still pretty juicy, but seemed stable enough. This isn’t America’s Test Kitchen, so I didn’t have any other versions to compare it to.

Complication #3: The baking time in the original recipe (20-25 minutes at 425 degrees) is fine for cobbler, but not long enough to really make the filling bubble in pie format. After 25 minutes, however, the biscuit topping was already getting brown, and I didn’t want to burn it up. So I ended up covering the whole thing with foil, lowering the oven temperature to 350 degrees, and cooking for another 20 minutes or so. I think the filling actually could have cooked longer than that, but it seemed fine.

Action shot of a slice about to be eaten. Pardon the weird effects on the photo.

The biscuits and blueberries together really made the pie; I’d picked up the berries earlier that same day from a farmer’s market stand, and as for the biscuits, who doesn’t love biscuits? I think a peachier version of this would be good too, though. I just need to develop the habit of planning meals further out in advance, so I’ll have time to let certain ingredients ripen on the counter for a few days.

June 24th, 2012 | Category: food, photos | Leave a comment

I’m a total convert for galettes now. This thing was a snap to pull together, as it’s basically like making a fancy pizza (we actually ate it more or less like pizza). The only tricky part was the dough, which is almost entirely butter and very, very sticky to work with. I rolled it out between sheets of wax paper and was crowing about how there were no cracks, etc, it looked very smooth and perfect, and then I went to lift off the paper and half the dough came with it. Oops. I’ll be less stingy with the dusting flour next time.

The edge is supposed to be "pleated" and generally neater than this, but even this attempt ended up looking fairly graceful. Gotta love French recipes for that.

This recipe came from Smitten Kitchen, and I didn’t adjust anything. Might have gone a little heavy on the basil at the end, but no one complained. We split the thing into four quadrants and chowed down, and I forgot to take my traditional “slice” photo. It’s fairly thin. I don’t think you’d want to pile it too high with stuff, as the dough might not be able to handle it. It’s not really like pizza, in that regard. But, wow, the buttery crust was totally worth the sticky trouble.

And, yes: this is technically called a galette, but in my book it’s not so different from pie. It’s what I imagine the French make when they don’t want to bother with a tart shell.

Just for posterity’s sake: I had this along with this delicious salad. Great summer meal.

June 24th, 2012 | Category: food, photos | Leave a comment

Or, as Evan briefly referred to it, “the tau party,” but he only said this once because, I imagine, it’s tiring to have to keep explaining to people that tau = 2 pi. I never learned about tau in school, personally. Why not just say 2 pi? But, as became clear when the dinner conversation moved on to the topic of types of prime numbers (“sexy primes” is a real mathematical term), there’s a lot about math that I don’t understand.

Anyway, so this party involved two pies: one savory, one sweet. This was how I convinced Evan to let the dessert pie count for the official June pie, even though he had to share it. (I should note that he always has to share it with me, the maker of the pie. This was understood from the beginning.)

This was also the last house party of Ann Arbor for us — at least, of our own hosting. Next month we head to San Francisco, and the July pie could happen anywhere. I keep telling Evan that I’m going to bake it on top of the engine while we drive from Wyoming to Montana on Day Four of our seven-day drive. If someone can send me a recipe for pie, made entirely out of ingredients that can be found at rest stops, along with a little information about safely using a Honda Civic as an oven, I will give it a go. But I have a couple back-up ideas if that doesn’t work out.

In the meantime, I’m going to get down to the business of documenting the tau party pies.

June 24th, 2012 | Category: ann arbor | Leave a comment

Hmm. So, when I’m blogging about a recipe that I got from someone else’s usually-more-famous blog, my strategy has been to just link to their blog and post only my own photos and ramblings here. In a blow to that strategy, the Smitten Kitchen website appears to be down tonight. I was planning to link to her recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie.

Well, by the time I get my blathering in order and my photos uploaded, there’s a pretty good chance her site will be running again, assuming this isn’t like that time someone backed a truck into a power transformer and took down half the Internet.

Moving on to the topic of pie, let’s discuss rhubarb a bit. I’ve made strawberry rhubarb pie on at least three different Memorial Day weekends, so I guess it’s officially kind of a traditional seasonal pie. If I hadn’t had my heart so set on it, I probably would have paid more attention to things like crop availability and gone with some other berry-centric pie for this month.

Rhubarb is more of a commodity than usual this year, at least in Michigan. Remember that glorious warm March where all the fruit trees blossomed and it was like spring had come early? And then April was kind of drab and cold but we didn’t care because we were still thinking about how nice March was? So, turns out rhubarb is one of those crops that really hates that. Long story short, I paid way more than I should have for the rhubarb that was in this recipe, and felt that it wasn’t even especially good rhubarb; it was simply among the few survivors from a late frost.

If we'd waited a couple hours to dig into it, the filling would have been a lot more settled. I recommend doing this.

But, behold, a pie was made anyway! And I had an unprecedented success with the pie crust, actually managing to get the entire top on with no cracking. I forgot to take a picture, of course. We were sort of in a hurry to get out the door on the evening that I made the pie, so as a result we dug into the pie while it was still a little too hot and unsettled… hence the huge rising puddle of pink juices in the photo I finally remembered to take. I think it also might have been a little underdone. Evan, being the excellent pie eater that he is, only had good things to say.

I think this photo was actually taken of a slice I cut the next day. You can see how much more solid the filling is.

The nice thing about this recipe in particular is that it’s not as sweet as the usual strawberry rhubarb pie; it’s actually more tart than sweet.

Oh, and look at that: the Smitten Kitchen site appears to be back up. Here’s the full recipe, which I did not change at all. My rhubarb looked a lot sadder than her batch, though.

May 31st, 2012 | Category: photos, recipes | Leave a comment

This is a recipe I’ve used several times for reliably good pecan pie, and today marks the first time I’ve ever dared to alter it—in this case, by adding bourbon. It was a last-minute decision. I had all the ingredients already spread out on the counter, and honestly, maybe I just wanted a drink and projected it onto the pie.

The pie. I was partway through serving when I remembered to take a photo.

We may never be sure. But the bourbon was a really nice addition to this. It’s already a very sweet pie, so it’s hard to dress up with ice cream. (I mean, if you’d like to, be my guest.) I added a tablespoon of Maker’s Mark and it definitely gave the pie a strong bourbon flavor. If you’re less enthused about the taste of bourbon, a half-tablespoon would probably give it a more subtle richness. And, of course, you can leave it out altogether—the original recipe really is a good one.

I had to reallocate a few pecans back onto this slice when they fell off during serving. The baked filling has a quiche-like consistency.

This recipe is, like many of the recipes in my green binder, a photocopied sheet from an unspecified cookbook.

Ingredients

• 3 eggs
• 1 cup light corn syrup
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup butter, melted
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 Tbsp bourbon
• 1-1/4 cups pecan halves
• Pastry for a single crust pie

Instructions

1. Beat eggs together in a mixing bowl. Stir in corn syrup and sugar. Drizzle in the melted butter while stirring.
2. Stir in the vanilla and bourbon. Stir in the pecan halves.
3. Grease a 9-inch pie pan. Attempt to get your pie crust rolled out and into the pan in one piece. (Good luck with that.) Once you’ve patched up any cracks and formed an acceptable crust, pour the pecan filling into the pan.
4. Bake for 45-50 minutes in a 350-degree oven.

My recipe says that once the pie is done, a knife will come out clean when inserted into the center. This has never, ever happened for me. My pies usually have a quiche-like consistency and are tremendously gooey. They hold their shape once cooled, but they’re definitely still a little jiggly when they come out of the oven. I guess if I ever noticed actual liquid-like behavior in the pan, like pecans actively sloshing around when the pan is shaken, I’d put it back in for a few minutes.

April 29th, 2012 | Category: food, recipes | Comments (1)

Technically, I don’t have a tart pan. I’ve made three tart-like desserts in 9-inch cake pans with no ill effects so far (weirdly enough, I’ve never made cake in them).

Anyway, here is our March pie: a lemon tart, recipe thanks to Smitten Kitchen once again. For once, I don’t think I made any substitutions for anything (except for using a cake pan, I suppose).

Her instructions suggest rolling out the buttery dough before pressing it into the pan. Nope. I’ve never had any luck rolling out anything crust-like, so upon seeing her note that skipping the rolling-out process was a secondary option, I immediately knew that’s what I would be doing.

I have very little experience “blind-baking,” which I think is the correct term for when you bake a pie crust with no filling in it. Anyway, there are about a hundred ways to do this, and in this recipe, she pointed out the benefit of not needing any weight in the pan—which is good, because I’m not sure what you’re supposed to add as the weight. Uncooked beans? Is that the standard? Are the beans usable after that? Doesn’t matter, because I didn’t use any. The crust did puff up a bit (and shrunk a bit down the sides; next time, I would have made a higher crust going up the sides to begin with), but I pressed it back down with a spoon and got the filling on top of it, and all seemed well.

Easy to slice. The crust is basically sweetened shortbread.

A side effect that I noticed: this recipe uses a whole lemon, rind and all, and I think the rind parts are lighter than the rest of the eggy filling mixture, and rise to the top. It gave the pie a weird texture on top that I didn’t notice in the Smitten Kitchen pictures; maybe she processed the lemons more than I did? The taste doesn’t suffer from this at all, though. If the appearance had really bothered me, I suppose an option would be to just sprinkle a generous amount of powdered sugar on top, or decorate it with some lemon slices.

March 27th, 2012 | Category: food, recipes | Leave a comment

I should clarify what I meant in the last post by “planning ahead” for a recipe. I wasn’t referring to having all the ingredients. (This is important too, though, and I’m definitely guilty of making a lot of substitutions for ingredients I don’t feel like buying/peeling/etc.) But what I was referring to was being prepared to actually cook the thing, as a matter of understanding the technique.

I.e., don’t launch into a custard pie without first scoping out some pointers on how to make stirred custard. I  am definitely versed in the whole just-jump-in-and-figure-it-out-as-you-go method of learning things, but there’s no need to bet a perfectly good pie on it if you don’t have to.

I did a little Googling on this and stumbled upon helpwithcooking.com. Have patience; the design of the site is awful and looks super-spammy, but the content actually seems pretty good. I don’t think I would use their recipes verbatim, but just in perusing the pages for stirred custard and meringue, I started to get ideas for an orange-chocolate custard pie.

February 17th, 2012 | Category: food | Leave a comment

This is one of those recipes that definitely separates the people who plan ahead from those who don’t. When it comes to cooking, I am definitely in the latter category. Which is how I found myself ad-libbing a fairly large proportion of the steps for this technically-daunting custard-based pie.

Basically, my research for this pie consisted of typing “chocolate pie” into Google and then picking out the picture that looked tastiest. This technique led me to this blog, where the author even admits that he meant to watch Grandma make her famous pie but then got distracted taking photos of something else, and by the time he came back to learn about making pie, it was being pulled out of the oven.

This sort of thing, incidentally, happens to me all the time.

Anyway, since I am a minimal-planning-ahead sort of cook, I took a glance at the ingredient list and didn’t bother to read the recipe itself until the moment I had everything on the counter in front of me. (I suppose this speaks to the power of the writer’s photo, that I had so much faith in the recipe based on just that). Immediately I sensed a problem: I was supposed to mix dry ingredients with a block of baking chocolate and milk and egg yolks… and then heat it up? But wouldn’t the chocolate need to be melted first? And how to keep the eggs from curdling?

This was the moment that I realized I’d never made custard before. Or meringue, for that matter, which was coming up immediately after. Hmm.

So, here’s basically how I put the thing together. The full recipe is linked here; these are just my additional notes. (The crust, I’d already had in the freezer, so I just baked it for about 20 minutes at 350 degrees and then set it aside to fill with the finished custard.)

1. Melt the chocolate in a saucepan. Meanwhile, separate the eggs, and mix the dry ingredients for the filling (sugar, salt, and flour) with the milk. The sugar may not entirely dissolve.
2. Beat the egg yolks lightly, and pour a little of the milk into the bowl with them. I wanted to get them a little liquidy so they’d be easier to pour into the warm custard mix later.
3. Once the chocolate is melted, begin slowly streaming in the milk mixture (the part you didn’t mix with the eggs), stirring with a whisk. Once that’s added, mix in the egg/milk combination, whisking all the while.
4. For some reason, you’re supposed to wait to add the butter and vanilla extract. I got the custard really thick (took about 10 minutes), and then took it off the burner and stirred them in. (It helps to melt the butter first.) I don’t know if it actually matters.

So, those steps seemed to lead to a decent-looking custard. I have a feeling there’s a simpler way to make chocolate custard with fewer bowls than I went through. Something to research for the next custard pie, whenever that may be.

As for the meringue… I loved how it tasted in the end, but I’m pretty sure I did something wrong. Notice how there’s a shiny substance just between the meringue and the custard in the photo? (There was no such substance in the original Grandma’s photo, I might add.) This seemed to be un-foamed egg white mix leaking out from the top meringue layer. So I’m guessing I didn’t whip the egg whites long enough. Or didn’t keep it in the oven long enough.

The pie, in the end, tasted just fine. (I can only assume Grandma’s is even better.) It’s best cold, and reminds me a little of some sort of candy bar. But if I were to try it again, I’d want to go in a little more prepared. Unlike fruit pies, where you can kind of just throw random chopped fruit into a crust and bake it into oblivion, the custard/meringue combo involves some additional skills that I’m not sure I have a handle on just yet.

February 15th, 2012 | Category: food, recipes | Comments (1)