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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)

As promised, January’s pie for Evan is a savory pie—probably the only non-dessert pie I’ll be making this year. I kept the recipe a surprise up until the moment it was ready to eat, leaving Evan with ample time to puzzle over what on earth I might be concocting with green pepper and cottage cheese.

We got this far into eating it (maybe 35%? This photo reminds me of my favorite pie chart ever) before I remembered that I’d meant to document the thing. Fresh pie, even the savory kind, is simply too hard to resist digging into right away.

Action shot of a slice—yes, it is served in wedges just like pie. However, the crust is made out of spaghetti, so by nature it can tend to slide around a bit come serving time.

I got this recipe from my mom, who got it from somewhere in Charlottesville in the ’70s. I think I can safely post this one without fear of copyright infringement. (Mom, if you’re writing a cookbook, I guess now’s the time to tell me.)

Ingredients

• 6 oz spaghetti
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 lb ground beef
• 1/2 cup onion, chopped
• 1/4 cup green pepper, chopped
• One 8 oz can tomatoes, cut up, undrained
• One 6 oz can tomato paste
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1/2 tsp garlic salt
• 1 cup cottage cheese
• 1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Instructions

1. Cook spaghetti; drain. Stir butter in while hot. Stir in Parmesan cheese and eggs (the latter, I added in after the pasta had cooled a bit).
2. Form spaghetti into a “crust” in a buttered 10-inch pie plate, pushing it up the sides a bit.
3. Cook ground beef, onion, and green pepper until vegetables are tender and meat is browned. Drain off excess fat.
4. Stir in undrained tomatoes, tomato paste, sugar, oregano, and garlic salt. Heat through.
5. Spread cottage cheese over the bottom of the crust. Fill pie with tomato mixture.
6. Bake uncovered in a 350-degree oven for 20 minutes. Sprinkle mozzarella on top and bake for 5 minutes longer, until cheese is melted.

January 16th, 2012 | Category: food, recipes | Comments (2)

I’m not completely through the process just yet, but I’ve made some good headway on the project of cleaning up my recipe folder. For some context, this is how the recipe folder has been looking for a while:

The right side might appear neat, but don’t be fooled: it’s merely a pile of printed-out recipes stacked on top of another pocket with an equal number of haphazard smaller recipes in it. The larger papers started out tucked in the pocket themselves, but after a while I couldn’t fit any more in.

My solution to this was inspired by a similar recipe binder that my mom has, which is far neater than anything I’ll ever put together. Nonetheless, I think my own binder is at least a huge improvement over the folder:

It has subsections and everything! Plastic sleeves for loose recipes! Hole-punched full-size recipes! I’ve still got a ways to go before all my scattered recipes are safely stored in here, though (I’m already thinking the 1/2″ binder size might have been naive on my part; 1″ would have been better).

January 16th, 2012 | Category: food, recipes | Leave a comment

So, let’s get the due credit out of the way. This wonderful recipe is an adaptation of Smitten Kitchen’s pear cranberry and gingersnap crumble. That crumble, in turn, was an adaptation of a pie recipe from Sweet Melissa, a bakery in Brooklyn. I can only hope that the bakery got the inspiration for the recipe from someone else’s pear and cranberry-themed dessert. Anyway, I’m a regular reader of Smitten Kitchen and thought this would be an excellent choice for a December birthday pie. (Evan always gets birthday pie rather than cake, but unfortunately for him, he was born well after berry season had ended.)

There was almost too much crumble for the pie to handle, from a structural perspective. But taste-wise, the balance seemed perfect; most of the sugar is in the crumble, which nicely complements the tart, almost appley, fruit interior of the pie. I made a regular pastry crust, which is basically invisible underneath all this but did the job just fine. More intrepid bakers might try some sort of crumble crust.

Once the bottom pie crust was made, my ingredient list was identical to that of the one for the Smitten Kitchen crumble. If she ever moves that page, this blog entry will be useless, but since she’s writing a book I can only hope she will keep her website running indefinitely. As for me, I printed out her (crumble) recipe and have added it to my ridiculously overstuffed yellow folder, with zero additional annotation about the fact that I turned the crumble into a pie.

Coming up next: a savory pie, and possibly a respectable organizational system for my recipes.

January 2nd, 2012 | Category: food, recipes | Leave a comment

So, part of my birthday present to Evan last month was a “Year of Pie” certificate, which was inspired by an identical gift between some friends of ours. Upon learning that such a thing were possible—a pie each month!—Evan was hooked on the idea, so it was an easy gift to decide on.

In related news, I’ve been finding that even though this blog goes through some definite periods of neglect, I actually refer to it now and again for recipes that I didn’t really save but for some reason blogged about. I’ve never been good with keeping track of online bookmarks, but I do have a talent for blathering. For instance, that roasted acorn squash recipe? No idea where that came from. The bean soup from a post or two ago? From a library book that I didn’t photocopy.

I guess you could say I’ve got a two-part New Year’s resolution as a result of this:

1. Start saving recipes in something other than that old yellow folder that I think I used for an NYU class. I’m thinking a binder.
2. Blog more recipes. Just the pies is fine.

So, in short, this may become a Pie Blog. At least until it becomes a blog about something else, or fades into total disuse.

January 2nd, 2012 | Category: ann arbor, food | Comments (1)

I found this recipe on a Reddit thread a few weeks ago (submitted by user “cephaloman,” many thanks!), and it’s definitely inspired me to keep some coconut milk and curry paste on hand regularly. The instructions on Reddit are a little haphazard, but worth looking at, since there was at least one chef from a Thai restaurant chiming in with his own recipe for Pad Thai and other Thai staples.

A note about curry paste: the Reddit thread creator explicitly recommends against using Thai Kitchen curry paste. There are apparently far, far better varieties out there. Unfortunately, I don’t know the Ann Arbor area well enough to seek out specialized markets, and Kroger’s just had Thai Kitchen, so… Thai Kitchen paste it is. If you do manage to find a different/better brand, note that it may be spicier than Thai Kitchen, and thus the full 2 tbsp of paste may be overpowering.

Ingredients

• 1/2 can coconut milk
• 3/4 cup water
• 1-2 tbsp red curry paste (your preference, also works with green curry)
• 1 tbsp lime juice
• 1-2 tbsp sugar
• 4-5 shakes fish sauce
• salt or soy sauce to taste (I add a dash of soy sauce)

Instructions

1. Mix all ingredients together in a bowl with a fork or whisk, stirring until the curry paste is dissolved into the liquid.

2. Warm the sauce in a small pan over medium heat until steaming; do not boil.

3. Serve over rice, adding vegetables, meat, and/or tofu as you desire. There should be enough sauce for about 4 servings.

I’ve found that it keeps pretty well for a few days in the fridge if we have any leftover; just warm it up again on the stove.

December 13th, 2010 | Category: food, photos | Leave a comment