Apple and plum pie Baked in my oven Sunday and made a big mess.
But the result sure was pretty even if I do have to clean the oven now where the pie bubbled over. Note to self: invest in a non stick liner that can be easily cleaned.
I made this pie while up in New Haven a few weeks ago using leftover peaches approaching their last legs of ripeness that had been picked by a friend as well as some nectarines and apricots that were hanging out in her fridge. I'll probably be dreaming of it when I am fasting on Saturday.
Beets Zucchini Savoy cabbage Red onions Basil Romaine lettuce Cucumber Red Norland Potatoes
I did my volunteer hours handing out shares on Thursday and as a special bonus I got some leftover peaches and blueberries that came with the fruit share. I promptly made pie:
Blueberry Peach Pie
1/2 pint of blueberries 6 large peaches and I probably dumped almost a full cup of flour and at least 3 tablespoons of tapioca to try to make it less watery. And it worked! Finally a peach pie that isn't a liquidy mass.
or Why You Should Never Bring Pie to a Picnic. My birthday was last week and to celebrate I had a picnic with a bunch of friends in the Sheep's Meadow in Central Park this past weekend. It was a beautiful day for a picnic, plenty of people were out enjoying the gorgeous weather, but not too many to make it overcrowded. There were several children celebrating birthday's in the same area, including three legged races and water balloon fight. All in all an ideal picnic day and I asked everyone to bring something while I brought pie.
You'd think I would have learned my lesson from the last attempt to bring pie somewhere. Despite having a plastic pie saver so that I don't repeat the mess I had last year when taking a pie on the subway to a Newsies sing along on the Upper West Side where I ended up with pie juice dripping out of the pie dish all over me, my scarf, and the subway car, it's still inevitably a disaster whenever I try to take pie out of the safety of my apartment. For the picnic I made two pies - Strawberry, Peaches and Cream pie and Three Berry Star Pie (Strawberry, Blackberry and Blueberry). I made both pies the night before thinking they'd have plenty of time to cool and be less liquidy the next morning. I tried making the crust dough in my food processor for the first time and as was my fear, when I wet to roll it out, the texture was off. I added eggs and milk and put the dough back in the fridge and was able to salvage the dough however so I thought things were looking up.
Three Berry Star Pie Before
Three Berry Star Pie After
This was the obvious problem of pie juice shifting during carrying. Not as big a mess as last time since the pie had cooled over night, but it still made for a tie dyed sort of pie look.
Sadly I don't have a before picture for the Peaches and Cream pie, but it was a lovely one crust pie with a brown sugar crumble topping. After pulling it out of the oven around midnight, I covered it with foil to protect it without thinking too much about it. It looked perfect. I was tired so I figured I would photograph it the next morning for the blog, but by morning the crumb topping had mostly melted into the rest of the pie. No matter, I thought, it would still taste good. Then when I unwrapped it at the picnic it had REALLY melted. I tasted it, but the texture was so funny that sadly this was one pie that just never got served.
On the plus side the salad I made with my CSA share partner for the picnic turned out fabulously including the roasted beets.
I was invited to a friend's to watch this year's Tony Awards (my thoughts on which I'll spare you on this blog as they have nothing to do with food, crafts or general domesticity) and I of course decided it was an opportunity to make pie. However clearly I had not made pie in some time, and I yet again forgot to pick up more tapioca because I've been out of it for weeks, so while still tasty (since really any homemade pie is tasty to some degree or other), the end result was an extremely runny Strawberry Blackberry Pie. Better luck next time. And there will most assuredly be a next time as berries are super cheap at my fruit and veggie market.
I used this pie making opportunity to use a new mini cookie cutter set I have in the shape of Noah's ark and the animals. I've never made a strawberry rhubarb pie before and I fudged the measurements for the filling based on a number of different recipes (primarily that old standby the Betty Crocker Cookbook). I used almost two full cups of sugar for the filling which is more than I normally put into a fruit pie filling and made the whole thing a bit sweeter than I personally like, but still very good. Sadly rhubarb is not the easiest thing to come by in my neighborhood and so I'll have to wait until the next time the CSA box has some to experiment with it again.
Why? Because strawberries and blackberries were cheap and had to be used that day. The crust was a basic butter crust but came out particularly flakey. I also felt like being artistic with the top.
As to the Oscars...well let's just say I've never seen so many cut shots to so many bored and clueless actors. It was priceless.
No, its not a lentil pie. Although that is an intriguing idea to file away. Last weekend I went to visit a friend in New Haven and we made a curried red lentil recipe that she had from a friend and it was fantastic.
Of course no weekend would be complete without making a pie. We didn't have a lot of time so went with a store bought crust and instant pudding but added a layer of melted peanut butter before putting the pudding in the crust and letting it set in the refrigerator. The lesson of the day however was that if you are going to melt peanut butter in the microwave make sure to do it in stages and mix it up. Otherwise the peanut butter will burn on the inside. Burnt peanut butter strangely smells almost exactly like burnt popcorn and that is a smell I could do without in my life.
Curried Lentils Florence Minnis
9oz split red lentils (about 1 cup) 2 medium onions chopped 3oz butter (very important for flavour) 6 cloves garlic sliced 1 medium carrot grated (though I just slice mine) 2 teasp. whole cumin seeds 1 and a half teasp. whole black or yellow mustard seeds 3 teasp. ground tumeric 1 can coconut milk 4-5 slices fresh ginger 140z chopped ripe tomatoes (or a can but some fresh tomato good for texture) juice of one large lime or 2 small ones handful chopped fresh coriander salt and pepper to taste
Fry onions in half the butter, add half the garlic, carrot and whole spices and cook for 5 mins. Stir in tumeric. Cool slightly. Tip in lentils, 10fl oz water, coconut milk, ginger, tomatoes, salt and pepper. Simmer for 30-40 mins. In separate pan, melt the rest of the butter and add the rest of the garlic, fry for a minute or two, and then tip into the lentil mixture. Add lime juice and coriander and leave to mellow for ten minutes. Remove the ginger slices. Serve warm, not hot, with rice and/or naan bread.
I made a cherry pie once. I vowed not to do it again until I had a cherry pitter as the last event had resulted in cherry juice all over my whole kitchen, self and dog.
For Chanukah I received a cherry pitter and for the first time since then cherries were on sale so I decided it was time to try again, in honor of the penultimate episode of Dollhouse. Only this time I added apples. I liked the apple cherry combination a lot more than just the plain cherry pie. I like cherries, but I think I like them better as a combination ingredient with other fruit. I had debated about adding blueberries into this mix as well and I think in the future I might try that, but sadly they were a bit pricey this week. The cherry pitter might be my new favorite kitchen toy. I have one made by OXO and using it gives this very satisfying punch to each cherry to push the pit out, sort of like using a leather punch. Someone needs to create one with an automatic cherry loader that would work like a machine gun. The best part of course is that the mess was all self contained.
I had the worst pie crust failure I've had in a long time on this one. I realized in the middle of pie making that I had no cold water in my kitchen and that threw off the timing and temperature of the water I used in making the dough. When it came time to roll it out I managed to get one decent crust out of the dough, but gave up and went for pastry shapes on top. It still worked out to a pretty pie though. The water is still not fixed a day later and the lesson here is always check that before you start cooking and more importantly never ever rent an apartment from Vantage Management if you can avoid it.
The filling is made up of 1 1/2 lbs of cherries, 3 large granny smith apples, 2 Tbs of tapioca, 1 cup of sugar, cinnamon and a few dots of butter.
January 29 will mark the last Dollhouse episode and assuming nothing else comes up, I'm planning the finale of Dollhouse and Pie as well. I started making pie partly for company who came over to watch the first early episodes and I've continued through most of both seasons, so now I'm faced with coming up with a suitable parting pie. It might have to feature red splatter in keeping with the latest few episodes.
While most people are jumping on the eat healthy and get in shape band wagon, I'm making my first real post in the new year about what might be the epitome of an unbalanced meal: macaroni and cheese and pie. The pie is a pear and strawberry pie.
The macaroni and cheese was inspired by clearing out leftover cheese in the fridge.
Recipe: 16oz box of elbow pasta, cooked 3 cups of white sauce 3 cups mixed of Gruyere, cheddar, mozzarella, and Parmesan Top with 1/2 cup of buttered bread crumbs (this time I tried Progresso's herbed panko)
White Sauce: 6 Tbs butter 6 Tbs flour 3 cups milk salt and pepper to taste
Pear & Strawberry Pie Filling 5 ripe pears peeled and sliced approx 3/4 of a lb of strawberries sliced 3 Tbs tapioca 3/4 cup of sugar
The filling was made up of sauteed turkey breast, celery, carrot, mushrooms and peas. I also added some chicken stock and heavy cream. It's seasoned with sage, salt and pepper. I put that in a regular butter crust bottom crust.
The top is made up of chive mashed potatoes. I used 8 small potatoes, mashed with a little more cream and butter and then about two tablespoons of chopped chives. It turned out to be the perfect amount to put on top of the pie. The potatoes had cooled somewhat when i spread them on top of the pie. I baked the whole thing about 40 minutes. It probably would have been good to let the top brown a bit longer, but I had lots of other pies to bake that day.
Pictures speak louder and words, and I remain in food coma from the seven pies that made up Thanksgiving dinner. Full details to follow in the week to come.
The last time I was in Maine my little brothers had been begging me to bake a pie. This time I indulged them and made an apple pie in keeping with it being Rosh Hashanah. I thought about using honey instead of sugar but the boys wanted a traditional pie. I used the bit of leftover pastry dough that I had to make a little pastry apple in the center of the pie. All in all it was a good trip home for the holiday and a very tasty pie.
Other apple things eaten included an apple cake and some fabulous apple crisp ice cream from Beal's.
My book club met this past weekend to discuss Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and in honor of it and since I was hosting I decided to bake of course. I made the fruit tarts in the previous post, but decided that I needed something thematically appropriate for our gathering. Incidentally Jane Austen is greatly improved by the addition of zombies and ninjas. The zombies are known as "unmentionables". I decided to take all the remaining fruit in my fridge and mix it up into "Unmentionable Pie". I figured it would be vaguely reminiscent of the mix of zombie body parts.
The filling is made up of apples (which I did buy for this purpose), peaches, grapes, strawberries, raspberries and kiwi.
In addition I also made a vegetable pie using cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, mushrooms, string beans, potato, a bit of cream, cheddar cheese and some broth. A variant of unmentionable pie as it also cleaned out parts of my fridge.
Tonight was creamy peach pie night. This is the first one crust pie I've made and it came out fabulously tasty. The filling is made up of 3/4 cup of heavy cream, six peaches (on sale for $0.88 a pound!), cinnamon, nutmug, 1/2 cup of sugar and 3 tablespoons of flour. The crust was baked for approximately 5 minutes prior to adding the filling in and then the whole thing was baked for about 40 minutes at 400 degrees. The best part was that the peaches stayed nice and firm and didn't become mushy.
It was incredibly hot out today here so baking both pie as well as pizza and stuffed mushroom (more on those later) was perhaps not the brightest idea in the world, but hey I signed up for my first grad school class so celebratory food and wine was in order.
The lesson learned this weekend is to never ever make a cherry pie without first investing in a cherry pitter.
I opted to go for the simple standby of Betty Crocker's cherry pie recipe.
This calls for six cups of pitted cherries if you are using fresh ones. I wasn't actually sure how many cherries six cups would be so I guessed. I ended up buying about three and a half pound of cherries which was the perfect amount actually to fill my pie dish.
Having gotten the cherries home it was time to pit them. I have never pitted cherries in my life. I figured the internet that keeper of all secrets would have the answer for how to easily take the pits out of cherries. In fact there are a multitude of different suggestions for how to do this without an actual cherry pitter. While I'm sure that some people may find these suggestions helpful, I failed at each and every one. First I tried a paring knife then I tried a method where you press down on the flat part of the cherry and it is supposed to split open. I got out a paperclip which according to many of the internet sages is the best way to do it. Thankfully I was making pie and not trying to keep the cherries whole because the process I end up with was just ripping them open and pulling the pits out. Every website I looked at did warn that this was not going to be a process that could be done without mess. Boy were they right. By the time I got through all of those cherries my arms were covered nearly up to my shoulders in cherry juice, my flip flops and feet were covered, the dog had licked up more cherry juice from the floor than I want to think about and there were cherry stems everywhere. I stopped keeping track of how long it took me to pull all those pits out, but it was way longer than I have the patience to do again.
Of course since I have next to now counter space whatsoever all of this had to be cleaned up before I could roll out the pie dough. That was quick and easy this time and I opted for a real lattice top this time around.
And after the pie came out of the oven it turns out it was quite tasty. I'm still not sure how I feel about the texture of the cherries and next time I might actually chop them up smaller. I'd also add more flour or corn starch as it was still a bit too juicy of a pie. If I decide to do it again it will be after the purchase of a cherry pitter.
I meant to make a smiley face, but it looks sort of like angry sadistically grinning pie, but oh well.
I had to use up the pastry dough that was in the fridge from the last pie I made otherwise it would have gone bad. Steak was on sale, so I thought I'd use up the mushrooms and celery in my fridge and make a steak and mushroom pie. Last time I did a steak pie I used Guinness and roughly followed Jamie Oliver's Steak Guinness and Cheddar pie recipe. It was pretty good, but on the whole I don't actually love the flavor of Guinness even in cooking. So this time I decided to make up the pie recipe.
So more or less:
Brown about 1/2 lb of steak with 1 small leek and 1 shallot in a tiny bit of vegetable oil and garlic salt and pepper 2 stalks of celery approx. a package of white mushrooms (I finished the one in the fridge and used about three of the supersized mushrooms that came in the package I bought today, I think I'll stuff the rest of them). I added some frozen pea and carrot mixture along with water and some Israeli mushroom soup powder. Fresh rosemary and thyme Thicken with flour.
Look at that lovely pie filling cooking away.
Unfortunately over the course of pie making I could feel myself getting that awful feeling in the back of my throat that means I'm getting sick. So even though I also made some lovely roasted red potatoes I couldn't really eat very much. But now there's pie in my fridge so hopefully I'll get to continue enjoying it, because pie is like chicken soup. It will make you healthy. Really.
So after my pie posting frenzy, I'm now more or less caught up and can post pie and other domestic projects as they happen.
I had friends over for pie experimentation tonight. Since I had ground turkey in the freezer I wanted to use, I perused the internet and decided to make my own variant on turkey meatball pie. Let's state for the record that even though this may use ground turkey instead of ground beef it is in no way healthy for you.
I made a simple butter pie crust recipe and doubled it so I have dough in the fridge to make more pie later this week. For those keep tracking that means 1 1/3 cups of butter (for the four pie crusts) and 4 cups of flour. Plus a bit of water. The turkey meatballs I made with ground turkey, salt, pepper fresh thyme and one egg. Then I fried them in butter. (I told you it wasn't healthy). After I added fresh celery and mushrooms and frozen peas, carrots and pearl onions. Some heavy cream to add to it, water and some more spices (rosemary, more thyme, parsley). Then I cooked the whole thing for about 40 minutes. I should have thickened the filling a bit more than I did, but it was still pretty tasty. I think next time I'd stick to traditional chicken pot pie, or maybe just use the ground turkey loose instead of going to the trouble of meatballs.
In the meantime I also made chocolate chip cookies. I would choose to bake on a hot day. Thank goodness for the air conditioner!
But the best part of making pie today was that I got to use both my new stainless steel measuring cups that I got yesterday and the pie server I picked up. I leave you with this obvious statement: It really is much easier to serve pie with an actual pie server and not a steak knife.
June 30, 2009 I went the easy route and didn't actually thread the lattice top, but it's a tasty Tri-berry pie none the less!
The next day at work we had pies from The Little Pie Company. Now I haven't had their pies since before starting to make my own. I tried their key lime, blueberry, and their mixed berry. And I have to say I was comparatively disappointed. Now I don't know much about key lime pie, so I can't comment much on that, though I would like to try some others in the future. The blueberry pie was rather bland. The blueberry filling just sort of lacked flavor. The mixed berry filling was good. And I maintain that its just about impossible to make sticking a bunch of berries and sugar together taste bad, but on the whole it was the pie crust that didn't excite me. I think I'll take homemade any day.
Pie is tasty. I didn't actually come to this conclusion until about a year and a half ago. I'm not sure why because obviously...pie = yum. But better late than never! I've spent the winter and spring and now that it is finally summer (even if it won't stop raining) so I'm going to start out by presenting the various pies.
The backstory is that I had never really baked before. Occasionally I'd made cookies, but to be honest half the time they came out of the premade roll of dough. I have a friend who makes amazing baked things, but she doesn't make pie. So when I decided it was time to learn to bake, I figured pie was going to be where I start. I wanted a project. Not that I don't have enough open projects (which hopefully as they are finished I'll post here) and pie is intimidating. But if housewives of old could do it, there's no reason I couldn't. Even if my kitchen is smaller than most people's walk in closets.
I think that the very first pie I ever made was back when I was in middle school and my youth group went apple picking and then baked pies. My only real memory of this event was that they didn't have enough rolling pins and that I was such a klutz that the glass I was using to roll with rolled on the floor and shattered. Perhaps not an auspicious start.
This past fall my friend Jason invited me out to go apple picking with his sister who was home from college and wanted pie. I missed out on the apple picking but had a great time making pie filling. We used pie crusts from the refrigerator. They are tasty too.
Once I decided I was going to do pie at home I took baby steps towards my own homemade pie crusts. First was the refrigerated already rolled out crusts. Then I moved on to "pie crust in a box - just add water". Then I started experimenting with crusts from scratch.
So the next few posts will be about pie as I present to you some of the pie experiments of this year.
The Duchy of Domesticity is the home of all the domestic projects that I feel like sharing with the world. Primarily at the moment this is pie. Because who doesn't like pie?
CSA Week #8
Blueberry Peach Pie
On the plus side the salad I made with my CSA share partner for the picnic turned out fabulously including the roasted beets.
Better luck next time. And there will most assuredly be a next time as berries are super cheap at my fruit and veggie market.
Strawberry Rhubarb Pie
The last time I was in Maine my little brothers had been begging me to bake a pie. This time I indulged them and made an apple pie in keeping with it being Rosh Hashanah. I thought about using honey instead of sugar but the boys wanted a traditional pie. I used the bit of leftover pastry dough that I had to make a little pastry apple in the center of the pie.
I meant to make a smiley face, but it looks sort of like angry sadistically grinning pie, but oh well.
ushrooms that came in the package I bought today, I think I'll stuff the rest of them).
