Friends of Pie

Kathy and Sara have earned the official designation of Friend of Pie. Not only did they let me stay with them after Helen's party, they made me waffles, gave me a tour of the finest container garden in the greater D.C. area AND had plenty of good pie and tart insights. I came away with some great new pie and cookie recipes, as well as a tart pan. I made my first ever tart pan this weekend, using summer veggies, including zucchini, sweet onions and mushrooms, with goat cheese and basil for extra flavor. I used my cuisinart to slice the onions and zucchini super thin. The edge of the crust got a little toasty in parts because I foolishly decided that I didn't really need to cover it with foil when I put the tart under the broiler. Fortunately it still tastes quite nice. Now that I have both pie pans and a tart pan, I may never eat anything non-pie-like ever again.

Helen's Strawberry Birthday Pie

Since 75% of my blog readership knows our dear Helen, I don't feel that I need to spend any time explaining why she is most deserving of birthday pie. If for some reason you are unconvinced of this fact, let me know and I will provide you with a complete list of reasons for your edification.

After several test pies, I ended up making a strawberry pie consisting of a baked shortbread cookie crust, filled with uncooked berries covered in a fruity glaze. The shortbread crust won out over regular crust in taste-testing. Early prototypes of the pie also had way too much glaze, so I tried to use as little as possible in the final pie. Despite riding to D.C. under heavy air-conditioning, the pies looked a little worse for the wear, but seemed to taste okay. Next year's birthday pies will surely be even better. Happy Birthday Helen!

Ruby Alice's Strawberry Sour Cream

I had to clean out the fridge a bit last night to make way for the lovely strawberries that I am picking up from my CSA tonight. One of the things that had to be used was a previous round of strawberries that was on its last legs. There were not quite enough berries for an all-strawberry pie, and what was left definitely had to be cooked, so I used it as an excuse to try a strawberry sour cream pie recipe that I got recently from my cousins Bob and Janet. The recipe comes from Bob's mother, Ruby Alice. I haven't cut into the pie yet, but the smell is incredible - Ruby Alice obviously knew how to bake. I do love a sour cream pie. Apple sour cream was my favorite for a while, but now I'm seeing that I'm going to have to do more with berries. And just wait till fresh peach season!

Experiments in Strawberry

I've been pondering the various elements of Helen's strawberry birthday pie. I got to tinkering in the pie lab last night with somewhat mixed results. First of all, I have to admit to a rookie mistake. It's terribly embarrassing, but I feel compelled to confess. I wanted to experiment with combining strawberries and a graham cracker crust. I also wanted to play around with a cooked strawberry pie (as opposed to glazed, uncooked berries). But it wasn't until I got the frankenberry pie in the oven that I thought "hmmmm, one generally uses graham cracker crusts for icebox pies, not baked pies." So yes, I scorched the edges of the crust. Badly. Very very badly. So badly that I couldn't bring it into work in it's pie form, despite the fact that people in our building will eat anything. This is also why you're viewing the pie in extreme close-up, sans edges. The good news is that the rest of the pie was totally edible, and in fact the bottom of the crust was quite lovely. For the filling, I used a recipe from Ken Haedrich's cookbook Pie that called for some manner of mint flavoring as well as lemon juice and nutmeg to flavor the pie. After calling Susan from the grocery store to ascertain that peppermint extract was probably the same thing as mint oil, that's what I went with. I was pleasantly surprised by the filling - it was much less jammy than I thought that a cooked, all-strawberry pie would be. The berries held their shape somewhat, and the crumb topping that I put on top was a nice addition. Scooped out from the burnt parts, it came out rather like a strawberry crisp. Still, there was a lot going on with this pie - cinnamon in topping and crust, nutmeg and mint in filling.....when re-heated it smelled a little bit like potpourri. It had a strange aftertaste too - I think that might have been the mint. I'm currently thinking that mint is not going to make it until the final pie, unless there is a groundswell of popular support for it. I liked the different elements of this pie very well, but it was very much a practice pie. In trying out different recipes, I didn't really consider the pie as a whole, which in terms of edibility is an issue. Still, it can't be that bad, since I'm eating some as I type. Although I do get queasy every time I think about finishing the whole thing on my own. Perhaps I can freeze some of it....

The Great Pie Exchange of '08 - part 1

I have a new favorite pie. Jeff and I agreed to swap pies recently. I’m to make him a spinach pie, and last week he gave me his famous rhubarb custard pie in exchange. Wow. Rhubarb custard pie gets everything right that strawberry rhubarb gets wrong. The flavors complement each other beautifully, without getting too lost or intertwined. It’s tart, sweet, and creamy all at once. Totally amazing. Fortunately, Kori was visiting when it arrived at the house, or I would have eaten the whole pie by myself in a matter of days. It had this magical quality whereby you would eat one piece, and immediately need a second. But once you ate the second piece, you only felt as full as if you had one piece, so you didn’t feel like a total glutton. Kori and I spent a lot of time debating just what Jeff’s crust secret is; her thought is that it reminds her of the crust of her great-grandma’s fried apple pie so we came up with all these theories about how Jeff could have fried the lattice top and then magically applied it to the pie. I ran some of these suppositions by Jeff this morning to see if I could get a reaction that would tell me we were on the right path, but he just smiled and declined to comment. I’m going to have to spend some time in the pie lab trying to figure this out.