Organizing the pie project

I’ve made 33 pies as of this weekend for the pie project, and I am 8 months in– so I’m 3/4 of the way through my pie year. The time has come to evaluate where I am at and how I will direct my energies for the last 4 months and 15 or so pies. So this entry is about me organizing myself and taking any input anyone wants to give on future directions. Here’s how I am organizing the categories, and I wish that I could draw a chart in WordPress instead of doing these lists:

Fruit Pie - Now in repertoire: apple and pear/ blackberry etc, apple sour cream, plain apple, blueberry, raspberry, peach; Planning to try: gooseberry, strawberry and rhubarb, grape, cherry, quince and apple

Candy Pie - Now in repertoire: maple syrup; Planning to try: I really should do a plain pecan pie, and my nephew has requested a chocolate covered cherry pie

Custard or Cream Pie - Now in repertoire: coconut cream, key lime pie; Planning to try: orange custard, maybe chocolate cream

Chiffon Pie - Now in repertoire: nothing; Planning to try: raspberry

Tarts and Tartlets – Now in repertoire: butter tarts, pecan tassies, lemon tart, Normandy tart, congress tarts; Planning to try: nothing

Meringue Pie – Now in repertoire: nothing; Planning to try: more lemon meringue

Holiday Pie – Now in repertoire: mince pies; Planning to try: need to replace my current pumpkin pie recipe

Meat Pies - Now in repertoire: nothing really except shepherd’s pie; Planning to try: improve my chicken pies and maybe try Cornish pasties. I also want to try small cheese and potato pies/ turnovers and I’m putting it in this category because there’s nowhere else for it to go

Well, I’ve counted up and that takes care of the 15 pies to be made. I also have a recipe for a sour cream raisin pie I was thinking about trying but to be honest that buttermilk raisin pie I made a few months ago has really put me off raisin pies altogether. Ugh, that pie was revolting.

Happily this pie project is meeting the goals I had set at the beginning: I can say without any false pride that I am very good now at producing pie crusts; I’ve added some great recipes to my recipe book; and I have learned a lot about pies and pie history generally through my reading and experimentation. I think I am on my way to becoming a pretty good pie maker. If anyone has any suggestions for pies I should try, or pie categories I have missed out on, let me know.

A day of really good eating plus a pie recipe

The promise of spring keeps being made and then broken here in Edmonton, while back at home on Vancouver Island I hear the cherry trees are blooming and the daffodil harvest has started down the road from my parent’s house. I have promised myself in the meantime that once I am done my thesis the Canadian prairies will know me no more, no matter how good the job market is in Alberta.

Today was a day of good food. It started off with brunch for one:

In this example you can see why being able to cook has its dangers. You make a cheese and apple loaf to go with your broccoli soup one night. The next morning, you think “That bread was quite sweet. Really more of a breakfast bread. I should have some for breakfast. What would go with a slice of cheese and apple bread?” Then you wind up frying bacon, scrambling eggs, preparing a grapefruit, and squeezing some fresh orange juice. It really is quite sad I have no one in-house to impress with my culinary skill, isn’t it? It’s also sad I have no one to share the calories with. When you can make exactly what you want to eat whenever you want it, it presents some challenges in terms of staying slim.

My friend Khyati invited me over for dinner tonight and she went all out, as she always does. It’s been a few months since I have been over there for dinner and oh, how I have missed her cooking. If all of India has food as good as hers it is absolutely imperative I get over there to eat. She served poppadums, raita, pickles and chutney, a dish of tender cubes of tofu in white sauce flavoured with fenugreek leaves, rice pilau, samosas, and seasoned potato slices. I took my camera to take a picture for you but the batteries were dead. Fortunately she sent me home with some leftovers so I can show you the wonderful potatoes:

These taste like heaven. I keep telling her that she is a genius with potatoes but I don’t think she believes me. I got the recipe from her, which she says is a family recipe, so I am going to try them soon. As soon as I get to the Indian store and buy some mango powder. I love anything made with mango powder, that taste is so addictive.

I took a blueberry pie over for dessert. Her son Aranya announced that it is the only kind of pie he likes in the world.

This picture is no magazine-worthy shot, but I am including it because homemade food is about taste and health. Anyway people don’t seem to mind rough-looking food when it’s about sweet fruit pie juices and pastry made at home with butter. They’re just excited to eat it. I tried tweaking the recipe again and I think I have got it down now, so here is my blueberry pie recipe for you to try. I’m calling it “winter” pie because it’s made with frozen berries, so it can be made in the depths of winter, and pure because I made it wanting the simple taste of the blueberry and nothing else.

Winter’s Pure Blueberry Pie

4 1/2 cups frozen blueberries

3/4 cup sugar

pinch of salt

4 tablespoons cornstarch

pastry for a double-crust 8″ pie

Dredge the blueberries with the sugar, salt, and cornstarch. Fill the prepared 8″ pie shell with the berries; cover with a lattice top, because blueberry pie demands a lattice. Be sure to seal the edges of the lattice to the bottom crust with a bit of water. Brush the top pastry with egg white, milk, or melted butter to help browning; sprinkle with sugar to make it pretty.

Bake the pie in a preheated oven at 425 F for 25 minutes, then lower the heat to 350F and cook for another 50 minutes. If your berries are fresh, obviously this will take considerably less time. Make sure you place a cookie sheet on the rack below the pie to catch any boiled-over juices. The pie is done when the top is a golden brown and the juices are bubbling through the lattice. Make sure the juice is boiling before you take the pie out, or you will be able to taste the cornstarch.

This pie was an improvement over the last in that it was not pie soup, but it is still runny, and that is something I suppose I will have to accept as part of the nature of homemade blueberry pie. Plus, as Ash has pointed out with masculine wisdom, the juices go really well with vanilla ice cream. I do want to warn you that this pie is not very sweet, which is how I like it. So if you are used to store-bought pies you might want to increase the sugar by one-quarter to half a cup.

Chicken Pie and Chocolate Cupcakes

The picture of this flower is in honour of a relaxing weekend. I finally gave up trying to meet an impossible deadline, cleaned the apartment right through, bought some flowers (thanks Mum for the treat money) and a couple of books, and settled in to read and watch old “Thin Man” movies lent to me by friends. The end result was that I finally, finally went to sleep at a decent hour and slept through the night. Bliss.

While grocery shopping on Saturday, I was in the store and saw Cadbury’s mini Easter eggs. A vision of chocolate cupcakes topped with mini Cadbury eggs came to me. So, here I was on Sunday morning, making cupcakes for my Sunday School class.

On another food blog I had read a few weeks ago that Ruth Reichl’s chocolate cake recipe is the ultimate. I had the recipe but had never planned to use it because it calls for cocoa rather than chocolate solids, which usually spells brown colour, no flavour to me. However, I decided to give it a go and halved the recipe. I also wanted chocolate orange cupcakes, so I added some orange zest and made the icing with melted butter, orange juice, and a few drops of vanilla. It made for a nice mild backnote but if I made this again I think I would intensify the orange.

This cake has a solid chocolate taste and a light open crumb, perfect for cupcakes. I would suggest that you be careful, if you want to try making these yourself, to under-fill the muffin cups. I overfilled and got “muffin tops” which were hard and crispy and detracted from the cupcake experience.

Ruth Reichl’s Big Chocolate Cake

1 1/2 cups boiling water

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons cocoa (not Dutch process)

3/4 cup whole milk

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

3 cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

3 sticks/ 1 1/2 cups unsalted butter, softened

1 1/2 cups firmly packed dark brown sugar

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

6 large eggs

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter, flour, and line two 9×13x2 inch baking pans.

Whisk together boiling water and cocoa in a bowl until smooth, then whisk in milk and vanilla. Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt.

Beat together the butter and sugars in the large bowl of a standing mixer until pale and fluffy, then add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. On low speed, beat in flour and cocoa mixture alternately in batches, beginning and ending with the flour (batter may look curdled).

Divide batter between pans, smoothing the tops. Bake in the middle of the oven until cake tester comes out clean, about 25 to 35 minutes. Remove cakes from pans and cool on racks.

Half this recipe made 14 cupcakes for me, so I think the full recipe would make 30 cupcakes, perfect for supplying a party. I added the zest of two oranges to the flour. What I would do if I wanted the orange flavour again is keep the zest and replace some of the boiling water with orange juice.

I made last week’s pie today for dinner. Using some of my free-range chicken, I made a little chicken pie. I made a salt and pepper pastry to hold it, and filled it with poached chicken, carrots, peas, onion, parsley, and a tarragon-flavoured white sauce. Pretty good but it needed more white sauce, salt, and tarragon.

Key Lime Pie

Despite the thesis writing, which has impacted all of my creative pursuits including my cooking this past couple of weeks (and will continue to do so for at least one more week….or three) I am holding fast to the pie project goals. Thanks to that determination, I can bring you another amazing pie recipe, courtesy of my sister.

Years ago, while I was living in AZ, Nigella Lawson had achieved fame in the U.S. with her cookbook “How to Eat”. I put it on my birthday list because I couldn’t afford the $40 to buy it. My sisters couldn’t afford to buy it for me either back then. So one of them made me a “How To Eat” cookbook, only it had pictures of my little nephews cooking and eating, “food quotes” from them, and various recipes in it. It was such a great, creative gift. I’ve kept it, and will always keep it, but I haven’t tried any of the recipes in it (mostly because my sister filled it with recipes she hadn’t tried herself but thought looked good and that I should give them a try).

I remembered, however, that there was a recipe for key lime pie in it that she claimed as her own creation. At Christmas, while I was home, I made sure to copy it out and bring it back to Edmonton with me, where it went on my pies to make list. When the key limes appeared in the grocery store, I knew it was time to try it out.

It requires some forethought, because it needs to refrigerate several hours or overnight, and she serves it topped with whipped cream (which is why you will see a gap in between my filling and the edge of my crust– cream is supposed to go there. I couldn’t face adding the cream when I had the pie itself to eat). As I made it, the snow returned to Edmonton. I hate the snow now, after three years of it, and I hate the bad roads that come with it. It was nice to fiddle with the tiny limes and think about Florida and how it must be warm and sunny there.

The pie is really easy to make. Really easy. I liked the fact that it called for baking rather than just refrigerating the pie, because in this age of food scares I have to admit that I don’t like to eat raw eggs that much. And the taste–! Wonderful. Just a bit of tang, and sweetly lime-y. Beautiful creamy texture, with a nice contrast of crunch in the graham cracker crust. This is another pie for my permanent repertoire, and I urge you to give it a try.

Key Lime Pie

1 can sweetened condensed milk (14 oz)

4 egg yolks

1/2 cup key lime juice

1 1/2 tablespoons finely grated lime zest

1 egg white, stiffly beaten

Combine the milk, yolks, juice, and zest thoroughly. Fold in the egg white. Pour into prepared graham cracker pie shell.

crust

1 1/4 cup graham cracker crumbs

5 1/3 tablespoons (2/3 stick) butter melted and cooled

3 tablespoons of sugar

pinch salt

Combine and press into pie pan with fingertips, making a thin layer. Do not pre-bake.

Bake pie when assembled at 375F for 15-18 minutes. Refrigerate, preferably overnight, and top with 1 cup of whipped cream.

As I said, I didn’t do the whipped cream top, but I am sure it would add another layer of gorgeousness to the pie, though I am not sure it needs it.

Shoofly Pie

Yesterday afternoon I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. I tried making Nigella Lawson’s custard cream cookies, celery and potato soup, soda bread, and this week’s pie. If you are ever tempted by the recipe in Nigella Lawson’s “Feast”, let me advise you that the cookies are pretty much tasteless, and when she says “roll out to a 4 mm thickness” she really means two, if you want the effect she achieves in the picture. I oversalted the soup to the point it was inedible and underbaked the bread, so that it had a fat wodge of raw dough in the middle. I tell you all this to make you feel better about any problems you may have in the kitchen, so you will know you are not alone and that I have probably exceeded any and all mistakes anyone else has ever made.

The pie boiled over and meant that I had to clean the oven asap, to get rid of the burnt sugar on the bottom of the oven– but I am getting ahead of myself.

I’m still in my thesis-imposed isolation, trying to finish two chapters before my meeting with my advisor on Wednesday. What I wanted to make was the blueberry pie again, since I think perfection is nearly within my grasp, but logically considered it seemed like the week for an experiment pie, since there would only be me to try it. I have a list on my fridge of pies I still want to try, and in the freezer was a single pie shell waiting to be used, so I went with shoofly pie.

Shoofly pie, according to my reading, is an old Pennsylvania Dutch recipe, and I thought it would be appropriate to make it since I have some Pennsylvania Dutch in my background through a great-grandmother. (For those of you who know me personally, I want to mention that my father’s genealogical research has turned up some ancestors involved in the Revolutionary War on the American side and in the Civil War. It all started with a child in England who was named “Oliver Cromwell” after the Oliver Cromwell, who found things uncomfortable for a man of his name later on and decided to head out to America. I could join the DAR! How funny is that?).

Shoofly pie is made with molasses and crumbs, and when baked it is marbled a bit, dark and light, from the crumbs. It was OK. I can see how, back in the day when rhubarb was referred to as “pie plant” and white sugar was too expensive for regular people to buy, that this would have been a good pie to make. It doesn’t taste overpoweringly of molasses, which I thought it would, it tastes rich and a bit smoky (or did the smokiness come from the oven floor and the burning sugar there?) but I wouldn’t want to make it again. I think there’s a reason why the popular pies we have today are popular, like fruit and cream pies. It’s because they are way better than the make-do pies, like mock cherry or mock lemon.

On the other hand, if I ever had to make a pie for a pioneer-themed night, this would be a great choice. Totally edible but not modern. If you ever try to make shoofly pie, there’s a dry bottom and wet bottom version (mine was supposed to be a wet bottom but as you can see it was mostly dry), and when you have your filling made it is like water. You have to pour it in to your pie shell. My recipe recommended partially baking the shell before filling it. It should have also warned about under-filling the shell, so I am warning you– try to under-fill the shell to prevent boil-over.