Who wants pie?

Here's a pie I made using the blueberries I picked at my friend Krenkel's place in Picayune, Mississippi.

This weekend is the Southern Decadence Festival in New Orleans, so why not enjoy some PIE???

Pie

At some point this weekend, there was pie.

Pie-pocalypse

Some people I work with organized a get-together that reached out across many bureaucratic divides, all in the common interest of delicious desserts.

The First Annual Beach House Pie-Luck. At least I think it's the first. Maybe they've been doing it without me in the past?

Who cares? It's time for pie!

Berry cobbler, mincemeat tarts, pumpkin, apple, pear pie. Plus red velvet cake, pumpkin brownies and ooey-gooey butter cake!!  Me? I brought a nutty tart.

The problem with Pie-Luck, however, is that every individual brings a dish that can feed a dozen people! There was more pie than we could consume. Fortunately, there was a group of hungry guys around the place, who pitched in to help!

It was a great rehearsal for Thanksgiving!

Blueberry buttermilk tart

Beautiful big blueberries.

Perfect for a summer dinner party.

Blind-bake a tart shell. Fill with one layer of fresh blueberries.

Make a filling -

1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon grated lemon rind
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons flour
3 egg yolks

Mix it all up in a blender or food processor, pour into tart shell with blueberries, and bake at 375 for 35 minutes. After it cools....sprinkle with confectioner's sugar.

And EAT!

All webbed out - how about some pie?

Sorry for the light posting. I've been working on my employer's website design and content, and after a day of that, coming home and posting online is not the first thing that comes to my mind.

But here's something sweet from July to keep your interest up.

Apricot almond tart!

Fresh almonds in the husks - aren't they beautiful?

On a trip to the Wednesday Farmer's Market, I met a vendor selling almonds. They also sold sliced almonds, almond meal, almond flour and marzipan.

Almond flour mixed with regular flour (at about 1 - 3 ratio) makes a tasty and tender pie crust.

And what goes better with almonds than fresh apricots?

A French-style tart, the fruit baked with an egg-and-cream custard, then topped with slivered almonds, made a perfect dessert for July 14th, the French national holiday.

Enjoy that while I go back to slaving over tables, I-frames, pixels and metadata!

Spring in Malibu

Click to"embiggen"

This afternoon a great celebration marked the birthdays of two good friends. We gathered at a country home high on a hill over Point Dume in Malibu.

A brisk wind blew from the northwest, the sun was golden, and the scent of 'Cecile Brunner' roses filled the air.

And there was Dorothianne's strawberry-rhubarb pie. It was a perfect Sunday.

Boxing Day

We spent the day after Christmas hiking in Red Rock Canyon.

Then we went home for our Boxing Day dinner.


It involved pie.

Spiced up apple pie

A friend at work is having a birthday, and she happens to love apple pie. So I offered to bring in a pie for our office's afternoon coffee break tomorrow.

I'm a little bored with basic apple pie, so I looked through Epicurious recipes for a fresh idea. Now, my friend is not too adventurous, so I didn't want to get too fancy or exotic. I came upon a recipe that I first dismissed, because it included some interesting spices. But I kept coming back to it. All the comments - 4 pages of them - mentioned how delicious it was. Yes, they talked about how much trouble it was to make, and how time-consuming, too, but even so, everyone raved about how delicious it was.


So...I decided to go ahead and make this Country Apple Tart with Spiced Brown Butter.

The recipe recommends using a 10" springform pan. My springform pan is 9", so I figured I would have enough leftovers to make a little tart for [The Man I Love] and I to enjoy at home, too.

Although I've perfected my favorite butter pastry recipe, I decided to follow the directions for the pastry in this recipe, which included sugar and two egg yolks.

And there was the first problem. According to the recipe, first you combine the flour, sugar, salt and butter, then add the two egg yolks and the mixture will come together in moist clumps.

No, it didn't.

Fortunately, I am now pretty confident about working ice-water into pastry flour until it's workable so I just followed that routine by hand and soon had a good dough that hung together and rolled out nicely. I lined my springform pan and a small tart pan with the dough, and blind-baked it for 10 minutes.


The recipe then called for up to 15 apples to be peeled, cored and quartered. 15 apples? That sounded like a lot! My apples were pretty big, so when they were quartered, the pieces seemed pretty big. I cut the quarters in half, making eighths, and then cut those eighths in half crosswise, making chunks.


You toss the apple chunks in butter and lemon juice and then roast them in a 400 degree oven. After they cool a bit, you put them into the tart shells. The irregular chunks of apple hold their shapes and give the tart a rustic, country feel.

Next, you make a brown butter, and infuse it with vanilla bean, star anise, cloves and cinnamon bark.


Brown butter is a wonderful thing. You melt butter over low heat and cook it, carefully, until the milk solids in the butter begin to brown. The result is a rich nutty flavor that adds an extra dimension to your dish. You can infuse the butter with herbs, or - in this case - spices. It takes about 20 minutes to get the butter nicely browned, and you have to be careful, because it can burn in a matter of seconds.

While keeping a close eye on the butter, I whisked two eggs with some flour and sugar to create a custard. No milk or cream was called for. Good for any dairy-phobic friends at the office. I departed from the recipe only in one way - I added the two reserved egg whites leftover from the crust. I cannot bear to throw them away.

The brown butter was strained into the custard (to exclude the chunks of spices), and whisked up to combine. Then the mixture was poured over the apples in the tarts.

As they baked (1 hour at 350 degrees), the kitchen was suffused with the scent of the spices, especially the vanilla bean.


I have to confess, I'm somewhat of a short-cut cook. I generally don't deal with whole spices - I have ground spices and vanilla extract, and figure it all tastes the same. But since I had to buy star anise anyway, and Cost Plus had a buy-two-get-one-free, I bought a packet holding two vanilla beans and tried - for once in my life - to follow the recipe correctly. The scent of fresh vanilla from a bean is pretty awesome.

While the tarts baked - on a foil-lined cookie sheet, as advised in the directions - I noticed butter oozing from the bottoms of the pans. With a stick and a half of butter in the crust and a stick used in the filling (halved, for two tarts), this recipe is all about the butter.


Here's the smaller tart, the one that's staying home.


And here's a slice served with vanilla ice cream. Tasty.


Visit Epicurious.com for the recipe.

Apple pie

Click to "embiggen"

"American as apple pie" goes the saying. Sunday at the market, they were selling a wide variety of apples for $0.67 a pound! At those prices, I can afford to experiment.

Here they are, from left to right: Rome Beauty, Braeburn, Granny Smith and Fuji apples. I'm going to let each variety star in its own apple pie, and compare the tastes.

Pears

Summer's great, but I love the fruits of autumn. At the Santa Monica Farmer's market on Saturday, I asked a vendor if the Bartlett pears she had on display were ripe. Not quite, she said, they were still firm.

I told her I wanted the sweetest pears she had for a pie that very day, and she said, "Oh, then I'll give you some from my samples," and she reached into a box behind the counter. These were the ripest fruit, the ones she had sliced up to give as samples to shoppers.

They were bumped and bruised a bit and the flesh was soft and slippery and perfumed. She sold them to me for half price.

This is my French pear tart. It holds a secret - a thin layer of rich dark semisweet chocolate beneath the fruit and custard.

Line a tart pan with pastry - I always use the rich butter pastry from the Gordon Hamersley recipe.

Put a layer of finely chopped dark semisweet chocolate on the bottom of the tart shell. I used Ghiradelli semisweet morsels. You can put the morsels in whole, or you can chop them finer - I gave mine a few minutes whirling in the food processor to break them up smaller.

You need about 5 ripe sweet pears. Peel them and cut them in half lengthwise, and core them. Lay them cut side down and slice them crosswise, about 1/8th of an inch thick, keeping the slices together as best you can. This will be slippery work!

Slip the broad blade of the knife, or use a spatula to transfer each pear into the shell, on top of the chocolate layer, holding its shape, in a flower pattern, with the narrow ends toward the center. With your hand, gently splay push the fruit so the slices splay out to the edge of the shell. This is easier than it sounds.

If you have empty space between the pears, you can fill it in with other slices.

Using 3 eggs, 1 cup of cream, a teaspoon of Kirch, vanilla, or almond extract as you prefer, make a custard. You can sweeten the custard to your taste, or not if the pears are sweet.

Pour the custard over the pears, filling all the spaces. Sprinkle the top with sugar, and bake in a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 350 and bake for another 30 - 40 minutes. You can brown the top under the broiler at the end if it isn't pretty enough.

It's a subtle combination, pears and chocolate. It all depends on the flavor of the pears. Give it a try.

A Pie a Week - Peachy keen

Peaches are still in the market, and today at the Palisades Farmers' Market, I found these. The size of a softball, they were beautiful yellow peaches.


I made a traditional American-style peach pie with a lattice topping.

A woven lattice topping is an easy way to make a great visual impact. I recently bought this cool little fluted pastry wheel to cut the strips for the lattice.


I served the pie to [The Man I Love] and a group of three young men in their early 20s - Our Son and a couple of friends. Rave reviews. There's only one piece left now. It's MINE, for breakfast!!

A Pie a Week - Lemon chess pie

Chess pie is a sweet pie common in the South. It's a single crust pie with a soft, sugary filling similar to a custard pie, but with a difference.

Chess pie was originally English, and migrated to the South from New England and Virginia. The ingredients are simple - eggs, sugar, cream or milk, butter and flavorings, plus a couple of spoonfuls of corn meal. This gives the custard a fine, granular texture.

The origins of the name "chess pie" is unclear. Some think that it's a corruption of "cheese pie," the filling being similar to a cheesecake-like confection. Some think that it was because, before refrigeration, people kept baked goods in a pie-chest, so this would be "chest pie." Others say that, in Southern dialect, when asked what kind of pie it was, housewives would answer, "Jes' pie."

It makes sense that it's "jes' pie," because it's an awful easy pie to make on an ordinary day. Blind-bake the shell, then mix the custard:

1.5 cup of sugar
2 tablespoons cornmeal
1/4 teaspoon salt
3-4 eggs
1/2 cup cream, half & half or whole milk
1/4 cup (1 stick) butter, melted and cooled
1 lemon, zested
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Mix the sugar, cornmeal and salt. Beat the eggs with the cream, then add the butter. Pour the liquid into the sugar mixture. Add the lemon zest, juice and vanilla, and combine until smooth.

Pour it into the pie shell, then bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

I made this one with the lemons from our garden. Jes' pie.

A Pie a Week - French nectarine tart

Similar to last week's apple tart, here's one with nectarines. Sliced nectarines are tossed with sugar, arranged in the pie shell, then a sweet custard is poured on top and the pie is baked. Easy!

A Pie a Week - French apple custard

By now, pie dough is a breeze for me, using the all-butter recipe I found. Now I'm concentrating on thinking up creative fillings for pies.

I had some granny smith apples. I also had some eggs from our neighbor's chickens. In a book of recipes I bought when we visited Burgundy, France, I learned that a very common type of French pie is to bake fruit in a sweetened egg custard in an open-faced tart.

So I lined my small tart pan with pastry, and then sliced the peeled apples into crescents. I tossed the apple slices with brown sugar, and then sprinkled a bit of ground ginger into the bowl. I grated the peel of an orange, and added that to the bowl, too.

While I let the fruit take on the sugar, I spread a thin layer of red currant jelly on the bottom of the tart shell. Then I laid the apple slices in a decorative pattern into the shell.


I made a custard with two eggs, some half and half, and about a half-cup of sugar - I didn't want it too sweet. I sprinkled in some grated nutmeg and a little bit more of the grated orange peel. Then I poured it over the fruit in the shell.

I've seen French tarts with a decorative lattice pastry top, and I had enough confidence in my new favorite pie crust to think I could work with it. So I rolled out an oblong bit of dough and used a pinked pastry wheel to cut strips about 1/2" wide. I laid these across the top of the tart in one direction, spaced about 1 inch apart.

Then I wove the rest cross-wise, under and over the others. When finished, I pressed the ends into the sides of the pie, and sprinkled it with granulated sugar before putting it in the oven.


Here it is after 50 minutes of baking. Pretty nice, huh? And pretty tasty, too! We had it for dinner, and it held up nicely enough to go to work with me on Monday for lunch!

A Pie a Week - Savory tarts

Since starting my "Pie a Week" project this summer, I've eaten a lot of pie. I have to confess, though, it's not dessert pies I like best - it's savory tarts.

The recipe is pretty basic - You can make a savory tart with almost any combination of vegetables in your fridge. Bake the vegetable and cheese with a rich egg custard, and you have a delicious and elegant lunch or brunch. You can cook one in the morning, and then have a nice dinner in the evening without heating up the kitchen.

First, you have to make the tart shell.

I've become so comfortable with the all-butter pastry recipe from chef Gordon Hamersley that I can make it in a few minutes.

• 1 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 Teaspoon salt
• 10 tablespoons (1 stick + 2 tablespoons) butter, cut into 1/4" slices
• 6 Tablespoons of ice water.

Mix the flour and salt in a bowl, then cut the butter into it with a pastry cutter, two knives, or your fingertips, until the butter is broken into pieces the size of a pea.

Pour the mixture onto a floured board and make a well in the center. A couple of Tablespoons at a time, mix in the ice water.

Gather the dough together, then roll into a log shape, about eight inches. With the heel of your hand, smear the dough on the board and gather it back together and repeat - this is called fraisage, and will form sheets of butter in the dough, creating the flake.

Shape the dough into a disc and wrap in plastic or foil and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

I use a Silpat sheet when I roll pastry dough. With a little bit of flour sprinkled on, I can roll this dough directly with my silicone rolling pin, but if your dough is sticking, you can roll it between two sheets of parchment paper or waxed paper. This dough stays together beautifully for me. If the edge gets misshapen, break off a piece and move it to where there's a gap - it should fill in nicely.

Line a tart pan with a removable bottom with the crust. For me, this dough is so easy to work with I can lift up the Silpat sheet and turn it upside down over the pan. Then I gently ease the sheet off the dough, and settle it into the pan. Trim the excess - you can roll it in a flat disc and freeze it for future use.

For a quiche or tart with custard, you have to pre-bake the shell. Line the shell with foil, and fill with dried beans or rice or pie-weights (you can buy these in cooking supply stores). Bake at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes, then remove the foil and the weights - use a fork to prick any places where there are air bubbles. Bake another 15 minutes, and cool.


What did I have in the fridge? I had some zucchini squash, some onions, and a half a large beefsteak tomato. I shredded the zucchini and chopped the onion, then sweated them in butter over the stove. I sprinkled in some fresh, chopped oregano for a little extra flavor.

I diced the tomato and let some of the liquid drain. I waited until the onion and zucchini were a little caramelized before adding the tomato. I spread the cooked vegetables in the bottom of the tart shell, and then grated some French Comte cheese I had in the fridge.

Then I whipped up a custard with eggs and half-and-half, poured it over the vegetables and cheese, and baked the tart in the oven at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes.

It was pretty when it came out.

And look at how flakey the crust is! Also - buttery and delicious!

The classic quiche Lorraine is a tart with chopped ham or bacon. If you had nothing but an onion in your refrigerator, and some cheese parings, you could make a carmelized onion tart. Fennel would make an interesting tart, maybe with some tomato. You could use mushrooms, or peppers. Mild chiles with cheddar cheese would give a tart a Southwestern twist.

The combination of flavors is endless. And like pizza, it's a great way to use what's left in the fridge to make a great meal without having to go shopping.