The Pie Ho
Fans of Pushing Daisies will recognize this pie! I’m rewatching the series for just about the millionth time and every time I do I wonder: is pear pie with Gruyere cheese baked into the crust actually good? Or did Bryan Fuller just want to make clever cheese rhymes with his fictional pies? This time around it was just too much for me to take, I had to know for sure.
The facts were these…
I recently downloaded the Epicurious app for my iPhone (which is awesome by the way! Organized, interesting, and you never need to worry about forgetting your shopping list!) and while I was flicking through it I stumbled on this recipe. I had a whole bulb of fennel and some chicken stock left over from making chicken pot pie so I thought I’d give it a try!
The only changes I made to the recipe were that I did not use fennel seeds in addition to the whole fennel, and I didn’t include the fronds in the tomato relish (I accidentally threw them away, my bad).
The soup was light, healthy, and super (or should I say SOUPer) easy to make. I also paired it with a few slices of toast with goat cheese spread lightly on top.
Per usual I’m going to withhold the actual recipe for this pieminister pie because I still occasionally get a squeamish about copyright. But I modified a lot of the ingredients (mostly because the specificity of the ingredients hinges on a lot of ingredients that or more prevalent in Britain), so I’m including the list of what I put into this pie:
I’ve wanted to share this playlist for a while but wasn’t sure how to do it; it’s the playlist I’ve cultivated specifically for the baking of pie. This is just a sampling of the full playlist, but it’s a pretty good survey if I do say so myself. The full playlist is on Spotify as “Pie Music” and you might be able to find it with some clever searching, but hopefully I’ll make another one of these soon!
Sample playlist: listen here.
- You Are Here - The Wailin’ Jennys
- Morning Comes - Delta Rae
- Make It Out West - The Greencards
- Dreams - Fleetwood Mac
- Ohio - Honeyhoney
- Raise Hell - Brandi Carlile
- Higher Love - James Vincent McMorrow
- Let It Be - Ray LaMontagne
- Middle of June - Noah Gundersen
I pride myself on being a pretty good mix-maker so I’d love to know what you think!
Nothing quite like an Arizona sunset reflected in the smooth, pristine surface of a lemon curd tart.
This is actually a rebake of a pie/tart I made my freshman year of college when this blog was in its infancy. When I made the switch over from blogger to tumblr it didn’t make the switch. I can’t remember why now.
I’m currently visiting my grandparents in Arizona where lemons are in season in a big way. One of their neighbors brought over a whole bag of lemons from her lemon tree! And since I’ve been looking for an excuse to show off my baking skills to my grandma (who is an amazing cook), I thought I’d take another crack at this pie. It was a bit like playing telephone since I was following the directions from my own blog and I made some changes the first time (I really hope I’ve gotten better at writing out my recipes, that was a bitch to slog through).
So here goes:
I worked on my quilt a bit more while I was home. Initially it this was going to be it, but after adding so much of the black and white fish scales around the edges I realized that in the process of trying to bulk it out I inadvertently skewed the color balance. I think I’m going to trim some of the black and white border and try and find a nice, bright floral to add around the edges; I’m thinking a warm pink with bits of yellow in it. I also have to finish sewing the intersections (I’ve included my old picture as a reminder of what I want them to look like) and the corners of the existing border. And I’ve decided to do them by hand to improve my hand stitching and to decrease the amount of brash mistakes I tend to make on the machine.
Happy Day After Pi Day everyone! I hope you all celebrated by getting appropriately pie-faced.
After I made the earl grey tart a while back I started thinking of other teas I’d really like to taste in a chocolate ganache filling since I’m absolutely addicted to tea. Chai lattes are my cold day jam and since March in NYC can’t decide whether it wants to be a lion or a lamb (inadvertent rhyme!) I thought I’d hit that flavor up for a pie. For Pi Day sharing and convenience (and because I knew you only want a shallow little bit of ganache in the middle anyway) I made them into cup pies.
I want to take a minute to talk about healthy eating. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of yoga and I just want to get into the spirit of that practice with today’s post. I know I post a lot of desserts and a lot of my recipes feature a lot of cheese and butter and potatoes, but I want everyone to know that I can be zen and hip, too.
So today we’re gunna deep fry some fuckin’ tofu.
This week was a bit rough. I won’t bore you with the details of my personal life, but I think everyone has those weeks where you just don’t want to leave the house to go and get that much needed comfort food, baked good fix. It turned out to be perfect since I’ve been meaning to make this recipe for microwavable cookies in a mug for a while.
Normally I’m exceedingly well stocked in the baking department, but when you don’t have what you need and don’t want to leave the house for the right ingredients in the midst of baking, you’ll substitute where you can.
You don’t need pastry flour or any fancy ratio of multiple flours, just your all-purpose shit will get the job done.
I like salted butter on my toast and I don’t have the cash moneys to buy all the kinds of butter, so I buy salted and then when I bake I just don’t add whatever tiny amount of salt they list.
When we were 90% finished with these I realized that my vanilla extract had been lost in the move to my new apartment. So, with all of the other ingredients assembled I had to come up with a solution that didn’t involve leaving the house. Honey. We substituted a dash of honey for the vanilla and M&Ms from the building’s vending machine instead of chocolate chips. The result was a little bit blander than the chocolate chip cookie we’d hoped for, but it was still really good.
I’ll probably leave the house today (probably) and pick up some other ingredients so the next time I make these I can (maybe) do them right.
