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…

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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:

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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.

If you’re like me, getting ambitious in the kitchen can be a dangerous endeavor. One minute you’re all like, “I’ma make a flat piece of crust and layer pears on it, the next you’re like, “Wow, the butter in the crust melted rather than baked and now I have a square of flour swimming in molten butter.”

Accidents happen, is my point.

I used to be really big on the idea that I didn’t want to cut corners; no store bought crust, no canned filling, pumpkin pie is always hard for me because my inclination is to carve and boil a whole pumpkin rather than use the canned stuff. But when those aforementioned accidents occur, it’s nice to have a quick and easy back up plan.

Phyllo dough is where I’m going with this. It’s crisp, it’s light, it’s layered, you can keep it in your fridge for a super long time as a plan B; we love it. So when I royally screwed my initial flat crust idea, I decided to wrap my pears in phyllo.

What you’ll need for this quick-fix, emergency dessert:

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I got the recipe for this tart from a blog called The Jewels of New York, which, in searching google for the recipe again, lead me to an escort website. So, you know, if you live in the New York area and are looking for a certain kind of good time, there’s that.

The original recipe is for tartlets, but we didn’t have a tart pan and, consequently, made a very thick, pie-sized version. C’est la vie, you do what you can. This recipe actually worked out really well, I only made two subtle changes! Well, in addition to making it into a pie. Whatever.

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I wanted to bake something for the release of The Hobbit: and Unexpected Journey, but the release date coincided with what was probably the most hectic week of my life. So here it is, super late in the game, way behind all the other Hobbit posts. Sue me.

This was sort of a haphazard recipe of my own design; everything in it was designed to reflect a certain hobbity sensibility. (Might as well just say “English” sensibility. DID YOU KNOW, The Lord of the Rings is basically just an alternate history of England? Yup, hobbits are basically just the embodiment of ideal Englishness. The more you know.)

We decided to go vegetarian on this pie as well, so here’s what went into the pan to saute pre-baking:

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Welcome to the handful of new followers who joined up after my short post on my first-hand Lee Pace encounter. I feel that in the spirit of full disclosure I should, perhaps, point out that post was an anomaly. I don’t generally stalk Lee Pace, generally I kind of throw quasi-edible things together in the oven and we see what comes out. If you’re cool with that, please, stick around, I’m more than pleased you’re here.

Now, onto business.

Normally I do a Christmas post, this year I was planning on making these puppies:

It’s called trdelnik, it’s a roasted dough that I had when I was in Prague. It’s kind of a tourist trap, but it’s also a festive, seasonal treat. They make dough, roll it in nuts, and then roast it on these rotisserie conveyor belts before rolling it in sugar and cinnamon. I found a recipe for it and I was like, “this will be such a cool, unusual, appropriately seasonal ethnic thing to do for mah blerg!”

The recipe I found (which claimed trdelnik can be made on rolling pins over a grill or stove) was irredeemable.

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