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…

Read More

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:

Read More

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:

Read More

(Warning: more swears than usual.)

I had a bad day today. I had the worst kind of bad day, which is the kind of bad day that starts good to psych you out and then get’s bad. That way you spend the day getting beaten down and, rather than just lying there and taking it like you would have if the day started out bad, you keep trying to get out of what you presume is some sort of fluke rut and back into the good day you were supposed to be having.

Unfortunately there comes a time when you have to say “fuck it,” go home, and eat your body weight in Skittles and comfort food. Don’t judge me, you’ve been there too.

(I didn’t actually eat my mac and cheese with basil, I just thought, “I should at least make it look like I put some effort into plating this.”)

In my last post I said that when I’m overwhelmed with gratitude I bake. Well, when I’m overwhelmed with frustration and sadness I bake, too. Neil Gaiman says that you should use your pain to “make good art,” I wonder if he’d consider mac and cheese art? I say… yes.

Read More

So I’ve decided to feature my cheese(s) of the week from now on. Because this is now a general food blog and why not? On the left we’ve got midnight moon goat and drunken goat on the right. I think I find cheeses in dark wax strangely alluring; they’re like the bad boys of the dairy isle. The midnight moon goat tastes a bit like a softer, goatier Parmesan and the drunken goat is a subtle, tangy, less crumbly goat. I bought both at Whole Foods.

I made this pie for a vegetarian friend of mine. The ingredients are as follows:

• Half a large eggplant
• Half a yellow onion
• Fifteen-ish Austrian crescent fingerling potatoes (though any yellow-ish fingerlings will probably do)
• 1/2 cup whole milk
• Parmesan and Feta cheeses to taste (the more the better in my opinion)
• Fresh basil
• Puff pastry (store bought will work) and sesame seeds to top it

Originally we were also going to put spinach and leeks in as well but I forgot and the pie was fine without them. Maybe next time!

Melt some butter in a large frying pan and saute chopped onion until they’re all brown and delicious. Throw in thin rounds of fingerling potato an saute until slightly opaque. Salt half rounds of eggplant to keep them from wilting too much, add eggplant and whole milk to pan, and then cook until slightly gray and opaque and whole milk has boiled down a bit. Scoop the stew-like mixture into a glass pan and sprinkle the cheeses and bits of basil on top. Layer puff pastry over all and sprinkling sesame seeds as desired. Bake until puff pastry is brown and then serve!

Been trying to post every Monday but there was this thing I had to do yesterday and then I was busy… doing another thing and… I got lazy, okay?

Anyway, this was my first attempt at devising my own meat pie recipe. I’m super critical of my pies, but luckily I made this for/with the help of three of my guy friends. Boys between the age of thirteen and twenty-five are like disposals, you step on their foot and their mouth opens up so you can just scrap the food off the plate and into them. It’s why I really like cooking with the boys: even if the crust falls apart and the pie becomes a glorified casserole they’ll probably still like it ‘cause they’ll definitely still eat it. Plus I get to boss them around a bit, which is fun.

Read More

Hey Hos, bet you weren’t expecting this! I just rediscovered some pictures of a pie I made in December before I left for London. It’s another one from Martha Stewart’s pie book. This one is the chess tart. Basically it’s like a pecan pie without the pecans or crack pie.