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Strawberry rhubarb minis (aka: I miss spring)

17 Oct

My parents came to town this weekend, so I wanted to knock their socks off with all this pie I’ve been ranting about (plus, if we’re being honest here,  I knew they would play with the boys and I could bake!).  I planned a pie-a-palooza of a weekend – dough experiments, mini pies, whole pies.

Staring out my kitchen window at the soggy leaves and rainy sky, I wanted just one more taste of warm weather before the winter suffocated me in the northeast Ohio snowbelt.  I knew I had the perfect solution to both a flavor my parents would love and one that would lift my spirits – strawberry rhubarb!  Lucky me, I had the last of the farmer’s market rhubarb frozen in my freezer along side some strawberries.

I had done a trial run a while back, so I set out to perfect my recipe.  I ended up crafting my own filling recipe from a hybrid of Smitten Kitchen and my Hungarian Grandmother’s.  The result: pure spring in every bite!  Love, love, love.

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Pie It Forward: A Double Dose

16 Oct

I was so excited about my plan to give away pie that I went a little crazy last week.  After dropping in on Jackie at the Shop-N-Go, I was hooked.  So, I decided to keep delivering pie to see how people responded.  And from what I can tell so far, people love getting pie!

Bedford Heights Police Department

I will be the first to admit that I have never thanked a police officer until last week when I delivered some pie.  I’m kind of embarrassed about that.  24 hours a day, wherever we are, there is a police force in the background operating as a safety net for all of us and I’m trying not to take that for granted.

My office has recently moved to Bedford Heights and unfortunately, we have had some run-ins with the police.  A suspicious car in the parking lot, a couple of broken windows from a BB gun, alarm trips (oops, we’re getting used to a new building), and some rowdy protesters (they come along with the territory).  Every time the police show up, they are just so nice, professional and understanding.

They even forgave me when I called about what turned out to be a cop doing security in an unmarked car in our parking lot.  When I kept asking when the police were going to arrive to check out this suspicious car that keeps showing up, the dispatcher finally said, “Honey, that  IS a cop in your parking lot.”  Oh – oops.  We’re BFFs now.

I was too nervous to ask to take their picture!

To the Bedford Heights Police Department – you deserve some pie!

Subway:  Russ

Part of the reason I am doing this is to make myself more aware of the people who are making everyone’s day a little better.  Russ at my local Subway proves that you can make someone’s day better no matter where you are or what you are doing.

I started to take notice the third or fourth time I went there.  Every time I left, I had a smile on my face and before long, I was looking forward to going there.  It was because each time I went in, I laughed – and so did others.  The place is boisterous and contagious.  Russ and his crew have a mutual respect for each other and their customers.

What I love the most is that Russ is the sandwich judge.  The line of customers get their ingredient choices evaluated and given the thumbs up or thumbs down.  “Oooh, she’s on fire!” he’ll holler if he likes your choices.  “Oh, watch it now, don’t go there” I’ve heard him say to the man behind me thinking about black olives.  “I know you’re addicted to this salad because we make it so good” he says.  And he’s right.  They have rocked my world with a spinach, buffalo chicken salad that’s made with love and laughter.

Russ gets Pie Eyed!

So, Russ, here’s to you and your crew at Subway!

xoxo, The Pie Eyed Piper

Pie Eyed’s First Suspect: Jackie

13 Oct

I have passed the Shop-N-Go convenience store in Bedford Heights hundreds of times over the years.  Now that I work next door, I drive past it everyday.  But I’ve never gone in until recently.  I was on a Diet Coke run and decided to pop into the store.  Upon checking out, I met Jackie, the store manager.  She was so incredibly nice!  We chatted for a bit and I could tell that she really takes pride in her store and cares about the customers.  She totally made my day.  Who knew there was such a gem like Jackie inside that store that I’ve been passing all these years?

So, to my new work neighbor Jackie, you’re my first person to get Pie Eyed!

Jackie gets Pie Eyed at the Shop-N-Go!

XOXO, The Pie Eyed Piper

Pie It Forward

12 Oct

There’s just something so genuine about pie.  It’s holidays, it’s grandma, it’s welcome to the neighborhood.  It is made to be shared.

There is no reason I need to bake all of this pie and keep it for myself.  So starting today, I will be delivering my pie to someone who deserves to be thanked or have their day brightened.  An unsuspecting person or group will get Pie Eyed with a delivery of fresh pie.

Check back soon to see who got Pie Eyed this week!

The L Word

10 Oct

I had to do it.  It was the natural next step.  It was time to make pie crust with LARD.  For some reason, I was having a hard time making the leap.  It’s the word – lard.  The first thing that comes to mind is the Lard A$$ pie eating contest in the movie Stand By Me.  Lard and pie together in a hard to watch ending.  But I’m ready to reclaim the word and find out if I will join the ranks of those singing its praises.

On a tip from my Mother-in-Law, I found non-hydrogenated pure lard at our local Heinen’s grocery store.  Right there next to pork bones and other non-identifiable pork products was a shiny white tub marked “Pure Lard.”  I almost made a mistake and bought beef suet, but I remembered that all the articles reference Leaf Lard from pigs.  Good thing I didn’t – the beef suet was like a hunk of fat and the pork lard is creamy.

I was carrying the tub to the front with my fingertips – like it was going to seep through the plastic.  Then I felt the need to chit chat about why I was buying lard to the 16 year old cashier who humored me and confirmed that it was “gross.”  But it was at that moment that my heart started to embrace this little tub of fat – it rang up $.99!  WOW!  A 14 ounce tub of Lard for $.99 and a 20 ounce package of Crisco costs nearly $4.50.  This could be the beginning of a beautiful pie partnership.

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Pie Hangover (Mini Apple Pies)

2 Oct

I’m feeling the consequences of too much pie.  I think I am honestly hung over.  It is not news that pie crust is nowhere near healthy – I’m not even going to try to claim the calcium from butter.  Ian and I have been eating an average of one mini-pie a day…for the past month.  We’re like a pair of bears getting ready for the winter hibernation.  I thought the 17 Day Diet was the solution – I would start today, detox, and find the strength to make pie and not eat it.  Then Ian suggested that we should just make ourselves sick on pie, then we would no longer want it.  So, with a sigh, I brewed some coffee and had a pumpkin mini-pie for breakfast.

I couldn’t let fall pass me by without working on an apple mini-pie.  There’s just something about a local apple – I could eat one for every meal.  So, this week I embarked on experimenting, eating, and more experimenting.

I used the apple pie filling recipe that I posted earlier, but made some tweaks and figured out how to pre-cook it without turning it mushy.  Then, instead of glazing like the pumpkin, I sprinkled them with sanding sugar.

Unlike a regular apple pie, the apples need to be cut pretty small to pile into the  middle of the little circle.  They are even a little big in the picture below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Pumpkin Hand Pie Heaven

26 Sep

* Update – I made these hand pies again and used a 2 1/2 inch diameter glass to make them a little smaller.  This allowed me to get a dozen from 1 recipe of dough and the serving is a little smaller (which means less calories!).

Fall has me feeling like pie (shock, so did spring and summer).  My son Elliot has been reminding me all weekend that it is officially Fall and wondering when we can have our first pumpkin pie.  I have this weird issue about having pumpkin pie before Thanksgiving.  It’s my absolute favorite pie, but I just can’t bring myself to make one if there isn’t turkey on the table.  I’m all over anything else that has pumpkin in it – lattes, cookies, bread, pasta – the seasonal eater in me is at her best in the Fall.

With pumpkin in the air and pie on my mind, what’s a girl to do?  It’s time to go back to pie-that-isn’t-pie… pumpkin style!  I feel like I have a handle on traditional pies.  My crust has been consistent and  I rocked a banana cream pie last week that easily trumped the homemade one I had at the Champaign County Fair last month.

I’m ready to go back to my original mission of finding new and exciting ways to enjoy pie.

Hand pies – practice makes perfect

When I first started this quest a couple of months ago, I dove right into perfecting the hand pie.  They’re such a throw back and with a vanilla glaze, are reminiscent of the Hostess pies I used to eat as a kid.  That is, if you make them right.  After eleven – yep – ELEVEN attempts, I finally nailed it tonight on my twelfth attempt at perfect hand pies.  Here are my lessons learned from the many failed attempts:

All butter isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

I so want to be a believer of all butter crust, but it just has not worked for me with hand pies.  Every time I tried, my dainty little pies ended up cooking in a pool of butter on parchment paper.  The result was a chewy, inedible crust and a total waste of good filling.  So I went out and bought a store bought crust just to see what would happen.  Do you know what happened?  The most beautiful little hand pies, all crisp, brown and flaky.  Why, you ask?  All LARD.  LARD – the homecoming queen of pie crust.  So, I experimented and found that if I increased the shortening, my crust was much better.

Cold, cold and colder

These hand pies are not for the faint of heart or short on time.  They take a serious commitment and some preparation.  To make a hand pie, take the dough out of the fridge and roll it as if you were rolling a pie and just as thin.  Using a round cookie cutter (anywhere from 3 to 5 inches in diameter depending on the finished size you want), cut circles and gently place them onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.  If you have scraps and need to re-roll them to get more circles, wrap them back up into a disc, cover with plastic wrap in chill in in the fridge for 10 minutes.  Once you have cut all of your circles, place them back in the fridge while you make your filling.  Once your filling is ready, take the circles out of the fridge and fill your hand pie (instructions to come).  Once the pies are sealed and filled, put them back in the fridge (or freezer) for 10-15 minutes.  Then, you’re ready to bake them.  If you didn’t notice, there’s a lot of fridge time!  It’s totally worth it.

Filling is key

I made a mistake early on by making pie filling and putting it uncooked into the hand pies as I would a regular pie.  This resulted in an inside crust that seemed under baked.  I realized that you need to fully cook your fillings and then bring them to room temperature before filling a hand pie.  Once I began to precook my fillings, the pies baked so much better!

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The Art of Crust – Pie Dough Recipe and Apple Pie

15 Sep

Enough about all of the books, blogs and articles that espouse how to make great pie.  It’s time to put my hands in the bowl and get dirty.

Over the past month or so, I’ve made ten attempts at various incarnations of a pie crust (attempt number eleven is in the fridge as I type).  I’ve landed on a pie crust recipe that is a hybrid of a few that I’ve had success with.  There’s not much creativity in tweaking a pie crust recipe, but this one seems to have the right shortening to butter ratio for my taste.

Best of Both Worlds Pie Dough

For a 9-inch single crust

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour (Cold!)

1 Tablespoon sugar

1 tsp salt

6 1/2 Tablespoons (a little more than 1/3 cup) shortening (I like Spectrum palm oil shortening) (Cold!)

6 Tablespoons unsalted butter (Cold!)

* cut both of these into tablespoon-sized pieces

Just under 1/4 cup ice water

1 1/2 teaspoons cider vinegar (just add to the water)

Put the flour, salt and sugar into a food processor with a metal blade; pulse just to combine the ingredients.  Drop in the butter and shortening.  Pulse only until they are cut into the flour – don’t over process.  It will look like some are the size of peas and some pieces might be larger.  Gradually begin to add the water through the chute pulsing each time.  Add about a tablespoon at a time. Watch carefully – you want to stop as soon as the dough can be pinched together.  This will happen in the blink of an eye.  The dough will not form in the processor like you would expect cookie dough to.  It might even still look a little crumbly.  If you can pinch it, turn it out onto saran wrap and form it gently into a ball.  Wrap the dough, flatten into a disk and refrigerate for at least an hour.

In future attempts, I’m going to try a vodka twist and one that includes an egg just to spice things up.

It was all about apple pie this weekend.  I mean, you can’t be a pie maker (or an American so I hear) if you can’t make an apple pie.  (more…)

Pie School 102 – the ingredients

11 Sep

4.  Maybe 5.  That’s it.  That’s the number of ingredients that you need to make a pie crust.  And they are all ingredients that you probably have in your house right now.  Compared to the ingredients needed to make a cake, pie crust should be, well, a piece of cake!

I had always heard that making pie crust was a big deal.  It was so scary, so temperamental.  It took some special gene that you were born with.  I honestly thought I could jump in and get it right after a few tries.  WRONG.  My crusts have been edible, but not up to the standards of amazing pie.  I feel like my kitchen has turned into a science fair project.

While I can’t say I’ve perfected crust yet (just you wait, I will!), I have nailed down the ingredient tricks of the trade.  So, for those like me and mining for tips, here’s what I have gleaned so far.

Cold, cold and colder

I hear you – keep the ingredients COLD!  Goodness.  Every person, every book, every website is a broken record.  The colder the better.  So, I am now keeping my butter, shortening and flour in the freezer.  To help make cutting in the fat easier, I slice my butter and shortening along the tablespoon lines while still in the wrapper before I freeze it.  Then, I put them in freezer bags and can break off however many tablespoons I need.

The type of ingredients matter

Butter – make sure it’s unsalted and don’t cheap out!  Some generic brands do not cook well.  Word has it that Land O’ Lakes is a good brand.  I’ve been buying Trader Joe’s and it seems good.  Butter in a crust gives it flavor and tenderness, but an all butter crust will tend to not be as flaky.

Crisco – by all means, buy the sticks not the tub! 

The sticks make it so easy to cut the right amount of shortening.  Shortening is the key to flakiness but not flavor.  I was struggling with an all butter crust, and once I added shortening to the mix, everything changed and the texture was spot on.  I am now a convert – though I think there’s room for both butter and shortening.

Lard – I haven’t gone there yet.  I hear it’s not so easy to find quality lard these days, but I have not tried.  What I do hear is that Lard will hands down give you the flakiest crust in town.  After all, that’s what grandma used.  And that store bought dough?  All lard.  I bought one, baked it and read the ingredients.

Flour – Call me naive, but I thought all purpose flour was all the same.  Nope.  Apparently, BLEACHED all purpose flour is key to pie crust.  I’ve been using unbleached all along.  Whoops.  That might explain my problems.  I have a pie crust sitting in the fridge right now that was made with bleached and am keeping my fingers crossed for a step in the right direction!

Throw in some salt, sugar and ice water and you have yourself a pie crust!  Time to get baking.  Next up will be a recipe for crust and a report back on this weekend’s pie experiment!

Drunk on Pie

10 Sep

Pie Eyed:  adj  slang  Intoxicated; drunk

I’ve had pie on my mind since last Thanksgiving.  Well, I have pie on my mind every Thanksgiving, but this time I couldn’t shake it.  Maybe it was because we hosted Thanksgiving at our house for the first time.  Or because I had finally graduated from babies and toddlers to preschoolers and had room in my brain to think about pie.  Regardless, November of 2010 brought a pie revolution to our home.

I made a homemade crust for the first time.  I piloted three different pumpkin pie recipes and two pecan pie recipes – the pie to person ratio was embarrassing.  The pie was good (pumpkin pie winner was Dorie Greenspan’s Caramel Pumpkin Pie) but I knew I could do better.

Spring came around and the mere sight of rhubarb and strawberries sent me on a pie binge – I made 8 over the course of two months.  The last two FINALLY had the right kind of crust.  The guy at the farmer’s market came to know the crazy look in my eye as I showed up every week hunting down the rhubarb haul.

But making big, round pies started to wear on me.  Sometimes you just want a little bit of  pie – not 8 slices that need to be eaten quickly before it goes bad.  And if you’re on a pie bend like me, then you definitely don’t want whole pies hanging around the house every week.  So I began obsessing about ways to keep the integrity of pie, but not make “pie” if you know what I mean.  Of course, this does not excuse beautiful whole pies from my baking endeavors – I’m just spicing it up a little to find all the wonderful ways to eat pie.

We’re a little drunk on pie over here.  If you find yourself wanting to raise a glass to pie, then join me as I find my way through failed crust attempts, filling mishaps and hopefully amazing accomplishments.  We can learn together and hope that everyone at our tables will be a little Pie Eyed this Thanksgiving!

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