As American As

OK maybe 30 pounds of apples was a bit optimistic, but I'm not giving up yet. This pie only my first effort with the apples, and it only used 1/15th of my stash. That's both good and daunting. But yesterday, I skipped yoga to run outside--it suddenly feels so important to soak up all the sun and warmth available to me, maybe that's why fall is my favorite season. I listened to the National (as promised) and Joshua Radin, whose music just exudes love to me. All while I rolled, peeled, chopped, baked and made the usual mess. The pie ended up extremely juicy, so juicy that some splashed on the floor when I pulled it out of the oven. I wiped it up, it was still sticky, so Megan wiped it up. Then my shoes stuck to the floor again this morning, and I wiped it up again. Perhaps apple pie juice will be one with our kitchen floor from here to eternity. The pie crust was perfect though--flaky just how I love it. And the autumnal spices paired with apples just spelled fall to me--so tart, sweet and savory. Not much can beat warm apple pie topped with vanilla ice cream. Apple pie a la mode is such a play of textures.

I went to a wedding this weekend for a couple friends. It was an incredibly lovely event that reflected the amazing couple so well. But part of the judge's "sermon" (?) stands out to me. She read court rulings from different marriage cases, most of which defined marriage as a socially accepted institution, a definition I found a bit cold for a wedding. But she closed by quoting from a California court ruling that said something like, "Half of marriages today end in divorce, the fact that people still choose to get married reflects the triumph of hope over experience."

So here's to hope and apple pie.

Pie Crust: from Better Homes and Gardens Baking Book 2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2/3 cup butter, cold 6 or 6 tablespoons cold water Now that I've conquered pie crust, I find it a very rewarding task (as with most anything involiving eating--hello, that's why I like to cook). In a large bowl, mix flour and salt together. Cut butter into 1-inch pieces. Incorporate into flour mixture using a pastry blender. Mash together until mixture forms pea-size crumbs. Add cold water a tablespoon at a time, using your hands to mix the dough until all of it is wet and it forms a ball well kneaded slightly. (Here's where things get messy and fun.)

Split dough in half. Form each half into a ball. Turn one ball out on a heavily floured surface. Smash a little with your palm. Using a rolling pie, roll dough straight back and forth a couple times, then rotate dough from 12 to 2, roll back and forth, rotate from 2 to 4, roll. Rotate, roll, etc. until the dough forms a 12-inch circle (or something resembling a circle). Roll dough onto rolling pin and transfer to a 9-inch pie pan. Gently unroll, squarely onto pan. Do the same with the other ball of dough. For a lattice top, just slice dough into 1-inch strips. Later, when you're attaching the lattice to the bottom layer of crust use a bit of lukewarm water to adhere the dough to each other.

Classic Apple Pie: from Better Homes & Gardens Baking Book 2 pounds of baking apples (I used Jonathon, but Makintosh works, just anything tart) 1 tablespoon lemon juice 3/4 cup sugar 2 tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon allspice All these pie recipes call for pounds of apples--do these people think I have room in my kitchen for a scale or something? I totally overestimated, but all I really needed was five regular-size apples (I peeled 9).

Preheat oven to 375. Peel and thinly slice your apples. Place in a large bowl and sprinkle with lemon juice--this will keep them from browning.

Here's the fun/easy part. In a small bowl, combine dry ingredients. Add to apples and toss with a spoon until completely coated. Place in crusted pie pan. Closer her up with your lattice top. You can paint the top with an egg white wash, but I didn't and it was fine. Bake for 50 minutes. Let cool and serve.

Le Quiche

The new kitchen has been officially christened. Christened with le quiche, finalmente (best if read with a hoity toity French accent). I finally get back to what I love. It may be boring and predictable, but give me time to cook after work, a short run and the television at least one night a week. I must have it, it's for my sanity. And it's best with bacon--fatty, greasy bacon--but throw in some tomatoes for good measure. Except I sat there eating, staring across the table at Megan. Both of us too stressed to cheer each other up. She about planning a wedding in the spring (!), and me about boys. I'm like what do I do, and she's like what do I do. And we're still both too tired and bogged down to cheer each other up. The house has this heaviness, I think because we're both scared. So we turn to Friends, real friends and Rachel-Joey-Chandler-etc. Friends. I watched all the seasons that Megan owns last summer, and we're going through them again. Last night was Thanksgiving Triffle--"custard good, jam good, meat good." And then Katy came over and did distract us. We downed a bottle of white wine between the three of us and chomped on quiche intermittently. And we laughed. And it'll get easier, one bottle of wine at a time, one episode at a time, one quiche at a time. BLT Quiche Pate Brisee Crust: from Martha Stewart Living 2 1/2 cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar 1 cup butter (very cold, straight from the fridge) 1/4 to 1/2 cup cold water Le Quiche: 4 eggs 6 slices of bacon, already cooked 1 Roma tomato, chopped grated cheddar cheese milk salt pepper For the crust: In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, salt and sugar. Then cut butter into 1/2-inches chunks and mix into flour with a pastry blender until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add 1/4 cup of cold water to mixture. Incorporate using your hands by kneading the dough. Add more water if it's still too crumbly. If you overdo it, you can always add a bit more flour. Once dough is solid and maleable, wrap in Siran and place in the freezer. Here's a good time for a run. Come back from your run, remove dough from freezer even though it's supposed to be frozen for an hour. This recipe will make two crusts for a pie, quiche or tart or one crust and top for a fancy pie. I sort of messed up here and, long story short, my crust was too thick so definitely follow these directions. Using your hands for this type of crust, place your dough in the middle of a tart pan. Spread out the dough with your fingers to an even thickness. Preheat oven to 425. On to the quiche part. In a small bowl, combine eggs, tomatoes, bacon, cheese, salt, pepper and milk. Whisk until eggs are beaten smooth. Pour egg mixture into crust. Pop it in the oven and bake it for 25 to 30 minutes, until the edges of the crust are browned as is the top of the quiche.

Queen of Tarts

I saw this tart on the cover of April's Gourmet Magazine and knew I had to make it. I even finally bought a tart pan with a removeable bottom. I predict many quiches and elegant pies in my future. Additionally, I think I may have solved my previous pie crust issues. Thus in the epic battle of me-versus-tart, I am the victor. I am the Queen of Tarts.

Strawberry Tart: from Gourmet Crust:
1 1/4 cups flour 3 tablespoons granulated sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 7 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 egg yolk 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
3 tablespoons cold water Filling:
1 1/2 pound strawberries 1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice 1/2 cup amaretto 1 pound mascarpone cheese 1/4 cup confectioners sugar 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon lemon zest 3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Pre-heat oven to 375. For crust, blend flour, 3 tablespoons of sugar, salt and butter in a large mixing bowl with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse meal. In a small bowl, whisk egg yolk, vanilla, lemon juice and water. Add wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until a dough is formed. Turn out on a lightly floured surface and knead a couple times. Form a flat, 5-inch circle with your hands. Place circle of dough into 9-inch tart pan and press with your fingers until dough covers the bottom and sides of the tart pan. With fork, stab little holes into the bottom of the crust.

Cover crust with aluminum foil and fill with pie weights or uncooked rice (guess which I chose). Bake for 20 minutes and remove tart from oven and remove foil and rice. Replace in oven and bake for another 20 minutes until golden. Let cool for at least 30 minutes.

While tart crust is cooling, make the filling. Slice strawberries and place in bowl with 1/3 cup granulated sugar and 1 teaspoon or so of lemon juice. Let sit for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, to allow the juice from the strawberries to collect in the bottom of the bowl.

Meanwhile, mix together mascarpone, powdered sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest and vanilla in a medium bowl. Once tart crust has cooled, spread mascarpone evenly onto the crust.

Go back to the strawberries. Using a strainer, pour the strawberries and their juice over a medium frying pan. Once drained, arrange the strawberries on top of the tart. Going back to the skillet, add 1/2 cup of amaretto liqueur to the strawberry juice mixture. Bring to a boil and simmer for 15 minutes or until it has reduced by half or has thickened to a syrup. Remove from heat and pour over tart. Refrigerate before serving. This is best eaten the day of.

Tart Cherry Pie

My mom once brought cherry pie to a church post-Thanksgiving-service pies-only potluck. If there was a competition, she would have won because (well, it was the best) the pastor loved that pie so much he referenced it in a sermon. No that didn't happen, but he did freaking love it. I'm pretty sure my mom is going straight to heaven.

It's the pie crust that is perfect. Most people buy pie crusts at the grocer because they think it's too much work. I admit to having difficulty with pastry crust in the past. Mom uses Martha's easy pie crust recipe, except that she uses the food processor instead of a pastry blender. The real key to good pie crust (as I've very recently discovered) is cold cold cold (cold water, cold butter, cold, put it back in the fridge if you have to), do not overwork the flour when you're kneading and use plenty of flour only when you're rolling out the dough. Check out this blog if you need more explicit instructions.

This pie was made with fresh cherries--not the canned kind. Although, it's important to note that the famed, getting-into-heaven-early pie was made with canned, so people will still love it even if it's not completely homemade. The McKains gave my sister the cherries a while back for consulting with them on how to remodel their house (apparently all she told them was that what they wanted would be expensive).

The recipe for the filling of this pie is from Better Homes and Gardens. To be concise, I'm printing it below.

Cherry Pie Filling and Topping:
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
2 tablespoons quick-cooking tapioca (buy the small ones, the big ones take longer to dissolve)
5 cups tart red cherries (not Bing and not Renier)
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 cup flour
2 tablespoons brown sugar
tablespoons butter
6 ounces slivered almonds

Place cherries, sugar and tapioca in a bowl, add almond extract and stir until cherries are coated. Let set for 10 to 15 minutes until the mixture forms a syrup, stirring occasionally. Make your pie crust in the meantime. Transfer cherry mixture to a crust lined pie-serving dish thing (what are those called?).

For filling, in a small bowl stir together flour and brown sugar. Add butter sliced into tablespoons and cut into flour mixture with a pastry blender until crumbly. Add slivered almonds and stir. Sprinkle topping onto pie. Cover pie with aluminum foil and bake on 375 for 25 minutes. Remove foil and cook for another 25 to 35 minutes, until the top is golden.

Pumpkin Quiche - Success!

Something fantastic happened in my kitchen on a cold winter night last week. Something new was made, something that may have never been done before (at least not the way I did it). But let me start at the beginning. I wanted to make these adorable peach hand pies. But as peaches (or almost any fruit) aren't in season, I decided to substitute pumpkin custard. I looked up a few custard recipes online and in my Better Homes cookbook and came up with something I thought might work. The key word here is thought. No, that's not true. Before I even started I told Megan that it was going to be a fiasco.

You know my history with pie crust. Well this time, it was easy. Seriously. I read Smitten Kitchen's encouraging directions on crusts, and even though there were a few moments when I thought all would be lost, it turned out fine (as you can see below).

The real problems came when I realized my custard was too runny to lie flat in the hand pie (sort of like a jelly- or custard-filled doughnut). Shit. OK, I improvise. What if I add more of the canned pumpkin? That could thicken it. Ummm, nope. I score through the pages of my Better Homes cookbook. Corn starch! I dumped a load on top of the orangey mixture. Then rethought and scooped the powder out of the soupy mixture. I even tried mixing it on high, hoping either the eggs or the cream would thicken--you know like whipped cream or my favorite French silk pie. After five minutes of straight up whipping the "pumpkin custard," I was out of ideas. Until, stroke of genius, I recalled the muffin tray I had just bought. I lined the muffin tray with my tart dough and filled the cups with my "custard." Who says you need tart trays when everything you own is non-stick? After 22 minutes in the oven, these babies slid right out.

And they were good. The crust was flaky and salty. The filling was creamy but not too sweet. To be honest, because of the ridiculous amount of eggs in this recipe my pumpkin-hand-pies were more like pumpkin quiches, a dish I'm sure some Frenchie came up with a millenia ago. And check out the kitchen: (biggest mess ever--there was custard filling on the walls, yikes)

Tart Crust: 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 16 tablespoons (2 sticks, 8 ounces) unsalted butter, cut into pieces 1/2 cup sour cream 4 teaspoons fresh lemon juice 1/2 cup ice water Apparently the key to good pie crust is keeping everything cold, so cold butter and ice water. Smitten Kitchen even recommends throwing the bowls in the fridge or freezer (just don't forget about them like I did). Combine dry ingredients in a bowl, add butter pieces and mix with pastry blender until it is coarsely blended. Put bowl in the freezer. In a separate bowl, mix sour cream, lemon juice and ice water with whisk. Remove dry mixture from freezer and pour half of liquid into it and mix with your fingers until liquid has been absorbed. Add the remainder of the liquid and continue to blend with your fingers. (Note: my mixture seemed to be very dry and lumpy. This turned out to not be a big deal once I rolled the dough out.) Cover bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for an hour or freeze for up to one month. To begin rolling dough, remove half of the cold dough from the fridge. With a lot of flour, roll the dough out onto a smooth surface. Using a four-inch biscuit cutter or a four-inch Starbucks mug with the skyline of New York on it to cut out circles from the dough (you can adjust the size). Place dough into either a tart pan or the wells of muffin trays. If you think your dough may stick to the sides, rub butter on the side of the trays to grease it up. K, now we move on to the filling. Pumpkin Filling: 5 eggs 3/4 cup cream (to lighten it up you could use half and half or milk) 1/2 cup sugar 1 15-ounce can pumpkin 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon ginger 1 teaspoon nutmeg Add the ingredients to a large mixing bowl and blend until the consistency is smooth (and a bit runny). Easy, right. Add about 2 tablespoons of the pumpkin mixture to each well of the muffin tray. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes, until tart crust is slightly browned and a toothpick pulls out clean.

"Easy" Tart Crust

You know that night, oh, two weeks ago when I botched the chocolate chip cookies almost beyond saving? Well it seems my culinary fiascos for that night weren't over. Making a quiche from scratch had been on my mind ever since reading this post. So after Eric and Mark went home, I pulled up Martha Stewart's "easy" tart crust on my computer and set to work.

Is "easy" some sort of marketing tool that Martha and her staff of editors and formally trained chefs use to lure in unsuspecting victims who start a recipe and then realize that in no way will it turn out successfully thus forcing them to glean every closer to Martha's "simple" instructions for entertaining? Or is it just me? Sure the recipe seems easy at a glance: there are four ingredients that surly everybody has on hand (water, butter, flour and salt). Below is an example of where things went wrong for me:

This is the food processor given to me by my sisters two years ago. Clearly, we have a problem. Study this photo below:

I knew as I was dumping in my 3 cups of flour and 1 cup of ice cold butter that the .00001-horsepowered propeller in this kitchen appliance was not going to cut it (pun intended). Left at a standstill (literally), I did what every self-respecting home cook would do: I hid the flour-butter combo in the back of the fridge promising to follow through later that week.

But as my food supply dwindled for the week, the bowl of flour and butter became more prominent. Every time I opened the fridge it called to me; I responded by slamming the door in its face ... up until two nights ago when the tart recipe and I faced off. The game so far is Tart-1, Lainey-0. Even my culinary improvising couldn't save me, but it is not over yet.

I think the problem arose when my food processor overheated and melted what was supposed to by very cold butter, resulting in a mixture not at all resembling dough (as evidenced in the first photo). Instead, I will buy a tart crust from the store (which is probably a good idea since I don't own a pastry pan or a food processor of the proper size to deal with this sort of thing), and I will make something entirely new from the creamy, buttery floury substance now occupying a conspicuous space in an already crowded refrigerator. I'm thinking shortbread.