Once a year dinner

This is a James Peterson recipe. Scrape out the pumpkin seeds, layer in bread and Gruyere cheese, a few thyme leaves, then pour a broth and cream mixture in and bake for 2 hours. It comes out of the oven looking like the above. Then you scoop it all out and serve it as is, sort of a yummy, porridge-y mush, or you wait a day because by the time it has baked for 2 hours it is past 8PM and time for bed. The next day you put it in a casserole, sprinkle a little more Gruyere on top and bake it.



I only make it once a year, but it is goo-ood.

Then I was buying fabric, and chatting with the designer who was selling the fabric and talk went to pumpkins, the way it does, and she just made a french stuffed pumpkin. It is stuffed with sausage and vegetables and served in wedges. I asked her where she got the recipe and she said, "a french cookbook."

I LIKE PIE

Elise,
The sub title for this post is Why don't you live here??
There is a pie contest the last Saturday in October. Since I wasn't able to do my bike race and since I can't even ride a bike for another week, there was a vacuum and you know how nature feels about that. I've set my sights on the pie contest and I've started to train. Really, that just means I make a lot of pies.
From my experience in the chiffon cake contest, I've learned that looks matter. If your entry isn't attractive, you will not win, no matter how ambrosial and otherworldly (in a good) it is. Given that, and the fact that I can't make an attractive roll-out pie crust--mine are always misshapen, sagging off one side of the pan while retreating from the other, uneven, irregular and goiterish--I have to make a pie that can take a cookie crust or at least a press-in-the-pan (PITP) crust.
I started with a brown butter butterscotch pie. It very nearly made me give it all up as a misbegotten whim. The recipe called for a lot of corn starch and the resulting custard was the consistency of wallpaper paste that had been left too long with its lid askew. But the flavor was amazing, so I rallied and persevered.


Note the sad crust.

I decided to see if I could work a little more on the coconut cream pie, the project we started 3 years ago when you visited me after I had back surgery, coconut having magic healing properties. The last time I made the version we had settled on, I thought it lacked a distinct coconut flavor. I thought I could try reducing the coconut milk, the way we do for the coconut birthday cake, and then using that as a base for the custard. Sounds like a good idea. There's a reason no one else has come up with it. The custard was not only way too thick, the oil separated as I heated the custard and it was like a large ball of slimy wet leather rolling around in some off colored grease. Also, the 2 cups of coconut was too much and only added to the hopeless thickness of it all. I chilled the results and then scraped off the hardened fat, spread it in the crust (which had its own issues*) and then topped it with whipped cream. I had a piece and threw the rest away. Not even worth eating. Not even when the only other dessert was a handful of raisins and some old chocolate that was 82% and had bloomed.
* I had made a PITP crust and added some coconut to the dough. When I prebaked the crust, the coconut overcooked and imparted a bitter, scorched flavor. This would have been more disappointing, except next to the disgustingness of the filling, it was a mild flaw.
I thought about the pudding that I like so much and it only has eggs to thicken it. I read recipes for pastry cream, and they all use flour. I read recipes for custard pie and they all use corn starch. I tried to read recipes for cream pie and all that comes up on a Google search are x-rated sites. Who knew?
I tried a recipe that uses a very small amount of cake flour, (flour and cornstarch, why didn't I think of that?). I reduced a can of Lite coconut milk from 14 oz to about a cup and then I used another cup of half and half. I used 4 egg yolks and one egg. I added one cup of coconut. There is some sugar in there too. It was creamy and light with a distinct, but not pronounced, coconut flavor. The PITP crust was fine. Next time I'm going to leave out the whole egg and use only yolks. And maybe you can walk me through a roll-out crust. We'll see if I can make something that doesn't look like it grew out of a tree.



Then, because I have a lot of time on my hands, (is this what people who don't bike do with their week-ends?) I made a lemon cream pie.



This was entirely my invention. Start with a PITP crust. Make a lemon curd, I used Martha Stewart's recipe. Make Bell's lemon souffle. Take 1 cup of heavy cream and boil it with a TB of lemon zest and let it cool overnight. Pour the curd in the prebaked crust, top with the lemon souffle and let that set up overnight. Then whip your lemon cream and spread that on top.
Pretty good. I made 1/3 of a recipe for the lemon souffle. It calls for 3 eggs, so halving it was beyond the abilities of my small brain and clumsy fingers. Next time I'll make 2/3 of the recipe and just top it with plain sweetened whipped cream. The lemon cream is too close in flavor and color to the souffle and I wanted 3 distinct layers. But it is worth working with.



Back to the contest. I am concerned that I'll get points off if my entry isn't "seasonal." The announcement doesn't specify seasonal, but judges are only human (very often blind humans with the taste buds of a radish) and at a fall festival they might just feel more partial to a fall pie. I'm going to try again with the butterscotch, at least it is a fall color.

Paella

Dear Marg,


Last Friday we went to Bob and Erin's for dinner. As often happens at their house, the guest list grew quickly. First, her parents stopped by so her Dad could fix the outdoor chairs he made years ago, and then (as often happens when dinner time gets near) their children started dropping by. We had dinner with 3 generations of Erin's family and it was great.

Erin has been perfecting Paella on an outdoor fire for almost a year now, and I think she's got it wired. She started by browning chicken legs in olive oil, and then added sausage and chopped onions. Sorry no pictures of that part. Then come the handfuls of rice. I forgot to ask if it's a special rice or not.

Pouring in warm chicken broth with saffron and smoky paprika in it

Stirring and turning the legs.

Simmer, simmer, simmer....

Clams, cherry tomatoes, and squid (or was it octopus?)

The cook

The dinner

It was delicious!! Smoky and savory and full of robust flavor. You would have loved it. (you could eat around the clams).

Love, Elise

What to cook after 2 days and 170 miles

Elise,
I rode my bike for two hard back-to-back days as a "race rehearsal" for the Everest Challenge. Two days, 170 miles and nearly 20,000 climbing feet. Bliss. The second day included riding through the outskirts of Hurricane Irene; wind, mist, rain, bright orange leaves flattened against shiny wet pavement, hardly a soul around. Day of a lifetime, I was delirious.
The next day, my close friend Christiana, and her mother were coming for dinner. I was exhausted. Feeding the dogs sent me back to bed. But I was eager to see them so I had to come up with a meal. I wanted to make several things, all simple and delicious, plentiful and easy. You suggested hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad and ice cream. That sounded like a lot of work, so we decided to substitute potato chips for the potato salad, skip the hamburgers and boil the hot dogs. Simple, easy and plentiful were covered. Delicious? Not so much.
I made the corn and tomato pie. Yum! I made a spinach and bacon salad. Had better. I made a caramel cake. Yuck!
In an effort to keep the focus on the negative, let's discuss the caramel cake. First of all, it was a misnomer because the topping was butterscotch sauce, not caramel. Then it was plain and too dry and crumbly and blandly sweet. I'm growing concerned that I overbake things. I've had a few bad experiences with cakes that weren't cooked through, and I think it has sent me too far in the other direction. When I think about how the cake could be improved, I imagine a bowl of ice cream with butterscotch sauce. There, that's an improvement.

The Value of Pie

I needed some way to lure Margaret out for a visit, and knowing her fondness for long distance bike riding and her genuine desire to share this "pleasure" with others, I agreed to do a fundraising ride. At first I set the goal of 70 miles and diligently trained for that for 3 weeks. After 3 weeks it became apparent that neither I, my butt, nor my life where suited for anything near that length so I settled on a 30 mile goal. I waited until she'd bought her plane ticket to break the news.

We were raising money for the cancer research at the Livestrong Foundation and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and in order to truly motivate ourselves (and our supporters) we named the team, The Value of Pie. With that development, Amos joined the team. In exchange for a blueberry pie, my friend Ross designed a logo for us.

The ride was fun, the weather was beautiful and we raised $1,500! Thank you to everyone who supported us and these 2 great causes.

After all that there had to be pie, right?

Thanks for coming out, Margaret!

At last! Margaret's fitness secret unveiled!

How chocolate can help your workout

Dinner in 30 minutes or Fewer

Dear Elise,
Remember those Penzey's spices I bought when we went to the Penzey's Spice Shop as part of our Foodie Tour of Seattle? Well, I used some tonight. (Not the Cake Spice that you disparaged as containing all spices that you already owned so why would you need the mix?) I had a Sweet Curry Powder and a Vindaloo Curry Powder and I wanted to sample and compare.
And it was 7 by the time I had walked and fed the dogs. I make a chicken curry with tomatoes (I substitute V8 juice for the tomatoes). It is really a curry chicken salad but very often I leave out the yogurt and eat it hot. The Sweet Curry Powder went into that one.
Then I make a curried spiced chick pea dish, a maje fave. The recipe calls for individual spices, (right up your ally) and I used the Vindaloo blend for that.
Both were good, but the Sweet one was not as complex and nuanced as the Vindaloo. And the Vindaloo was much hotter.
I also used coconut oil for both. I have read, or maybe just heard, (maybe true, but perhaps not) that coconut oil is the new best thing, very healthy and so forth. It was good. Better with the chick peas, lost in the chicken curry. (I want to try it in brownies.)
Everything was better with the chick peas. Maybe I just prefer chick peas. And since I didn't have to open, measure out, close and put away 6 different spice bottles, everything was ready before 7:30. Suddenly Dinner!
For dessert? Dark Chocolate, as we read in the paper today (so it must be true), mice who consumed dark chocolate for two weeks performed 50% better on an endurance test than mice who didn't get any chocolate. Preaching to the cocaophiles maybe, but I'm sold.
Love, spice blends and dark chocolate, Margaret