Pie in the Face Wednesday - Classic Pie'd

Probably one of the best pie fights in film history. It's a Three-Stooges Pie Fight of Course!

Blueberry pie is bona fide health food

This month, thanks to the work by Yale University's Griffin Prevention Research Center, thousands of stores will be posting numbers about the nutrition information of your food choices. According to National Geographic Magazine, "the Overall Nutritional Quality Index scores foods from 1-100, based on nutrients, vitamins, sugar and salt as well as impact on blood pressure and other health concerns."

Pie makers? Blueberries scored 100. And apples? 96. Clearly, pie is health food. Get bakin'.

Pie Practice

Maybe some of you out there are thinking to yourself, “Self, I really want to go to this pie-off thing because it sounds really fun but I don’t know how to bake a pie.” Well, take heart. The pie-off embraces all skill levels. I myself have only made two pies in my life. It was about 10 years ago and they were hardly from scratch – and I am an official Pie Commissioner.

So on Sunday I dusted off my rolling pin and baked a practice pie. I’ve never made pie crust from scratch and this was my biggest source of pie anxiety. So many people have conflicting theories on what makes the best pie crust. How does a pie novice decide what to do? My fellow Pie Commissioners both swear by this person, her recipe and technique. Seemed like a good starting point to me. My mom gave me the last harvest of her backyard rhubarb. So I was good to go.

Except, I still needed to buy a pie plate. When presented with the various pie plate options at Kitchen Kaboodle, I made a snap decision and purchased a Pure by Chantal pie plate in ivory. It’s environmentally friendly, but I made my decision solely on looks. It was cute and it was mine.

Here's a little pictorial diary of my first homemade pie from scratch.

Behold, the Pie-Cozy

I announced on Twitter last week that my mom was making a pie-cozy tote to give as a prize at the Portland Pie-Off. The overall reaction was, "what is a pie-cozy?" This surprised me as my mom has been carrying pies to potlucks, picnics, and family dinners in pie-cozies for as long as I can remember. I thought every home had one, but a Google search only turned up one other pie-cozy and it is butt-ugly. My grandmother made our pie-cozies and I guess took the pattern with her to her grave. My mom is an amazing seamstress and was able to re-create the wonderfulness that is a pie-cozy. And if you are lucky, you can win this very pie-cozy at the Pie-Off:

A fairly simple item. The pie-cozy looks like this.

It opens up at the top like so.

Then insert your pie (works well for casseroles, too).

Pull the drawstring closed and carry with the handles.

Butter or Shortening? The Debate Continues

A long standing, and often passionate issue among devoted bakers (read: **crazies**), is the use of butter vs. shortening in pie crusts as well as margarine and Lard (leaf lard vs. suet? You decide). In fact, I can think of nothing that induces more pie-in-the-face online and offline mayhem than these few simple ingredients.

Take this heated online debate.

My favorite quote with such adamant use of ALL CAPS and !!!! POINTS!

"I always use LARD and ICE COLD water!. it is better than anything else I have tried. Regarding kosher baking, 'CRISCO' is certified by the OU and is better than margarine. 86 the butter and margarine for pie crust!"

Local food writer and avid baker, Nancy Rommelmann weighs in with her personal experience here.

Moi? Well, I fall into the butter only camp. It's taken me several years to perfect my recipe (including a hands-on class with Shuna Lydon herself), but Crisco just doesn't do it for me in both baking satisfaction and taste and lard is too alienating to vegetarians and my Jewish friends. However, I won't judge anyone if they want to use the solid-greasy, chemically produced trans-fat laden Crisco stuff. Seriously.

My Mom, an excellent pie baker if ever there was one, even uses these weird pre-made pie crust sticks. So weird that you can't even find them online. She's the only one I know who uses them. Her pies, including the crust, are always excellent BTW.

Greetings, and Happy Lemon Meringue Pie Day to you!

Special thanks to Philadelphia, not just the city of brotherly love, but also the birthplace of lemon meringue pie. Elizabeth Coane Goodfellow invented the tangy sweet treat. But the most recognizable element of the lemon meringue pie is the meringue, right?

It turns out the precursor to the meringue was something called Snow Eggs, a popular dessert in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. In case you'd like to try it out, here's the handy 17th Century French recipe...

Snow eggs
Boile some milk with a little flower water well allyed, then put it in more than half of one dosen of whites of eggs, and stir well all together, and sugar it. When you are ready to serve, set them on the fire again and glase them, that is, take the rest of your whites of eggs, beat them with a feather, and mix all well together; or else fry well the rest of your whites, and powre them over your other eggs. Pass over it lightly an oven lid, or the fire-shovell red hot, and serve them sured with sweet waters. You may instead of whites, put in it the yolks of your eggs proportionable, and the whites fried upon. The cream after the Mazarine way is make in the same manner, except you must put no whites of eggs on it."
---The French Cook, Francois Pierre, La Varenne, translated into English in 1653 by I.D.G., with an introdution by Philip and Mary Hyman [Southover Press:East Sussex] 2001 (p. 98-99)

Now that's an easy one, right?

Happy Lemon Meringue Pie Day to you!

Sade Sings Cherry Pie

With a sultry voice and jazzy guitar rifts in the background, this sexy songstress makes me wanna whip out the apron and get to bakin'. Cause we all know nothing satisfies like Cherry Pie!

As Sade sings,

"oooh You're as Sweet as Cherry Pie"

Enjoy!