Sunday, March 29, 2009

Pie Baking While Canoe Camping


Six of us went camping in three canoes over spring break, on the Colorado (Texas) River, East of Austin, toward Bastrop. Over the course of the weekend of March 20, we had fried catfish, bread pudding, chicken chili, apple pie, and breakfast one day was monkey bread, and eggs the other another. My sister cooked most of it. My brother-in-law worked on the coals for the dutch oven. Everyone else pitched in. But here is our apple pie, and no recipe is needed.
I had expert help prepping apples. We used about six small fuji apples.



I used a store bought pie pastry. Nobody would make pastry out on the river. I like the type that come in a roll. I brought all of the streusel ingredients in a bag, and mixed them on site. I used a typical streusel topping recipe, and added pecans. I have used almonds before, too. I forgot sugar for the apples, so I used some of the streusel topping. I had made extra, and it came in handy.



The pie, ready for the dutch oven




Above is how it looked going in to the dutch oven. Pretty good, I think. We had to scrape some burn off, so it was very lucky to have so much streusel topping. We ended up with just the right amount.


Here is the finished pie in the dutch oven. It was a nice reward after a long day of laying around outside. Below, see the picture of the tired camper eating the pie. He can barely hold his head up.




And we had a great fire on that cool night.




This is how the river looks early in the morning.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Lime Orange Chess Pie



The other day, my son wanted to make a pie and I suggested a chess pie, because I knew we wouldn’t have to go to the store. We made a few substitutions. We tried lime juice, and orange zest. It worked out very well. The orange zest smells really wonderful. We have made it again since, and the picture shown is of one I made yesterday, and it's gone now. We used 1 ½ cup sugar, ¼ cup soy milk, ¼ cup cream, ½ stick salted butter, 2 tablespoons corn meal, 2 whole eggs, 3 egg whites, 4 tablespoons lime juice, zest of one orange, ½ teaspoon vanilla, in a partially pre-baked crust, bake at 350 45 to 50 minutes. The recipe owes much to Ken Haedrich’s Lemon Chess Pie on page 367 of Pie 200 Tried and True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie. And by the way, the molas potholder was a gift from a friend who went home to Panama for a visit.




I have recently started looking again at this vintage cookbook,above, Farm Journal Complete Pie Cookbook. It has some strange recipes that are off-beat such as oatmeal pie, raisin orange, apple grapefruit, strawberry cantaloupe pie, and so forth. They overdo the raisins. But you get an opportunity to read about unusual ingredients. I would like to try the fried pies. This cookbook is going for $30 on amazon.com but I wouldn't sell. It's too funky.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Chocolate Pie with Cinnamon Meringue


My son and I baked this Chocolate Pie with cinnamon meringue the other day. The recipe is from Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie by Ken Haedrich. Here is a photo without any food styling. We had a great time and the pie was good. "Pie" is my favorite cookbook at the moment. Every recipe from that book has turned out well, and none are very difficult. And the book is very funny.
My pecan pie is healthier than the regular one, and goes like this: 4 egg whites, 1 whole egg, 1 cup sugar, 2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil, 1 tsp vanilla,1 Tbsp Kahlua, 1 C real maple syrup, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 and 1/4 C pecans, and your favorite uncooked 9 inch pie crust, homemade or not. Bake 15 minutes at 400'F, then 40 minutes at 350 'F. Let me know how you like it. I will not post a phote here because it's impossible to cut it neatly. Next time, a chess pie modification.

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