How To Be Objective When Your Taste Buds are Screaming Ewww

During Week 17 I hit upon another “first” in my pie-making.  Prior to this week I had never tasted or baked a Pecan Pie, of any sort.  Growing up I tended to avoid all things nut, whether in the form of pie or cookies, or just for plain for snacking.  I had an opportunity to try a Pecan Pie nearly every Thanksgiving of my childhood, but alas I avoided it until now, near the end of my 32^nd year. 

With this confession at hand, readers, I must also admit that I know not what a good Pecan Pie should taste like or what its texture should feel like, so I had no idea what I was getting myself into by making a Sugar Free Pecan Pie over a traditional Pecan Pie. 

I was set on making a pie for my Father In-Law, who does not eat sugar, and also wanted to make a sugar free pie that is not available at Marie Callendar’s.  The cookbooks I have in the house do not have recipes for sugar free pies, so I began to scour the internet for recipe options.  The recipe I found for Sugar Free Pecan Pie comes from Tablespoon.com.

For the crust I used a parbaked All-Butter Crust.

The filling was incredibly fast.  I mixed all the ingredients in a bowl, poured them in my crust, and baked for 50 minutes.  Should it have been this easy to make?  Are Pecan Pies this easy??  This pie was making a great first impression on me, even if it was to be short-lived. 

Fast filling

Oven-ready

Now when I took this Sugar Free Pecan Pie to my In-Laws’ house, I received nothing but praise from my Father In-Law.  My Mother In-Law also found it to be quite good.  My husband and I, on the other hand found the pie rather strange.  Since neither of us had experienced Pecan Pie before I feel a little wrong giving this pie completely bad marks just because of my uncertainty of the pie.  Here are my observations:

1.  

     The pie was squishy, like a cross between a gelatin and a pudding.  I was expecting a filling that was more solid and firm.

2.       The pecans had become chewy, even those that were sticking out of the top of the pie.  I was expecting them to be a little crispier—at least those on the surface of the pie.

3.       The pie was just sugary sweet tasting.  I was expecting more of the earthiness of the nuts to rise above the syrupy sweet flavor.

4.       The crust was awesome.

So whether my In-Laws were right on with their praise and I could not comprehend the true meaning of Pecan Pie, or whether my In-Laws were over generous with their praise and my husband and I were correct in our assessment of this pie, I may never know.  Now it is your turn.  If you have made a Pecan Pie before, try out this recipe for Sugar Free Pecan Pie and let me know your thoughts!

    

Now I Understand Why

Lemon Blueberry Pie was the short order for Week 16.  Blueberries were on sale for a spectacular price, so another pie featuring the delightful berry seemed an easy choice.  The recipe comes from the Cutie Pies cookbook.

For the crust I chose to follow the recipe for All-Butter Crust from the Cutie Pies cookbook as I am becoming increasingly fond of this simple to make and simply delicious crust.  For the last month or so I have been using this crust and it is with reserve, and delicacy, that I am venturing to say that it may be my favorite crust yet.  Grandma’s Oil Crust has, and will always remain, one of my favorite crust recipes, but I believe it may have finally met its match.  Hopefully, if Grandma reads this blog entry, she will forgive me this betrayal and accept a homemade pie of her choice the next time we are together as payoff for such a breach in loyalty....

The filling for this pie was very simple, and the whole pie was prepared, baked and cooling by the time I was on my way to church this particular Sunday morning. 

The recipe leaves the option to leave the pie open-faced or put a crumb topping on.  I opted for the crumb topping.  The only other time I have had a blueberry pie it did not have the addition of lemon and was prepared with a double-crust.  The flavor of that first pie decent, but I felt it was missing something.  So with this pie I had my hopes on brightening the flavor with the lemon and the sweet crumb topping. 

Our visiting friends were not disappointed.  This Lemon Blueberry Pie was delicious.  The addition of lemon perked up the pie and made my taste buds pop.  The crumb topping further enhanced the pie by providing a melt-in-your-mouth finish.

Not many leftovers this week!

To all of my friends who have always loved Blueberry Pies… now I understand why.

BanBerPudPie

Our friend Erin’s birthday happened to fall on Week 15, so I let Erin’s preference guide the pie for this week.  I had already made her all-time favorite pie, Banana Cream Pie, during Week 3 and since part of my pie adventure is to not repeat pies, I started flipping through my cookbooks to find a pie with banana in it that might serve as a suitable replacement.  I came up with two that I was very interested in trying and Erin opted for the Banana Blueberry Pudding Pie.

Erin's birthday pie

The recipe for Banana Blueberry Pudding Pie comes from the Cutie Pies cookbook, a resource for pies that I love more and more.

How it all begins

The crust on this pie was unique.  Rather than a pastry crust or some form of crushed cookie with melted butter, this recipe called for crumbled vanilla wafers left unmarred by other ingredients or baking.  Just crumbled vanilla wafers.  This was topped with sliced bananas and blueberries that had been dipped in fresh lemon juice.  So far putting this pie together was very simple, and not having to use the oven would make this a perfect pie to make during the hot summer when turning the oven on means raising the temperature of your home from miserable to standing at the fiery gates of Hades.

First vanilla wafers (just vanilla wafers)

Then come the bananas

Add some blueberries and we're almost done

On top of the vanilla wafers and fruit, I mixed together a filling of cream cheese, condensed milk, vanilla pudding, and whipped cream.  Chilled it in the refrigerator for a few hours and voila!  A simple pie, perfect for those hot summer nights.  But was it good?

Whipping up some memorable filling

The simple vanilla wafer “crust” was a pleasant complement to the pudding and fruit.  Another aspect of this pie that made an impression on me was the subtle tanginess achieved by the lemon dipped bananas and blueberries.  It may have been intended to keep the bananas from browning too quickly, but the effect on my taste buds was delightful.  With each bite of this pie, I felt like a kid again, eating pie at Grandma’s dining room table.  Banana Blueberry Pudding Pie is yet another pie I will be putting in my growing list of pies I will be making again in the future. 

View of the layers

Now, I’m sure all of you are dying to know if Erin enjoyed her birthday pie and I am pleased to announce that she loved it and took a slice home for later.  The rest of my family enjoyed the pie immensely; in fact it was given a nickname: BanBerPud Pie. 

Bountiful Berry Black-Bottom Pie

Four layers of heavenly goodness: buttery pastry crust, filled with a layer of chocolate, topped with four kinds of berries, and finished off with crumb topping.  The Bountiful Berry Black-Bottom Pie I made for Week 14 was sensational.  The recipe comes from Dani Cone’s Cutie Pies cookbook. 

For the crust I opted to stick with the All-Butter Crust recipe used in the Cutie Pies cookbook.  It is a tasty crust, but seems to lack stability when I fold and crimp the edges.  It may be stable before I place it in the oven, but by the end of baking one side has inevitably slumped into the pie pan or flopped over the edge of the pie pan.  As I work through this crust recipe in the future, I will have to see if I can tweak the recipe a bit to make the edge of the crust more durable.   

The filling was put together very quickly, scattering chocolate chips on the bottom of the crust topping with a layer of sweetened and spiced berries.  The pie could be left open or finished with a crumb topping, but who can resist a crumb topping?  “Not I,” said the avid pie-baker. 

   

The chocolatey base

Four kinds of berries

Sweetening up the deal

Feeling crumby, anyone?

Bountiful Berry Black-Bottom Pie oven-ready!

Our Bountiful Berry Black-Bottom Pie was the finale to an already grand meal with our friend Eric.  It is hard to believe that so many good things could come together so perfectly for a small dinner party, but this was one meal that hit the spot from the first bite into our French dip sandwiches to our last taste of pie licked off our forks.  Perfection.   

At the top of my list of favorites...

I am often asked if I have a top list of pies from my year-long adventure.  Usually my response is indefinite with a pie or two listed between a lot of hemming and hawing because, let’s be honest here, I have made a lot of very tasty pies so far.  However, if I were asked today, Bountiful Berry Black-Bottom Pie is most certainly at the top of that list.  Enough said?

                                                                                                                                             

Mouth-Watering Mid-Winter Pot Pie

Since it is mid-winter, I felt that the pie for Week 13 might be most suited as a savory pie.  It was time to try a pot pie and the New Best Recipe Cookbook had just the one to try: Chicken Pot Pie with Bacon and Corn.  My mouth was watering just reading the title. 

This recipe gave the option of using a savory pie dough topping or fluffy buttermilk biscuit topping.  Well, when I am given the choice between a traditional crust for a pot pie or homemade fluffy, buttery biscuit topping… I can tell you that I will always choose buttermilk biscuits!

Buttermilk biscuits begin with butter...

Rather than a traditional pot pie with carrots and peas, I opted for a recipe with bacon and corn, which turned out to be an excellent decision. 

Pot pie vegetables, with the exception of the corn to come later

Bacon, perhaps the most important ingredient!

Chicken simmering

Having never made a pot pie before, the process seemed a bit lengthy for a midweek dinner for the family, although the end result was incredible.  The recipe does offer some options for making this more manageable, allowing one to make both the biscuits and the filling in advance, so it certainly could be doable if one uses the advanced preparation options.   

Also as a family with young children, an 8 x 13 –inch pan was going to be more than we could eat, so I used two 8 x 8-inch pans for the recipe and froze one for a dinner later on.  This worked well, and made the second meal incredibly fast and easy. 

One Chicken Pot Pie ready to be baked

The consensus from my family was unanimous: AMAZING!  The bacon and corn were a nice spin from a traditional pot pie and a huge hit with my 3 ½ year-old son.  The biscuits were to die for.  Again, this Chicken Pot Pie with Bacon and Corn recipe was AMAZING and my family will be enjoying this one time and time again for years to come.

Final product before it was devoured

Gooey Brownie in a Flaky Pastry Crust... Um, Sure, I Can Eat That...

If you have ever wondered what a brownie wrapped in a pie shell was like, make a Tarheel Pie.  This recipe was presented to me by my husband’s Aunt Monica.  Two Christmases ago, she baked this pie and I did not get to try it because the fruit side of me won over the chocolate side.  Instead of trying the Tarheel Pie, I opted for Aunt Monica’s Apple Pie (absolutely divine!).  Since that day, however, I have thought about the pie I had missed.  So during Week 12, I decided to discover for myself the joy of a Tarheel Pie.

For the crust, I used Grandma’s oil crust.  I had read the directions for the pie earlier in the week and since they seemed simple enough, I thought I would not over-complicate it by making a crust that would require refrigeration or freezing.  On top of that, I had run a half-marathon the day before I made the pie and any amount of work was sounding like too much work.  

Chocolate goodness coming up! 

The crust was ready and in the pie pan in about five minutes and the filling took about the same amount of time.  Easy!  My only complaint with this pie was that I probably over-baked it.  The recipe calls for 30-40 minutes of bake time and I was wanting my crust to brown a little more, so I left it in for the full 40 minutes.  The pie was still very tasty, but not as gooey as it could have been had I heeded the warning to not over-bake it! 

Chocolate and melted butter... a great way to start!

Mixing the rest of the ingredients

Ready to bake

Tar Heel Pie

That said, if you need a chocolaty dessert with little prep time, this pie may just fit the bill.  In fact, I pretty well finished this pie on my own… yikes….  Be warned!

Potluck Pie

During the fifth Sunday of December, my church was having a day of Worship Through Action, in which we would put together crisis care kits to be sent all over the nation/globe during major catastrophes (i.e. hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc.) , followed by a time of potluck fellowship.  My go-to on these pie adventures has been dessert pies, so I thought I would break my pattern and bring a brunch-type pie: Three Cheese and Onion Pie. 

The recipe I selected comes from a new cookbook I received for Christmas entitled, Cutie Pies.  The author of this cookbook is the owner of a pie shop, High 5 Pie, and a couple of coffeehouses, Fuel Coffee, in the greater Seattle area.  One of the interesting things about this particular pie cookbook is the variety of options that are held within.  Each recipe can be made into a variety of forms—Cutie Pies made in standard muffin pans, Petit-5s made in mini muffin pans, Pie Jars made in small jam-type jars, Flipsides formed like a pocket, Piepops made on a stick, and Full-Sized Pies made in a traditional 9-inch pie pan. 

With the new cookbook, came a new recipe for an all-butter crust, so I gave this a try.  This first time around I made the crust by hand, not my food processor, and found that I may not have mixed it thoroughly enough as well as let it get too warm because it was very sticky when I rolled it out.  The next time I will definitely try my food processor for the mixing and not letting the dough sit out for more than ten minutes before I get rolling.

The filling was very simple and I had two Three Cheese and Onion Pies ready to bake in no time at all. 

Final product?  Apart from baking the pie for an additional 10-15 minutes longer than the recipe indicated, delicious.  This was a great variation from my usual dessert pie and a success at the church potluck.  As long as you can handle a strong onion flavor, this is your pie.  

Perfect for a brunch