Waitress

I finally watched Waitress last night.  When I first started this blog, I had several people mention this movie to me since pie baking is at its center.  It was pretty apprehensive about watching it, if for no other reason than I am not much of a fan of Keri Russell.  Felicity, anyone?  I doubt that I could have, and I know that I had no desire to, sit through a full episode of that ode to overwrought angst (seriously, that's all the big words that I know.  In one sentence).  But, I was wrong to hesitate on this movie.  It certainly is not the finest film I have ever watched.  How could it be?  I've seen both of the Jackass movies.  After those anything less than Citizen Kane is tripe.  But this was not bad at all.  It was pretty cute and I enjoyed the pie angle.  I might even go so far as to say that I was a little bit inspired.  I am in no position to be inventing pies from scratch, but by the end of this mad adventure, perhaps...

I know that I still owe pictures of the Shoo-Fly pie.  I'll get them posted; hopefully tomorrow.  It was surprisingly good.  If you like molasses cookies, you'd like Shoo-Fly pie.

Pie of the week - Week #19

This week's pie is going to be Crack pie.  Apparently, from my minimal research, this is sometimes also called Chess pie.  I do not know anything more than that at the moment.  Apparently, however, I am on a kick of making pies that I had never heard of before I started all of this foolishness.  Here's hoping that it turns out as well as the Shoo-fly.  More to come soon...

Pie of the week - Week #18

I have had this one on my list for quite a while simply because it sounds pretty strange and intriguing.  Then, this week on Good Eats, Alton Brown did a segment on Shoo-Fly pie.  The confluence of events leads me to making it this coming week.  I have never had it, nor had I heard of it prior to some general pie research a few months ago.  It is a molasses pie created(?) and  traditionally made by the Pennsylvania Dutch.  We shall see how I do with it.

Better... - Week #18

This week, I begged my wife to pick a pie flavor for me, since I have done miserably in both selection and execution for several weeks in a row.  She chose (based on I have no idea what) Lemon-Raspberry.  As it turns out, there are many, many recipes available, unlike the mango pies of the world.

The most interesting thing about this pie is that is made on a shortbread crust.  I did not even know what that was, so I went out and bought a box of Lorna Doones, assuming it was a crumb crust.  But, no.  Instead, it is a butter cookie that you smash into a pie plate.  I ended up using a user's variation on this recipe.  Overall it turned out okay, tasted fine, but the corners were too thick and were hard to get a fork through.

Here's a picture of the baked crust.

The filling was more institutional that most.   The lemon flavor was largely from the boxed pudding (although, along with the prescribed lemon zest, I squeezed half a lemon in).  In most of my prior pies, I have tried to use raw ingredients when I could.  This one was a little bit more "out-of-a-box."  Even still, I liked some things about the overall recipe a lot, including that it had whole raspberries on both the bottom (along with some raspberry jame) and the top of the pie.  The picture on the recipe's site made that look really nice.  My effort, however... not so much.

Up until this point, things seemed just fine.

But, by the time we got to the eating stage, the raspberries -- and much of the jam -- had floated toward the outer edge.  I think the taste was still the same, but the presentation suffered.  Paula Deen tells me that you eat first with your eyes, so I'll have to work on that!

It definitely looked okay as a whole pie, but suffered when cut.

All in all, I liked it.  It is a definite middle-of-the-pack kind of pie.  A solid improvement over the last two weeks.

Upgraded blog stuff you may or may not notice.

• The slideshow in the upper right now includes captions (thanks for the tip, jj)
  
• The rankings finally have numbers assigned to them.  I did not ever find a widget, but instead actually thought about it for five minutes and realized how to do it.  Not my strong suit, this thinking.
  

Next week's pie forthcoming...

Two in a row - Cinnamon Pie - Week #17

Do you want to know what isn't fun? I am sure you can think of tons of things, but I can tell you this. Making inedible pies that ended up being consumed by the garbage disposal for the the past two weeks makes my short list. I actually think that this week's debacle might have been worse than last week.  I have stated here, at least once, that pie makes people happy.  I can attest, without reservation, that bad pie can make someone absolutely miserable.  In particular, making and then eating horrendous pie has made me miserable.  In the interest of attempting to learn from my mistakes, I claim to have learned (or confirmed) several important things over the last few weeks:

1. I am not spontaneous.  I am a planner -- not necessarily a good planner, but a planner nonetheless.  When I don't plan and I do things on the spur of the moment (for example, selecting -- or making -- a pie) they seldom turn out well
   
2. If you are going to make a good pie, you have to pick a good recipe.
   
3. I think I am officially in The Dip - anyone who has read it...  time to make a decision.
   

Suffice it to say, I have failed on several levels the past two weeks.  If I am to continue with this exercise, I am going to have to learn something from these failures.  If I am to commence with traveling through the valley that I am currently in, I have to hope to come out the other side better in some tangible way for the effort.  More and more, my hope for this experience has less to do with pie making and more to do with this, the blogging/writing experience.  

So, despite the fact that I seldom seem to do the writing on time, and I seldom manage to write more than the bare minimum, I am going to try to change that going forward.  As of now, I am going to continue making pies, but how and when I write in this blog will likely change.  I probably won't be writing comprehensive pie baking reports most weeks.  I will continue to publicly select a flavor, and I will comment on some specifics.  I just don't plan to follow the heretofore subscribed to formula.  We shall see how that turns out.  But, it is a slightly new direction and I am anxious to see how it goes.

All right.  Enough with the whining already.  Maybe that can be the new poll question.  

Do you prefer...

• Blubbering, whiny rants about how hard it is to make a pie every week
  
• Conventional pie blogging
  
• Blogs written by people who think there is conventional pie blogging
  
• None of the above.  Write about how you screwed up this week already!
  

Having written all of that...  After two pretty mediocre weeks, I needed to vent, I suppose.  In a way, I suppose that is the beauty of the blog.  You can write whatever you want.  It is almost the very definition.  With great power, however, great responsibility...  You can not get it back.  Once it is published, it is out there to be read and you can't hit the delete key, retrieve it, or ask everyone to just ignore it.  With RSS aggregators being as prevalent as they are, you can't even hope that an erroneous blog entry can be deleted, never to be seen again.  Odds are, it has already been picked up by the Google Reader's and Bloglines of the 'net.  They have it, and it's irretrievable.

So, there it is.  My first blog that has little or nearly nothing to do with pie.  I have been wondering if I would be the only one ever to read it.  Apparently not, because I'm posting it in a minute.  I figure that if I had the courage/stupidity to make, and post about some of the awful pies of the past four months, why not go the next step and expose myself wallowing in depression at the current state of my experiment.

This is, however still called 52pies, so have a look at what a truly shitty pie looks like...

This recipe wasn't too awful, but no matter what it wouldn't have been a a good pie.  Underbaked, and executed like a disinterested bystander, which I was in many ways.

More of the weird crust bubbling behavior.

No separate post this week about flavor.  I am planning on making a lemon/raspberry pie this week.  I do not know every detail of what that will mean, but I will soon.

Yuck! - Week 16

Awful, horrible, disgusting.  Pick a synonym.  Any synonym.  As the culmination of a wretched week of coughing, aching, stuff-head, fever, etc. this pie did nothing to lift my mood.  I was far behind the usual pie baking schedule, and for the first time since I started several months ago was just looking to "go through the motions" this week.  Unfortunately, that combination led to me selecting a mediocre (or worse) recipe and then proceeding to execute it poorly.  

I'll share some pictures and commentary below, but believe me, I don't want to.

I picked this recipe from a random blog because it looked reasonably straightforward and it called for canned mango pulp.  In general, I have been trying very hard to use fresh ingredients when available, but as I mentioned earlier, there was a strong emphasis this week on just completing the pie.  I thought that using the canned pulp would help.  It did, and I seriously doubt that using fresh would have made any difference at all.  I'm convinced that this is just not a good recipe for mango pie.  Here is the pulp that I used (thanks, U & P. B.).  I have no real idea if it is a good or bad choice, but I am certain that it was the least of my problems.

This pie used a graham cracker crust.  I thought that it was strange that the recipe did not call for blind baking.  I was at least a little bit concerned that this would result in a soggy, textureless crust.  Apparently I am getting a better feel for this, because that is exactly what the end result was.  A slimy, tasteless grotesque excuse for a pie crust.  If you look closely at the picture on the blog where I got the recipe you can even see that it looks like it has sopped up half of the filling and is discolored.  A mess.  

The filling was as straightforward as it appeared in the recipe.  The only variation was that I had to bake it for significantly longer than suggested (10-15 minutes extra) to get it to set up.  Based on the ingredients I can not say that I am surprised, but this pie was closest in texture to the egg custard pie, which you may remember I found revolting.  Perhaps most disappointingly, while it smelled pretty good, and like mango, it didn't really taste like anything at all.  It was just a losing proposition all the way around.

I certainly cannot place all of the blame on the recipe, however.  I added to the misery by leaving some loose graham cracker crumbs in the crust before adding the filling.  Of course, when I poured in the filling, those crumbs floated to the top (duh!) and resulted in some really strange graham cracker crumb/mango pulp formations.  Not attractive!  Here is an overhead view.

And a slice.

I keep telling myself that they can't all turn out.  This week was certainly proof of that.  On to bigger and better things -- I hope.  I do not even know what a cinnamon pie might be like, but I sincerely hope that it is better than this week's disaster.

Pie of the week - Week #16

I am much, much farther behind this week than I have ever been in the past fifteen weeks.  I was sick this weekend, and then went to bed the past two nights at 7:00pm.  Thus, no pie baking.  I finally got around to it tonight, so I'll try to blog about the results tomorrow.

Despite my tardiness in finishing this week's pie, I am still on the hook to choose next week's.  So, without further ado...

I am going to try a cinnamon pie next week.

Lesser Babka?  I think not!