The First Pie of Spring

This feels like the longest winter in history. It’s just never-ending.  I’ve been so busy since I last posted in November that most of this never-ending winter has seemed to pass by quickly, but it still feels as if it should be over by now. 

I spent part of the winter watching old episodes of Pushing Daisies each evening, a TV show that came on a few years ago about a piemaker named Ned who has the magical ability to bring dead people, animals, and plants back to life, with the catch being that he can’t touch them again or he will kill them forever. On the show, they always showed images of huge mouth-watering pies displayed in Ned’s pie shop, the Pie Hole, in the background. My favourite part of the show was when Ned’s brought-back-to-life girlfriend, Chuck (a.k.a. Charlotte) would bake pies with gruyère cheese baked into the crust and homeopathic liquid antidepressants dropped into the filling for her two mourning, cheese-loving aunts, who didn't know that she had returned from the dead. Chuck would make the pies and then have them secretly delivered to her aunts to cheer them up.

I don’t know that this winter has been bad enough to start baking antidepressants into my desserts (although putting cheese in the crust is something I definitely have to try), but in my attempt to will spring into existence, I decided to make the first pie of spring today.

It’s apple, peach and blueberry. I made half of my favourite Perfect Pie Crust recipe and I used the leftover pie dough to cut out flower and leaf shapes. I baked these on a separate baking sheet and then placed them on top of the pie once I took it out of the oven to cool.

This pie reminded me of some pies that I made in December: a Christmas chicken and broccoli pie and some starry lemon mini tarts.

For the Christmas chicken pie, I cut out small Christmas shapes (snowmen, reindeer, and stars) and baked them separately for a few minutes on a baking sheet, and then added them to the top of the pie once it came out of the oven, just like I did with the spring pie. The pie filling was made of chicken, broccoli, mushrooms, onions, garlic, milk and cheese, with flour to thicken, that was cooked ahead of time before being added to the crust.

I also made starry lemon mini tarts.

I made my own lemon curd for the tarts. These tarts were made to look like traditional British Christmas mince pies with the star on top, which I’ve never made and never tasted. There’s something about the word “mince” that turns me off. I’ve never seen mincement in the stores and I don’t know if I want to make it myself. I think I’d like to try these little tarts with a chocolate filling. Maybe Nutella with chopped, toasted hazelnuts mixed in.  Hazelnuts are pretty Christmassy.

Looking at these pictures of my Christmas pies reminds me that I still have a bunch of photos of Christmas food from last year that I haven’t had a chance to share. When I get time, I will post them. Hopefully before next Christmas.

And in case you are still digging out from this long, miserable winter and don't have access to a pie with cheese and antidepressants baked into it, here’s something that’s sure to help brighten up your day: a Mini Maestro from Kyrgyzstan who takes her conducting very seriously and very cutely.

Nuts, Nuts, Nuts

I love unexpected snow days! I love snow mornings, too, even if this snow morning was capped on both ends by frustration. I got to stay home and relax most of the morning due to the weather, even though I had already driven in to work first thing this morning, taken off my coat and boots, and had started opening emails in my office when I got the call saying that the office was going to be closed for the rest of the morning due to the inclement weather, which resulted in me having to drive all the way back home again on the treacherous snow-covered roads, and then drive back to work again only a few hours later on still-treacherous roads when the office reopened. But that’s winter.

And according to some optimistic groundhogs, this winter might end early. I can’t believe it’s Groundhog Day already. Christmas seems like only a distant memory or a dream, something that never really happened. Seriously, though, where did January go? I’ve been so busy that I didn’t even notice it passing. Despite the occasional messy, blustery day, winter has been good so far, and I’ve been making and baking a lot of nutty things the past few weeks.

Like mixed nut butter. I didn’t follow a recipe to make nut butter but there are plenty online. I didn’t blanch the nuts to remove the skins beforehand, however, which is what most recipes seem to recommend. I wanted to keep the fibre in there. Plus, I was too lazy to fuss around with blanching. I used brazil nuts, pecans, and walnuts, all toasted in the oven, about 2.25 cups total, and then buzzed them in the food processor until they resembled a course, grainy flour, making sure to stop before they turned into nut butter. I also added some ground almond meal that I had bought at Bulk Barn.

I didn’t use all of the ground nuts that you see above, just a fraction. I then added a small amount of salt and icing sugar to taste to the ground nut mixture in the food processor and let it all whiz together until it turned creamy and smooth, scraping down the sides with a spatula occasionally. And here's what I got:

The nut butter was so good. I only made a small batch, enough to equal about 1 cup, because this sort of thing probably goes bad quickly.

The rest of the ground nuts were used to make cookies.

I decided to pipe the batter onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet using a Wilton disposable plastic piping bag because it was kind of gloopy. I added raisins to some cookies. I modified this ground almond pie crust recipe  (which I made into a pie crust, as well, but I forgot to take pictures!) to make the cookie batter by adding cinnamon, nutmeg, approximately 1/4 cup of brown sugar instead of sweetener, an extra tablespoon of margarine, one beaten egg, and 1 tsp of vanilla. They were delicious and chewy.

Speaking of delicious and chewy, I also made some coconut macaroons.

My favourite coconut macaroon recipe is one from AllRecipes.com, but I can't seem to find the exact one that I always use as I didn't bookmark it and only have the printed version. These are addictive, though.

And finally I made baked doughnuts!



Ha, I tricked you. Doughnuts aren't made from nuts or coconuts. I made them using my new Wilton doughnut pans (one regular sized pan and one mini pan) that I got for Christmas, and the recipe for the doughnuts was on the pan's package. The trick with using the doughnut pans is not to fill the round cavities too full so that you can get the hole in the middle once the doughnut is baked. Naturally, I filled the cavities in the mini doughnut pan too full and ended up with little one-bite cupcakey things rather than little doughnuts, but they tasted like doughnuts. Some doughnuts I topped with pink royal icing glaze, and the rest were topped with melted chocolate. And lots and lots of sprinkles, of course.

Anyway, I have plans to spend the rest of the winter (which could be six weeks long or six months depending on which groundhog you follow) planning and baking cakes and sewing some little things. Or maybe sewing cakes and baking little things. Either or.

A Spring Snow Day with a Whiff of Christmas

While there’s definitely a part of me that wants spring to just hurry up and get here already, I’m not going to complain about this completely unexpected snow day, especially when I was able to spend most of it curled up on the couch in my office/craft room listening to the Strokes. How decadent it feels to have a day off that’s not full of chores or scheduled things to do, which is what I normally do when I have a planned day off from work.

A couple of days ago, I finally found an aptly named Perfect Pie Crust recipe, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because now I can make pies with amazingly buttery, flaky crust. Bad because now all I want to do is make pies. On Wednesday after I got home from work, I used the newfound recipe to make an Unintentionally Greek quiche of sorts out of spinach, onions, garlic, red pepper, feta cheese and eggs, just the things that were close to going bad in my fridge, like my Unintentionally Italian soup that I made over a month ago.

Later that same night I made a coconut cream pie, following this recipe for the filling. The Perfect Pie Crust recipe makes enough for two bottom-only pies or tarts, or in this case a quiche and a pie.





I toasted the coconut first and doubled the amount. I also doubled the vanilla, which I always do for every dessert recipe that calls for vanilla, and I added a drop of coconut extract. I used the same Perfect Pie Crust recipe (baked it blind and let it cool), which has no sugar in it, but it was fine for this pie, a nice complement to the sweet coconut custard. Half of this recipe with the doubled coconut is enough to fill one pie shell, but I only made it with custard, not whipped cream on top like most coconut cream pies because even I impose some limits on dessert decadence. Except for eating a slice of the pie for breakfast. That level of decadence is well within my limits, particularly on a rare early spring snow day when it seems as if anything goes.

As I already said, the problem with finding the perfect pie crust recipe is that now all I want to do is make pies. The crust is so easy to make and turns out so perfectly that I have no excuse not to make a pie (or two!) every day for the rest of my life. Except for my waistline, of course. What I want to conquer next is one of those fancy fruit flans, a classic tarte aux fruits, with the multi-coloured concentric circles of fresh fruit on top.

I want to try my hand at making a pavlova at some point, too. I had never even heard of pavlova until I watched Nigella Lawson make one on her Forever Summer series on TV. It's a big baked meringue dessert, essentially. I could watch Nigella cook and bake for hours on end. Nigella’s Bribery and Corruption Drawer, her cupboard full of chocolate and treats in her kitchen, is the sort of thing that I would have myself in my own kitchen if I only had more willpower. I have a strong feeling that the only person who would be corrupted by having a big ol' stash of chocolate in the house is me. I just think the incongruence of the beautiful, sophisticated, food-writer Nigella showing us her cupboard full of junk is hilarious, which is why I like her.

Speaking of incongruence, and seeing as how nothing screams “early spring snowstorm” like a dark Christmas fruitcake (ha!), I baked a fruitcake today. Not one of those boozey, pudding-like concoctions that you have to bake a year in advance and then put in a dark cupboard and feed it a spoonful of booze every day until Christmas or anything. No, that process sounds too much like something out of a Dickens novel for my tastes, like some poor, alcoholic orphan-child confined to a dank corner of the workhouse, languishing from lack of sunlight and nutrition, kept docile with an occasional dram of gin. I don't know why my brain automatically makes that association between  fruitcake and Victorian-era orphans, but it does.





This doesn't look like an drunken orphan to me at all, not with all those blackberries and my best attempt at fancy-pants piped icing, which is actually light Cool Whip.

Anyway, I had dried cherries, prunes, raisins and a handful of dried cranberries that had been kicking around for ages in my cupboard, along with two slices of crystallized ginger that have been in my spice basket for as long as I can remember. No nuts, though; I didn’t have any. So I modified a recipe that I found online, chucked everything that I could find in, and there you go. It's moist and spicy now but I bet after a couple of days in the container, it will be even awesomer.

The only issue with it occurred when I turned the cake out of the loaf pan when part of the bottom stuck to the pan, but in retrospect, maybe if I had better prepared the pan before pouring in the batter, like with greased parchment paper or something, then it could have helped the cake from sticking. Then again, I’m sure that everything that I did—i.e. baking a dark fruit cake in late March, not making it the traditional way, using old dried-up odds and ends from the back of my baking cupboard, and eating it with (gasp!) blackberries and light Cool Whip, of all things--is highly disreputable and violates every sense of propriety that most sensible bakers have, but I don’t care because, guess what?! The cake is delicious and it's a snow day in Spring and my house smells like Christmas! It’s that unmistakable smell of happiness and home and coziness and the prospect of exciting things just around the corner. You just can’t get that happy smell out of a bottle, so even if it is technically "spring," I’ll take a whiff of Christmas whenever I can get it.

"If I had rocks in my head, I wouldn’t be any smarter"

OK, enough already, Winter! You win! Apparently, no amount of fist shaking and complaining loudly and frequently about the state of the roads can deter you. The poor scarecrows in my back yard didn’t stand a chance against your snowy onslaught. Just look:



Taken on February 3^rd after a blustery morning.


 Taken on the afternoon of February 12th.

Even though the one on the left is up to his straw-filled armpits with snow, and the one on the right lost his armpits weeks ago, they still look pretty happy sitting out there wearing their little snow caps.

One good thing about this winter weather was getting an unexpected day off today due to an office power outage. I came back home around 10 AM this morning with the intention of making the most of my time by heading straight to my home office/craft room and digging into my research paper, but I ended up heading out to the kitchen to make a wicked pot of soup out of various containers of vegetables, some raw and some leftover roasted, that were kicking around in my fridge, instead. It turned into what I like to call "Unintentionally Italian" roasted vegetable soup with white kidney beans.

The best pots of soup are made from the dregs and back corners of my fridge—I just gather things up, throw them in the pot with some stock and hope for the best, and I always get something better than I expected. Lately it seems as if I’ve been making a pot of soup every week, mainly because I’ve had more fresh vegetables on hand and there’s no way to use them up otherwise, so I always make them into soup before they rot or take on a life of their own and start to cackle and hiss at me from the crisper drawer.

Anyway, tonight I was feeling nostalgic (and by “nostaligic” I mean too lazy to fastidiously nitpick/edit my literature review for my paper) and so I started looking for opening theme songs from the TV shows from my childhood on YouTube, like  Gummi Bears, She-Ra, Jem, etc. What’s strange is that I can barely remember what I had for lunch (oh, right--fridge-raid soup!), and yet I can still clearly remember all the words to the Muppet Babies opening theme. And it’s just as infectious now as it was then—I tapped my foot and bobbed my head the whole way through!




After my embarrassing singalong with the Muppet Babies, my old friend Synchronicity tapped me on the shoulder and I began to feel smugly justified in my procrastination as I came across one of my favourite shows from when I was very young, Tales of the Wizard of Oz, which in the following episode, like my pictures above, featured a bodiless scarecrow. (Yes, I can sing along to this theme song, too.)


I'm going to call the bodiless scarescrow in my back yard Socrates. I don't think I'll try to stuff his head with fish, though.