The Pie Project

They would probably use corn. Maiz makes Guatemala go 'round (and accounts for approximately three million tortillas per person, per meal). Why is this on my mind? Because I'm going to Guate tomorrow, for ten days! Morgan has never been and I'm excited to show her around a bit. I worked on a coffee farm there, back in my Watson Fellow days ('03-'04) and have been back twice. Me encanta. We'll hit up the world's most beautiful lake, some highland towns, the colonial cloud city Xela, and my favorite coffee farm on the planet , ending up in ritzier Antigua for New Year's. I'll bring a notebook and a few t-shirts and not much else - hooray, simplicity. Okay, I'm bringing underwear, a fleece, and deodorant. But you get the idea. Anyway! If Guatemalans did make pie, they might also go for squash. It's one of the three sisters, after all, a New World staple. Making a pumpkin pie from scratch is an earthy, gooey experie nce that results in THE BEST p...

Oh my god. This is a British treat (those Brits...hmmm...) called Stargazy Pie. Get it? The fish are staring up at the stars. I lifted this pic from the ever lovely blog, The World Needs More Pie . I don't know if we need more of this pie, but it does fascinate/horrify me. It does occur to me I've yet to make a savory pie for this blog o' mine. Soon!

A little eye candy for a cold day (yes, even in Houston). This Cook's Illustrated gem was so good, I made it again for Thanksgiving with friends and family. The meal included potatoes from their garden and a turkey smoked at home. Love that real food. A meal like that makes me think, economic crisis, schmeconomic crisis; Wall Street can tumble but we'll be okay. Um, I hope so. Anyway, the apple-cranberry pie was a big hit with all, especially little Larkin here, who didn't want to leave the pie table for anything. "I like pie," he kept saying. A kid after my own heart! See earlier post for recipe. Note the cranberry mixed a bit more with the apple in this version - not sure why, but it's pretty, no?

Yes, yes, yes. More, please. This peanut butter pie from Joy of Cooking was so utterly delicious I had to stop myself from eating the whole thing. I've always been a chocolate/peanut butter person, from my childhood obsession with Reese's Cups and Pieces to ... still obsessed. Well, I've graduated to the occasional spoonful of organic peanut butter with a few dark chocolate chips on top. I don't buy Reese's anymore because I'm afraid they'll make my teeth fall right out of my head (I will eat them at Grandma's - but that's because she keeps them in bowls all over the freaking counter. What's a girl supposed to do?) This pie was luscious and just sweet enough, somewhere between fluffy and creamy, with a crowning layer of shivery good chocolate. It sounds like a kid treat but it's perfectly respectable for adults, as evidenced by the rate at which my mom and friends devoured it. The homemade graham cracker crust adds a nice nutty texture. I wou...

This is Georgie, my mom and Paul's adoring pooch. She'll lick your feet with love. She likes pie, too...

You could say I got them from my mom, who taught me to make crust in the first place, or from my aunts, who've overseen many a piemaking adventure. Or maybe from my maternal grandma, who grew up in Montana in a household full of women. She taught nursing at a community college for about a hundred years while juggling seven (!) kids. The woman is a little loopy on occasion, but wow, is she tough, and she can bake - I remember most her homemade fudge. But I owe a good deal of my baking love to my Grandpa Hugh. I never saw him make a pie; instead, he'd make my birthday cake every year. I salivated over the cake-from-a-box, yellowy and slathered with unholy green frosting. You probably don't know that pistachio Jell-O pudding + Cool Whip = addiction. This was the frosting of a union man whose yard was full of half-junked cars when my grandmother married him in the early eighties. Hugh was her second husband, officially my step-grandfather, though I only ever knew him as Grandpa...

Dilemma: which pie to eat between holidays? Answer numero uno: coconut cream. If you need a little respite from the apple/pumpkin parade, go tropical. The same could be said for your vacation plans - take a break from the family, go to the beach? M and I are doing a trip to Guatemala at Xmas. Not the beach, exactly, but decidedly not-winter. I can't wait! The semester is whirling to a close and I'm exhausted and hoarse and don't want to talk about it. Though I shouldn't take it for granted, as next year at this time I might be lusting after grad school from the confines of a cubicle. Nooooo...say it ain't so. This is a bit of an Obama tribute, a few weeks late, since he ordered a slice at that campaign stop diner in Ohio. I'm not a huge coconut fan, unless they're the cold green kind sold at Mexican roadside stands, hacked open and stuck with a straw, but I liked this pie. It wasn't quite amazing, mostly because coconut does not achieve amazing status in...