The Dinner Files

My Uncle Denny may be best known both here and in my mind for his superlative smoked salmon, a fish he catches, cleans, and smokes himself. It is actually smoked, not cold-cured or salt-cured, but set in a smoke house filled with smoke from a hot fire, a process known as hot smoked to some, kippered to others, or, simply, smoked. Instead of transforming the salmon  into the silken slabs of gravlax, the smokes dried the fish a bit, highlighting the oils which remain free-flowing in even the coldest of waters and that make salmon so delicious, and makes it easy to flake into salty bites.

Yet it is from him that I first learned a) pumpkin pie need not come from a can, and b) you need not confine yourself to pumpkin when making what he calls “gourd pie.” It takes no discernible effort for me to picture him in the kitchen of their old house – the one with a giant hand-cranked coffee grinder built into the kitchen wall, with baskets and pan hanging over the counters, and a wood-burning stove in the living room – manning the blender on a Thanksgiving morning, whipping up a half dozen of his gourd pies to bring to the Thanksgiving potluck and soccer game while my cousin, who is now finishing up law school, pulled at my hand hoping I’d read the stack of picture books he’d assembled to him.

So when Denny and my Aunt Nancy as well as my parents were in town the weekend before my dad’s birthday, we had a little dinner to celebrate. I took extreme advantage of my guests and made a range of pies to fill in my Thanksgiving offerings over at Local Foods. Pumpkin pie, chile pumpkin pie (seriously, that bit of ground dried chile is awesome in pumpkin pie!), and a bourbon pecan pie (made with maple syrup) were all on offer. Following my fine uncle’s example, the pumpkin pies were made with freshly roasted winter squash, with something labelled a “red kabocha” at the market. It looked suspiciously like a red kuri pumpkin to me. Check out that gorgeous color.

Whether you roast your own squash to make your own pie or not, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving and hope you spend it with people who make you laugh and who slowly but surely, without too much fuss and without distracting from the animated conversation already in the works, pay you the ultimate compliment and finish all the pie.

(Still menu planning? Find a gaggle of my Thanksgiving desserts recipes over at Local Foods.)

One thing about being a grown-up: it can be tricky to make new friends. Sure, I meet people that seem like I’d like to be friends with them, but finding the time to become friends is tough. Then there is staying in touch with old friends. People you’d love to talk to everyday. People who make you smile and feel good about the world and the way you go through it. People you truly love but to whom you only speak or see occasionally because everyone has not just jobs but careers and not just families but small children. Some days I feel very forlorn that so many people I love live far away and in any case we’re all so busy as evidenced by how infrequently I see dear friends who live within an hour (hey, even a five minute walk is too much to navigate much of the time!) of my house; on better days I feel extraordinarily lucky that I have so many people to miss.

On top of all this is the difficulty of finding couples with whom one can, if one is in a couple, be friends with as couples. My dashing husband and I definitely have an ample shared section of the Venn diagram of people we like. And yet… so many factors have to come together for it all to work.  The least of which may be the extent to which couples come in the very oddest combinations sometimes.

So when on Sunday night we had dinner at a couple friends’ house and were served scrumptious roast chicken and mushroom risotto and all the adults had a bit more wine than perhaps they should have while the children entertained themselves in other parts of the house, I was very happy I had spent the afternoon baking them a pie. It is a sad cliché, but it is true (and the reason why I have never ever wanted to work in or run a restaurant) that when I cook for you I am saying “I love you,” or at the very least I am saying “I think you are a lovely/funny/interesting person, I hope you enjoy this pie.”

Wait a second, you ask, back up. Why would it take all afternoon to bake a pie? Well, I didn’t get started until 2 because my son and I had spent the earlier part of the day with my Very Tall Cousin Sam being thwarted at every turn: it rained at the flea market and instead of leaving with a coffee table and a dining table and nightstands and a few chairs and a desk and vintage Christmas ornaments and “toys” we left with a coffee table and not one single other thing except a now-broken once-favorite umbrella, the Pixar show at the Oakland Museum was sold out, the tofu place wasn’t open.

So around 2 I donned my apron and started in on the walnut pie I had in my mind’s eye. The first walnut-laced crust was a disaster. It melted into a puddle of an overly buttery cake-like-but-not-delicious thing in the middle of the pie pan.

So I made a regular crust and what was essentially my world-famous pecan pie with walnuts and maple syrup in lieu of pecans and corn syrup. It wasn’t the pie I imagined but it was, by all accounts, fabulous. Best crust I have ever made. Ultra-flaky. I finally tried that trick where you use vodka instead of water. There simply isn’t as much water in 2 tablespoons of vodka as there is in 2 tablespoons of water, so there is less water to develop the gluten in the flour and take away from the flaky-tender potential inherent in flour and butter. The dough, however, is tender and delicate too, so it requires a kind hand when rolling out and getting into the pie pan.

May I suggest bringing it to people who make you smile?

Walnut pie

This is basically my pecan pie recipe. I love pecan pie but find most of them cloying. The bitterness of the walnuts tame the already not-too-sweet nature of this particular version. Plus I used maple syrup in place of the corn syrup, but I think we’ve established that I’m a bit maple-crazy these days.

2 1/2 cup walnuts

1 9-inch pie crust (buy one or make one – I used this pie crust recipe but left out the sugar and used vodka instead of water)

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup maple syrup

1/2 cup packed brown sugar (dark or light, either works)

1/4 cup heavy cream

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons whiskey of whatever sort – including bourbon – you prefer (optional but very tasty)

Preheat oven to 350F.

Lay walnuts on a baking sheet and bake until toasted, 5 to 10 minutes. Watch them very carefully. Walnuts go from toasted to burnt in a snap and this is a lot of walnuts. Let them cool. (Alternatively, you can toast them in a large frying pan over medium-high heat watching constantly and stirring frequently for 5 to 10 minutes.)

Roll crust and place it in a pie pan. Oil or butter the shiny side of a piece of foil and place it, oiled side down, on the pie crust. Fill with pie weights or dry beans. Bake 15 minutes. Carefully remove the foil and bake another 5 minutes. Let cool a bit.

While pie crust bakes, melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Add the syrup, sugar, cream, and salt. Stir until the sugar completely dissolves. Take off the heat and let cool to at least a warm room temperature. Stir in cooled off walnuts. Pour into partially-baked pie crust, place pie pan on a baking sheet (to save your oven in case it bubbles over), and bake until the entire filling is bubbling vigorously – and that includes the very middle of the pie, about 40 minutes. Let cool until set (see above) before serving.

Be warned that this pie has some body to it. It’s basically caramel-coated nuts in a crust. It is not for the weak of jaw or the newly crowned teeth. If you want that gooey, soft style nut pie there are many recipe out there that use a lot more cream and a fair amount of corn syrup and even eggs. Those are not the nut pies for me. This one is good on its own and sheer perfection with whipped or ice cream.

My plan was to use the sour cherries – something I never ever see in California – I bought at Clancy’s in Minneapolis and use the rest of the insane amount of blueberries my parents had brought up to the cabin and make scads of turnovers. These turnovers would be gorgeous and delicious and I would distribute them amongst our kind neighbors here at the lake – some of whom coughed up some Benadryl and Benadryl cream when my son got stung by a bee and others of whom are just jolly welcoming folks to whom I find myself driven to give turnovers.

So I made two batches of pie crust, tossed fruit with sugar and flour, and started rolling out circles. It ended up being 14 circles – six sour cherry turnovers and eight blueberry turnovers. Here’s the thing. Whether browning meat or rolling out pie dough, I like to take it to the limit. The limit is where really good stew becomes mind-blowing, where a nice pie becomes sublime. The thing with the limit, though, is it is the actual limit. Go beyond it and… things fall apart quickly. Good meat is burned. Perfectly ripe fruit boils into a mess of crust-less nonsense.

I went too far. I reached for the sun and my wax wings melted. That turnover dough wasn’t strudel-thin, but it was too thin for turnovers. Once in the hot oven the fruit just burst right out of those weak little casings and bubbled into a sticky, almost-burnt raft on the pan. The turnovers were still edible, but much of the juicy essence of the fruit ended up soaking in the sink.

They tasted fine, but only a few looked remotely gift-able. (The skillful use of a knife to cut off the burnt fruit dripping out of the sides saved the ones below for their photo shoot.) The Benadryl-giving neighbors (hey Rollins!) ended up with a turnover apiece. The other neighbors (hey Carlsens!) will get something nice soon. I have plans. Big plans.

Sour cherry turnovers

The sour cherries were awesome in these. Use any fruit you like, though, just cut the sugar back by about a third for fruit that isn’t mouth-puckeringly sour. This recipe makes six not-too-thin turnovers; increase at will if you have the gumption to roll out the dough.

1 recipe pie dough (for a one-crust pie)

1 pint sour cherries

1/3 cup sugar

a scant 2 tablespoons flour

Make the pie dough, divide it into 6 pieces and pat each piece into a 1/2-inch-thick disc. Wrap in plastic and chill at least an hour and up to 2 days.

Preheat oven to 350. Pit cherries. Have a large baking sheet ready. In a large bowl toss the cherries, sugar, and flour until some juice from the cherries and the sugar and flour form a sort of wet sandy mixture around the cherries.

Roll out each disc of dough into a 5- to 6-inch circle. Put 1/6 of the cherries on half of each circle, fold the dough over the fruit to make a half-moon shape, and crimp the edges. Put turnovers on the baking sheet, cut a vent or two or three in the top of each turnover, and bake until fruit filling is bubbling and the crust is the color of a wooden cutting board, about 50 minutes. Let cool.

Eat with coffee. I find they really taste best at breakfast. Turnovers are, after all, the original Pop-Tart.

Along with all those deviled eggs I also baked up an apple pie this weekend. I used apples from the tree in our backyard*, so I have no idea what kind they were, but they did bake up nice and soft while still keeping their shape – and that is, of course, an important element of an awesome apple pie.

Just as important, obviously, is the crust. I’ve recently written about my love of the part-butter part-lard crust (see a recipe-style recipe for the crust at Local Foods), so I’ll refrain from going on about it again – but it was amazingly flaky and flavorful.

Perfect apple pie, in my assessment, also tastes like apples. Sure a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg and other warm spices should be in there, but I prefer apple pies in which they highlight rather than overwhelm the apple flavor. With that in mind, I made the filling using 5 apples (quartered, cored, peeled, and chopped and tossed with 1 Tbsp. lemon juice), 1/4 cup each brown and white sugar, 2 Tbsp. flour, 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, 1/4 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg, 1/8 tsp. salt. I poured that in the bottom crust, dotted it with about 2 Tbsp. butter, covered the whole thing with a second crust, and baked it at 450 for 15 minutes and 350 for well over an hour. But then, I like my pie crust really, really cooked.

* Our apple tree is the bane of my backyard experience. My grudges against the tree are many. First and foremost the tree itself is ugly. It is one of those multi-variety grafted numbers with three varieties growing on one tree which, as a fact by itself, is awesome but which, in practice on this particular tree, has led – along with very poor pruning at some point – to a very ugly shape. Second, it stands right in the middle of a small yard. Since it is a dwarf variety, it blocks the visual line from any spot in the yard to any other. Third, the apples attract rats. I know the rats would be there anyway – we live in the middle of a city and there are rats outside. That is an unpleasant fact. We are happy to not have them in the house at the moment. But I find half-gnawed apples still hanging on the tree, sitting on the ground under the tree, and dragged to sundry spots around our tiny yard and that is nasty. Fourth, it isn’t the tree’s fault, but I just don’t like apples enough to put up with the first three reasons. If I’m going to have a tree that attracts rats, I want cherries or pears in exchange. So this is the last fall we’ll have apples in our backyard. As soon as we get all the fruit we’re going to get this year, that sucker is coming down. I have an ax and everything.