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Posts from the ‘Pies’ Category

Mar 14

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Live and let Pie

Happy Pie Day everyone.  Man am I glad I got to baking early because things have gotten…well to say “hectic” would be an understatement.

Actually I’m kind of a mess right now.

I messed up something at work.  I’m freaking out about some family stresses.  I’ve got pressure on me to do things that I shouldn’t even be doing.  I just want to curl up and cry.  So instead of course, I pulled out a rolling pin, got to sweating and baked some pie.  After all as the song says “Baby don’t you cry, gonna bake a pie, gonna bake a pie with a heart in the middle.  Baby don’t be blue, gonna bake for you, gonna bake a pie with a heart in the middle.”  Waitress has become my go-to movie for when I really need a good cry and for pie day so it kind of works on both fronts today.

What I really need is for those close to me to cut me some slack if I need it.  I have a tendency to withdraw when I’m overwhelmed.  It’s an INFJ personality trait and it’s a seriously important defense mechanism for me.  I’ll often do things that make no sense to those who don’t “get it” – like how can you find time to bake if you claim to be so busy?  Well for one thing this replaced my sleeping and for another it’s a sort of active meditation for me.  Plus I can multitask in the kitchen and listen to lectures (oh yeah did I mention I’m back in school on top of the million other things I’m doing) while I keep my hands moving.  It’s also a solitary activity which is what I need when I’m freaking out and all up in my head.  For some people talking things out is what helps.  It doesn’t help me.  I need to be left alone, to develop an action plan and work out my problems on my own.

Part of this is because the time it would take to explain what’s going on would be extensive.  Simply spending 15 minutes having to explain the backstory of why something is the way it is, and then answering the subsequent questions, just adds to my anxiety.  When I’m up against the wall the thing I usually want most is time and I don’t feel like I have any to waste.  Plus the questions are usually extremely frustrating because unless you’ve actually lived through it all, usually there’s just no way to really impart an understanding of why something is upsetting me so much—especially when I’m dealing with messier and complicated problems like family.  (To clarify there aren’t any emergencies with mia familia.  Just some added stress I don’t need which would, under best circumstances, be annoying but at the moment making me flip the fuck out.  I realize I’m over reacting about it and that’s the important thing.)

I’ve never claimed to be an easy person to get along with.  I know that I’ll snap if I try to socialize when I’m like this so instead I just pull back completely.  It’s better for my friendships in the long run.  I just wish people could understand that.  There’s a hard outer shell I provide to the world and then a squishy, soft interior but underneath that is a third shell just like the outer, surface layer.  Like with pie. Tightly wound people like me are never going to stop being crazy—but what makes me the sort of person who can manage it is that I recognize when it’s happening and take steps to minimize the outfall.  So instead of flipping out at people for seemingly no reason, I can temper the storm until it passes.  Much easier to evacuate than clean up damage after the earthquake you see?

I really want the world to stop trying to change me.  I hear “hey you need to learn to relax and take it easy” way too much.  No, not just friends, but from every corner of every media out there.  I swear I think there’s a billboard nearby about smelling the roses.  Well I love rose, and I will stop to appreciate a flower when I have the time, but I’m not going to turn off this hyperdrive I’ve got.  It’s just not in my DNA.  I don’t do the standing still thing very well…unless I’m on a yoga mat.  And even then, the reason I can handle the slowness of meditation in Bikram is because it’s the punctuation to a very active form of yoga.  While I want to learn how to better manage my stress, because hey no one wants to feel like they are on the verge of having an Alice in Wonderland – drown in your own tears – kind of moment, I also don’t feel a need to radically change myself either.  Don’t worry, my blood pressure can handle it. Sometimes I think I’m hardwired this way because I physically need it.  When my bp is regularly 95/50 I have to think that without any stress in my life I’d wind up dead!

I want to be understood and in kind I’ll do my best to adapt to the styles of others.  I want to be trusted to handle my own concerns as I see fit.  I want to get the sense of accomplishment that comes from defeating these troubles when I’m confronted with them.

But mostly right now I just want some pie.  I call this a triple apple pie because in addition to the apples I use apple butter and an apple whisky I love for baking and cocktails.  Both ingredients are optional—though both make the flavor incredible so I wouldn’t recommend leaving it out.  IF you can’t find apple butter just increase your sugar by ¼ a cup.  If you can’t find the apple whisky…well you can instead try 2 tsp of a standard whisky with 1 tsp of apple cider.

Triple Apple Pie

An Olivia Original Read more

Mar 8

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SciFriday and the Feminist Mys-Quiche

IMG_2932Today is International Women’s Day and I find myself focusing in on it through the lens of my culture—not the Jewish one but rather the geeky one.  As a woman I often find myself troubled both by the attitudes of the “normies” and the male geeks within the scifi world.  There’s one thing that unifies these two seemingly disparate groups: they remain ever incredulous about the geeks with lovely lady lumps.  Yeah I just wrote that sentence.

In my younger years I digested most of my science fiction in the form of the written word.  I grew up reading both the classics and every bargain bin paperback I could get my hands on.  Heinlein.  Adams.  Asimov.  Scott Card.  Herbert.  Huxley.  Clarke.  Wells.  Bradbury.  Oh…Bradbury.   But what do you notice about all these names?  They’re all male.  Every damn last one.  I have nothing against the male sex mind you and for a long time I didn’t really notice that my bookcase had this imbalance of gender.  I did after all have a few books written by women—Madame L’engle and Lois Lowry for example—but for the most part scifi as a genre was and is largely dominated by men.

For a while I was happy in this little world of spaceships, lasers and dystopian futures.  Then one day I woke up.  I think it coincided with middle school and frankly it kind of shocks me that I don’t remember realizing this sooner.  I had always been a very “girl power” oriented kid.  I was in elementary school during the reign of the platform british diva and definitely spent nights in front of my mirror singing “wannabe” with a hairbrush.  The theme I wrote up for my 10th birthday party?  Girls Rule, Boys Drool—Splash til you Crash Birthday Bash.  It was a pool party—ahem.  Anyway THAT embarrassing tidbit aside the point is suddenly one day I realized all my books were written about or by men. IMG_2929

Thus began my search for scifi written by women and a dark and disturbing realization: there is a great deal of scifi written by women but they changed their names to be accepted.  A number of books I’d read were written by women but I had no way of knowing that, and based on the trend by the more notable authors, I always assumed that names which followed the A. Z. Last Name formatting were men.  That was exactly what the publishing industry wanted me to think—or rather what they wanted little boys to think.  It started as a way for women to publish when it was considered indecent to do so and then carried on as tradition because publishing companies didn’t think boys and men would want to read books written by a woman.

IMG_2936Disgusted, I understood that this belief not only dismissed females as writers—but females as readers.  It completely ignored the girls who were reading, the girls who might choose to read a book because it was authored by someone with whom they share a certain ovarian affinity.  Talk about a total invalidation of my greatest love.  Heck even J.K. Rowling fell trap to that line of thinking as her editors didn’t believe Harry Potter would sell to boys if they knew the author was a woman.  Well that cat got out of the bag and Rowling is still richer than the bloody queen so fuck-that.  Sadly it’s probably somewhat true that boys would turn away more from female written works.  There are certainly a number of men I’ve met who avoid anything that seems remotely “feminist” out of fear that supporting it will suddenly doom them to marry a girl who doesn’t shave her armpits.  Disgraceful.

With the second wave of feminism (aka the 60’s) a number of female scifi authors came out of the woodwork. Notable among them being Ursula K. Le Guin who is usually the first and sadly only name people provide when I mention female scifi writers.  As for me, the first scifi work I encountered in my youth that made me think about this topic was Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale”.  If you aren’t familiar with the work it is about a dystopian future where a fascist and religiously dominant government has suspended the constitution following a terrorist attack.  In this world women have been stripped of any rights and are regulated to various roles in society; racism and homophobia also rampant.  The protagonist of the story is in the ranks of the Handmaids who function as concubines and whose sole purpose is to provide a womb for breeding; women reduced to literally the very thing that define their sex.  Other roles women play are wives, daughters, “Marthas” aka compliant infertile women and the Aunts who train the handmaids.  Infertile or troublesome women get branded as “unwomen.”

While this certainly sounds like a feminist manifesto, it should be noted that the book explores a variety of other oppressions enacted by this government for religious and racial reasons.  Heck even the men are just as regulated as the women; assigned various roles within the military structure of the government but it is only the higher ranking classes that are permitted to breed and obtain a handmaid.  As for the rest?  No sex.  Not even masturbation.  I particularly remember reading the part about underwear designed to prevent nocturnal emissions and thinking that this world is just as criminal to men as it is to women.  Gay men, as another example, are gender traitors and sent to death camps.

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I’d like to think that today we don’t have this problem anymore or that it’s at least diminishing, but well…when I was thinking about this blog I decided to go find a copy of this book.  I popped into a used bookstore on the street after yoga, ran up to the scifi section and discovered no listing for Atwood at all.  With a heavy sigh I trudged up to the “Fiction-Literature” area and sure enough there it was.  I went to check out and this was the exchange that followed:

Me: Glad you had this, I went looking in the scifi section first and couldn’t find it.

Counter: Well that’s because it’s not scifi.

Me: Uhh…well actually it is, I mean it’s soft scifi* but it’s definitely always been in that category from what I know.

Counter: it’s feminist lit.  It can’t be scifi.

And it was a girl behind the counter too.  Apparently feminism and scifi are incompatible.  So much for forward thinking but hardly that surprising.  I still get strange looks from most people who discover my love of the genre.  Strides have been made over the years but aliens and wormholes are still apparently a “boy thing” in the eyes of most.  I personally feel that more strides have been made in film and tv to promote the female empowerment of the geek world and it saddens me that books seem to lag behind which is why I’m so excited when I do find a thoughtful and geeky lady writer.  There is a need, especially in our youth, to identify and learn about ourselves.  That’s part of why people will seek out specific racial, cultural or gender groups and socialize within them.  We want to understand ourselves and while Joss Whedon comes pretty damn close, ultimately I’ll still learn more about being a woman from another woman.  That’s why it’s important to have these talks still and why you can’t ever be completely “color blind” in life.  So I hope more women writers are picking up the call and defying convention and I really hope that they drop the stupid initial-last name convention because while 5 boys might pass over your book, there will be one little girl who might finally pick it up.

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*Some people will claim it’s not scifi or only loosely scifi because it is about a dystopian future.  Funny that I don’t hear people rejecting 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 nearly as often on those grounds.  Now for those of you that would, look we can talk about this another time and I’ll school you on the history of the genre, also known as speculative fiction, and please stop trying to invalidate these books just because you happen to prefer hard-scifi which is a subgenre okay?

Oh right, I still have a recipe to share!  Well as you ponder this topic, why not bake up a lovely quiche for dinner.  Why a Quiche for today’s post?  It’s a largely egg based dish and since I’m thinking about ovaries and baby-mamas I immediately jumped to the ovary connection.  I’m weird.  Accept it.

Scifi Mys-Quiche

An Olivia Original – I made several mini-quiche but this recipe will make one large 9” pie Read more

Nov 28

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Are you gourd with pumpkin pie yet?

 I know I know, Halloween is over, Thanksgiving is over, there are leftovers in the fridge and you’ve probably gorged on enough pumpkin pie that even a Starbucks Pumpkin Pie Latte sounds awful.  But see with all the nonsense around buying a car and getting back into work, I didn’t think the timing lined up for yet another pumpkin pie/tart recipe.  Still we haven’t had a chance to discuss Thanksgiving yet reader and I have such a story to share.

 I set the oven on fire this Thanksgiving.

Now admittedly it wasn’t my fault and the long version of the story makes it pretty clear it was an unavoidable flare up but the fact remains: I woke up my family with an oven fire on Thanksgiving Day.  So much for my reputation as a kitchen guru huh?  The damn oven was smoking up a storm and for whatever reason the fire alarm refused to turn off even with the usual vigorous towel waving and window opening.  Gee could that be because there was an actual fire Olivia?  SHUSH YOU!

Okay long story: so Thanksgiving morning was all about getting the pie in the oven first.  I almost always make dessert first.  It gets pushed off otherwise so I always start the day with pies and things, then put the Turkey in the oven for a long, low and slow cook.  In fact I usually have a detailed plan mapping out precisely what temperature things are cooking at so I can coordinate oven space accurately.  I take this holiday seriously.  Well a kitchen fire kind of throws off my clockwork precision and that whole plan fell apart leading to a very, very delayed dinner.

Let’s set the scene: the pie crust had been pre-baked, cooled and filled with my new pumpkin pie recipe I was playing with.  As I walked to the open oven, carefully keeping the filling from sloshing over the sides, a small dog dashed under my feet.  We have 5 dogs in the house, in case I never mentioned that.  This particular canine happens to be my mother’s lapdog that I often refer to as Salacious B. Crumb because he rather reminds me of the court jester  ****TRIVIA TIME: Who is Salacious B. Crumb?  Be the first to answer and win a treat from me!  Previous winner of the most recent contest is ineligible to win.**** 

Salacious comes dashing in under my feet, I trip and the pie goes flying.  Thankfully my expensive, French pie dish remained intact but uncooked pumpkin pie innards were dripping down the insides of my oven looking like The Great Chunkin Pumpkin Charlie Brown—dotted with smashed up bits of pie crust.  I damn near burst into tears.  I was going to have to start ALL OVER and now I had to clean the oven on top of it.  Thankfully Mom swooped into action and cleaned the oven for me while I pulled one of my spare pie crusts out of the freezer to defrost.  Yes I have spare pie crusts in my freezer.  It’s so much easier to make triple batches and freeze some whenever you make dough. 

The problem was that not all the pumpkin pie filling got cleaned up in the oven.  Not Mom’s fault and she was a superhero for helping me out with the mess…though it was HER dog that caused the problem :-P

Well what happens when a gas oven has organic combustible material present near the bottom flame?  Yeah.  Fire.

When I went to turn the oven on to re-bake a crust and put the Turkey in, SWOOSH went the flames and “WAAAAAAH” went the Olivia.  That time I did cry a little out of frustration over the delay.  I was handicapped.  Nothing I was going to do on the stovetop could be done until an hour or so before dinner—the turkey being removed from the oven was the stovetop trigger.  All the “do ahead” stuff had already been done ahead.  I literally had to just stop, sit and watch the pretty red flames dance away waiting for it to all finally burn off so I could use the oven again.  Dinner was supposed to be done at 5PM.  We ate at 8PM instead.  I felt like such an utter failure.  A very kind bottle of red wine unstoppered by to keep me company during this waiting time so it wasn’t too bad; somehow I managed not to repeat the performance.

Thankfully the spread didn’t suffer and I was able to make my entire menu after all.  As for that original pumpkin pie?  I had about a cup and half of filling left and decided to save that for something else and just rework the whole recipe from scratch.  I was using egg whites for lift and by the time the next pie was ready the whites would have lost their integrity in that first mix.  Instead I saved it and poured it into a small tartlet the next day with a fun twist on traditional flavors.  The result of my kitchen pyrotechnics was a delicious tart recipe with a very rummy pumpkin filling and walnut cardamom tart dough.

So there you have it: the story of Thanksgiving 2012 when Olivia set the kitchen on fire and a delicious pumpkin rummy tart to commemorate the event.

Rummy Pumpkin Tarts

an Olivia Original Read more

Aug 30

Banana Pie-ty

Well behaved women seldom make history – Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

A perpetual struggle for me, specifically at work, is determining when I should assert myself.  There was a time, as a child and an adolescent, that I didn’t know how not to do this.  I still recall the only time I ever got in trouble in school for physical misbehavior.  It was first grade and in a class full of overachieving “gifted” children there was a status associated with getting to have your paper on top of the stack when it was turned in.  My classmate was picking up our homework and I insisted that mine be on top.  She refused to comply and to this day, I have no idea what came over me, I pinched her wrist.  I was horrified immediately after the fact and I’ve never exerted physical force on a classmate since but yeah…I wasn’t shy about trying to take what I wanted.

I feel like something changed along the way after high school.  Some key event must have humbled me or snipped my tongue because I have noticed that I am far less likely to stand up for myself these last few years when I need to.  Is this cowardice or strategic?  I certainly think time has tempered the youthful urge to always say what I’m thinking.  The belief that I should “always stand up for what’s right” was something that I clung to with a religious zealotry in high school.  As a result I’d often burn bridges and isolate myself in situations that really served no purpose.  Thankfully I don’t seem to have done any permanent damage.  While I know I was a difficult bitca in those years, I don’t have any particular moment I can look back on and specifically regret.  Well except dating an ex-boyfriend’s best friend and turning my life into a Dawson’s Creek kind of moment.  I honestly didn’t realize what I was doing until many years later when I evaluated that decision and went “wow that was frelled up.”  In my defense though, “ex-boyfriend” is a lose term.  I think dating at that point in time still hadn’t extended past a clumsy kiss, hand holding and standing around with each other at lunch time.  Hardly a torrid love affair.

Eh what can I say, I didn’t peak in my wild relationship years until college.

Back to the topic at hand before I wandered off into dating history.  Assertive behavior.  It’s important to be able to stand up for yourself and not constantly bow down to authority.  My mother instilled this in her children and of course has and is currently regretting it as my 17 year old brother is 17.  A special blend of testosterone, bipolar disorder and generic stupidity makes him especially virulent at times when he is “standing up” for himself.  I generally just view it as extremely loud laziness and self-indulgence but hey that’s me.  I’m sure I had at least a smidgen of his arrogance at that age but where we differ is that I somehow picked up more wisdom along the way.

Funny how I started this writing about how young I am and yet mostly am talking about how much I’ve matured?  Well here’s the problem: there’s wisdom in not being a doormat too.  Just as hard as it can be to learn to step off the soapbox, it can be hard to learn how to successfully navigate workplace environments as a young adult when you want so desperately to succeed, to be recognized and yet not piss off the people above you in the process.  Being younger has some advantages: I’m better with technology, quicker to pick up new tasks and generally think and react faster.  The problem is that you are still not supposed to talk about that.  Someone with 20 years in the industry, any industry you choose to work in, will inevitably think that experience trumps youth.  In many respects this is true.  There is a lot we can learn from people who’ve been there, done that and I’m not going to understand all the subtleties of the task at hand.   That in itself is the trap.

I want to do well, which means I need people to like me, which means not stepping on toes or becoming a nuisance.  It’s a lot easier to bow your head and kill yourself accommodating any request that comes along in order to please someone than it is to say “No.”  For someone such as me, someone who was raised to question authority constantly, this habit becomes slowly soul-crushing.  My position at work gives me a great deal of power in some respects but absolutely zero authority.  That creates an even more unique challenge.  There’s a great deal I see, do and can control but because my position is considered rather “low” by most, if and when I push back it’s considered stepping out of my place.  If not standing up for myself is soul-crushing, this attitude I have received or witnessed is heaven-crushing.  Recently I realized if I didn’t learn how to stop saying “yes” all the time to avoid being sneered at I was going to lose all respect for myself.

“Tact is just not saying true stuff.  Pass.”  — Cordelia Chase

So I dipped my toe in the deep end.  I started pushing back in situations that called for it.  The maturity aspect that I’m picking up is learning how to do this tactfully.  My favorite characters in the Buffy universe were never known for this skill.  I think I loved Anya and Cordelia so much because I longed for a world where people could just be blunt and upfront about things.  Back when 24 was still on the air, I cheered anytime Chloe spoke while my ex-boyfriend (the Jersey Ginger Lawyer) thought she was a raving see-you-next-Thursday.  Hilarious that considering his brusque personality made him essentially the male equivalent.

To me these kinds of women are heroes.  Sadly the real world doesn’t work this way.  Instead we have to employ that dirty word: diplomacy.  It takes energy and effort to think before you speak and it takes a level of cunning that also has a habit of making me worry about being too manipulative.  I often times think if I were willing to permanently live in the mud, to not look at the sky above me, I’d make an excellent politician.

It’s at work primarily where I most often struggle with this.  In new and strange surroundings I also bite my tongue but that’s primarily to observe what the status quo is so I can adapt to it.  If I’m able to pick up that people around me are just as comfortable with the nitty, gritty of truth in speech I can slip back into assertive Olivia mode well enough.  Then of course there are relationships…and that’s a whole other bag of bananas but suffice to say, I’m too much of a door mat with men in recent past.  Need to change that because I know the type of man I want to be with is not the type of man that prefers silent partners.  Friends and the internet bear the brunt of the more Honest Olivia.   I still find myself clucking my tongue at myself sometimes for the tone I employ when I say things to people I care about.  I hate so desperately to hurt feelings because I don’t want to push people away.  That’s the problem with being too blunt.  It’s an honest life but also a lonely one.

This pie has that kind of balanced element to it.  Bananas are known for being very assertive in flavor.  Typically when you bake with them that’s all you taste unless you throw in an equally assertive and tart counterpart like cranberry.  Banana cream pie is typically going to be dominated by its feature player but not this recipe.  The use of brown sugar in the pastry cream makes the color less yellow and the flavor of the vanilla cream a little bit more robust.  Just the right balance.

Brown Sugar Banana Pie

From Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking from my home to yours” Read more

Aug 20

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It’s a Southern Thing: National Chocolate Pecan Pie Day

Gulf breeze on the porch

Me and my honey rocking back and forth

Light it up again with my kin and friends

Underneath a yellow moon

Sweet dream New Orleans

Mississippi River running over me

Pretty Momma come and take me by the hand

Don’t mock what you don’t understand

It’s a Southern Thing

No muffins this monday.  I’ve put away the tin for the pie dish to celebration a very important food holiday….

I’ve lived in California a decade now. It’s kind of a strange thing to think of and when folks ask where I’m from, I’m never sure how to answer. “Oh all over.” I’ll say. I can’t really place a finger on where “home” is. New England? Virginia? California? If I say California is it Benicia for high school, Davis for college or Fairfield for this awkward post-grad, working as a contractor phase of my life? I haven’t really been in any one spot for long enough to feel like it’s the right answer.

I do feel that living in the hippie bay of California has made my years in Virginia seem far more southron than they were. I never realized I used words that gave my voice the tiniest southern lilt, like my occasional reliance upon “y’all” or my occasional h-slur when I say “Vih-rginia”. But are these true accents of my youth or merely affectations I use when I want to play the a part? I mean I lived outside DC, it’s not exactly the Creole porch swing kind of town. My friends listened to rap and rock not country. While I long for a humid summer night, the sounds of cicadas and most of all the fireflies of my years near the nation’s capitol — I would hardly call myself a southern girl. Instead I think it’s just another role I slip into rather casually. After all just as often as I use “ya’ll” I say knackered, arse and wanker yet no one is likely to suggest I’m British.


I just realized I mostly love to use British slang for vulgarities. Go figure.

Nope my childhood may be hard to pin down, I may be a bit of a tumbleweed or a gypsy in my nature, but hold me up against Scarlett O’Hara and you’ll find I’m hardly a southern girl. I seem to have a knack for just picking up pieces of different cultures and regions from film, books and television. There’s so much world to see, so many things to experience…I think it’s part of why I find the idea of acting so intriguing. I want to experience everything. To be all these different versions of myself and play at them for a while, but choose one? Never. My tongue seems to share this feeling.   Travelling the world through food is what my inner omnomnomnomnomgirl would kill my disciplined skinny girl to acheive. I have yet to meet a dish I wouldn’t eat and it’s very rare to find one I hate. Actually the foodstuff I can think of that I will actually say I don’t like is oatmeal. I really dislike oatmeal. I do love oats in about a million other forms just not bloody (there’s the british again) oatmeal.

You know what makes people think I’m southern most often? My absolute obsession with Pecan Pie. If you ask me to pick my favorite pie, it’s gonna be Pecan and nothing screams “SOUTH” like this nutty, corn syrupy treat. Anytime I make it someone invariably asks if I’m from the south. Again back to that conundrum. Sometimes it’s easier to just shrug and say “well I lived in Virigina for a while” and let it lay. Nevermind I lived in an area far more like the Bay Area than Charleston.

Today is National Chocolate Pecan Pie Day. While my favorite incarnation combines my New England birth with my not-so-Southern roots (Maple Pecan mmmm) I have to say that Chocolate Pecan Pie is still pretty frakking high on my list of favorite variations. Especially this recipe which spikes the mix with espresso powder and cinnamon. Oh god I’m getting almost inappropriately excited thinking about it right now which would be awkward since I’m currently sitting in a coffee shop among far too many San Franciscans for that to be ok. Then again, this city is full of crazy people….

Pecan pie didn’t really show up in cookbooks until the 1940’s which was around the time corn syrup was developed. The nuts themselves are native to Louisiana and Mississippi, eaten heavily by the Native Americans and quite popular once introduced to Europeans. If you are a history buff you might be interested to know that we can trace the successful propagation of pecans as a large scale to a single slave named Antoine who grafted strong root stock with a flavorful plant that made it easier to grow robust and delicious pecan crops. Things like that always give me a little quiet pause. It’s kind of sad to look at my favorite pie and know that were it not for both peoples that were displaced and oppressed, I would not get to appreciate such a treat.

There’s so much to experience in this world. I want to try it all. You should too. And start with this recipe if you’ve never had pecan pie. It’s amazing and pretty hard to screw up. Even if your pie crust winds up kind of dry like mine did, the filling will blow you away. Eat it with a spoon. Or a ladle. Or just shove your face up in the whole thing…. Then bake a few more. Maple, Bourbon, Pumpkin, Vanilla, Cream Cheese, Cherry…they all pair well.

Chocolate Pecan Pie Read more

Aug 15

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Julia Child’s Birthday & Lemon Meringue Pie Day

“I think every woman should have a blowtorch.”
― Julia Child

Happy 100th Birthday Julia Child! It’s not only your birthday but National Lemon Meringue Pie day and so I made some hybrid cupcakes and put that blowtorch to good use in your honor. Well your honor and my stomach’s insistence that I feed it something using the 4 pints of meyer lemon curd I made recently ;-)

With it being lemon meringue pie day I hope you’ll find these cupcakes an acceptable stand in. I do have an older post that contains the more traditional pie recipe. It was delicious even if the meringue did separate a bit from the pie itself. A common problem actually. See meringue is well, it’s tricky. It’s a foam that is constantly trying to undo itself and has a tendency to terrify experienced and amateur chefs alike. I certainly got a bit aggravated with how mine turned out on these cupcakes because I over whipped the stuff and knew it wasn’t going to spread in the creamy manner I’d managed with that ol’ pie recipe. Still I soldiered ahead with my blow torch.

“Upon reflection, I decided I had three main weaknesses: I was confused (evidenced by a lack of facts, an inability to coordinate my thoughts, and an inability to verbalize my ideas); I had a lack of confidence, which cause me to back down from forcefully stated positions; and I was overly emotional at the expense of careful, ‘scientific’ thought. I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

Meringue at its most basic level is a whipped egg white. That’s it. There are a number of additives and I’ll get to those in a minute, but essentially the first meringues came out of the mid-17th century with the invention of straw whisks. Anytime I think I’m challenged, I remind myself that the person who first found this didn’t have the benefit of a kitchen aid and I shut up for a moment at least. Straw?! When you consider that what you are doing is taking water and and separating it into bubbles by displaying it with air and a thin strand of protein…that’s kind of miraculous on a molecular level. The proteins in egg whites get thinned out into the most tendril like strands as you whip them; physical agitation causes them to unfold. As the proteins unfold you expose their hydrophilic and hydrophobic ends water present in the egg whites and air. As the proteins rebond to one another, the hydrophobic (repelled by water) ends will want to bond together and capture pockets of air as they so creating bubbles and as bubbles accumulate, you get foam. Unfortunately these bubbles can’t last forever. The protein structure eventually collapses due to weight of the water and tightening of protein bonds causing water “seepage”. It’s up to the kitchen warrior to find a way to combat these pressures to keep that precious foam aloft.

What are the tricks to keeping your meringue from falling apart?

  1. Heat. When you cook your meringue you get extra support from a protein called ovalbumin. This is the strongest protein present in egg whites but it remains unphased by whisking. Heat is the only way to get it to unfold and restructure. Keep in mind that overheating causes the proteins to tighten together even stronger which squeezes out water from your droplets and creates seepage into air pockets causing deflation. Wah wah wah.
  2. Thickeners: agents like sugar, flour, gelatin can all be added into the egg whites to provide extra backbone structure for the air bubbles. Unfortunately they can also work against you if the ratio is off and they inhibit the same height your foam would get as unadulterated egg white. Sugar is the ingredient you’ll add most often, especially for meringue, because it lends a crispness and you need sugar in conjunction with protein and heat to get that caramelized flavor that only comes from a Maillard Reaction. Sugar reduces how quickly you can form foam and lowers the volume you can achieve because it interferes with the proteins. On the other hand it will thicken your meringue and slow down evaporation of water during the baking process. Why would you want to keep the water around longer? It helps provide structure upon which the protein lattice over you ovalbumins can harden. Powdered and super fine sugar is best as granulated sugar will leave your mixture kind of grainy since it doesn’t completely dissolve in water
  3. Copper Bowls: did your mother ever tell you to use a copper bowl when you bake meringue? Well there’s a reason for that! Proteins have 4 levels of structure. The first two are comprised of amino acids and hydrogen bonding between them.  Think of it like a string of beads.  Once you hit the third level, this string starts to fold over on itself, twist and compact into a tight ball.  Each bead could be thought of as slightly magenetic so they all stick together in a jumbled mess.  This globule is formed by sulfur to sulfur bonds. The fourth level is where individual “globs” bind to other “globs” also in part from sulfur-sulfur bonding. As I said before, when proteins bind too tightly to themselves it squeezes out the water.  Your goal is to unwind the original protein globs and then encourage them to reform in a looser structure that captures pockets of air and water.  If they compact tightly then you just wind up with a mess of protein and no bubbles!  Copper interferes with these sulfur bonds.*****Interesting side note: your hair texture, which is composed of a protein called keratin, is determined by these same sulfur bonds. Chemical treatments like perms use substances like ammonium thioglycolate to disrupt the sulfur bonds and then additional chemicals are used to restructure the hair as desired. Just throwing that out there for any Elle Woods fans
  4. Acids: copper bowls are EXPENSIVE. A great alternative to use to disrupt disulfide bridges are acids. Free hydrogen will bond to exposed sulfur and reduce the number bonds that form. A pinch of cream of tartar or some lemon juice does the trick nicely.
  5. Finally the style of beating itself is important. You want to operate on a Hypocycloidal style i.e. a beater rotating on its head that also moves around the bowl. Think of it like how a planet both rotates on its own axis AND on route around the sun.Most stand mixers do this for you. Sadly unless you are a double jointed circus performer, it is much harder to achieve this effect by hand.

“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.”
― Julia Child

This post got long awfully fast! I have much more meringue advice to give but I suppose I’ll save that for another day. Ultimately though take a lesson from Julia here and just go for it with gusto. You’re gonna get seepage, over mix, deflate…it’s all going to happen at some point or another due to a stupid mistake or bad kitchen conditions. I knew once I ran my blowtorch over the too-clumpy meringue, it would be less noticeable. They aren’t as pretty as I like and I hesitated sharing because as I blogged earlier in the week, I’m a perfectionist to my core. Still I think for Julia I can manage to embarrass myself a little.

Happy Birthday Julia Child! I hope they’ve got pie in heaven’s skies today for you. (Please note :I am 100% agnostic and not insinuating I actually believe in heaven. It’s just a nice thought of the great French Chef standing over me. End of Disclaimer)

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes Read more

Mar 14

Rebecca Baker’s Favorite Holiday

Pie Day Pie Day Gotta get fed on Pie Day Everybody’s looking forward to the first bite!

It’s only Wednesday? What a week. I got home late last night due to overtime and the significant increase in traffic when I leave the office at 5 rather than 4. Still I couldn’t let today come by without some PIE. It’s tradition of the geekiest/foodie type.

Admittedly the pie recipe I’m sharing with you today is NOT what I baked up last night. Last night was an experiment that surprisingly turned out pretty well and you’ll be seeing it soon. Hint: St. Patrick’s Day. Today instead I’m going to share the BIRTHDAY PIE I made for my stepbrother a while back.

Birthday cake? Pshhhhh. Pie is so much better. At least this pie was. Dorie’s FLORIDA PIE is like a taste of the brightest day of summer in the middle of a rainy winter. The main ingredients are lime and coconut, both things easy enough to find in winter. Each bite is tangy and delightful and will make you long for hot weather and poolside barbecue. Even the name conjures up images of Sun and Sand: Floridy Pie. This qualifies as one of the recipes I love to eat even more than I love to make. Trust me that means a lot.

In fact this cake is so refreshing it might be enough to fight off rising temperatures of the earth’s core that could cause an earthbake! Confused about that last part? Remember when I said I got to shoot some actual lines this weekend? It was for a small episode of The Uploaders satirizing SyFy channel. That’s all I’ll say for now, I don’t know if there is anything I shouldn’t say but out of deference to artistic integrity, I’ll hold it back for now. Filming was quite fun and I got to see some old faces and make acquaintance with some new ones. I was unbelievably nervous because I hadn’t done anything like this outside my bathroom for 6 years.

Florida Pie Read more

Feb 16

Sneeze the Cheese (Don’t, please!)

For the first time in my life people around me, everywhere, are sick while I remain steadfastly healthy. Since Christmas.

It’s freaking me out.

Boyfriend – sick. Coworkers – sick. Family members over Christmas – sick. Me: healthy(?)

Okay what bizarro world have I stepped into? Should I be on the lookout for a backward S and have some blue kryptonite on hand? Should I be knocking on every piece of wood I see? In any event I’m certainly enjoying it.

I know I’ve said this in the past but a big part of my improved immune system the last year is Bikram Yoga. It hasn’t just been helping me either. My mother has started going to do Bikram regularly (three times a week) interspersed with Vinyasa Yoga, a slightly less hot but still warm practice. It’s been really good for her and in addition to getting healthier she has lost 40 pounds doing the practice with a low carb diet and the occasional walk.

Ideally I’d be going to Bikram every day. For a while I was on an ultimate yoga journey to do 10 days in a row and I made it to day 8 before getting interrupted in life. Of course that was when I lived 4 blocks from a studio and had a 5 minute work commute on my bicycle. These days it is much harder for me to get in to practice because of my job and 55 mile commute. Still I’m doing my best to get out of work timely enough to go at least twice a week. Eventually I’ll make myself go on weekends when I’m visiting the boyfriend back in Davis.

I suppose that for a post so focused on healthy, happy bodies I should share a skinny recipe but I so want to tell you about this pie. It’s pretty tasty and if you are a fan of Chicago Style Pizza you’ll go gaga for this. Personally I’m more of a New Yorker, despite being raised by parents who are California transplants from the Windy City. Despite my predilection for the superior New York style pizza, I have to admit I like this pie a lot. Maybe if I make it for the boyfriend he won’t mind that I slip away for two hours to go to Yoga when I’m supposed to be spending weekends with him….

Tomato and Cheddar Pie Read more

Nov 5

Not Quite Familiar

I have officially be unemployed now for a week.  Well 5 days, 4 working days, but it still is pretty weird for me.  I’ve had a job since I was 15…not the same job mind you, but I always had work lined up for myself.  Not having a job to check into is strange but not as much as I’d expected.  I don’t feel as out of place as I’d expected, but it’s enough to feel different.  IT could be that I’m spending so much time going on interviews and applying to jobs that I feel like I’m working.  Let’s face it:  looking for work IS work.  The trick I’m finding is to have a schedule to operate on each day so I don’t just end up sleeping in, watching tv and doing nothing but baking cookies during commercials.

A normal day for me involves getting up, writing a bit, going to the gym and then doing job applications for a few hours after which I play around in the kitchen.  This recipe for a Sour Cream Plum Tart had intrigued me when I saw it in an old copy of bon apetit I breezed through during a job search break a few week ago.  I had nearly everything it called for in my fridge.  No fresh plums but a jar full of red plum jam I’d made during the summer.

 

I think this recipe needed more gelatin OR mine just didn’t dissolve enough.  Either way my tart was a bit closer to a thin pudding.  It tasted delicious but less of a sour cream WOW and more of a subtle cheesecake flavor.  Makes sense because the sour cream really isn’t that present and there is a heavy flavor coming from the vanilla bean and heavy cream included in the recipe.

Ultimately I’d say this recipe is a lot like how I feel about life without a job to report into everyday.  Different, but still very similar to what I knew before…or in this case, different from cheesecake but still pretty damn similar to it.  Enough so that I probably wouldn’t use it again…except maybe as an ice cream base.  That could be interesting.

Santa Rose Plum Sour Cream Tart Read more

Aug 18

Strawberry Fields Forever

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.“
— Marilyn Monroe

I have found some of the most amazing friends in my neighbors.  You know the ones I ended up finding when I had to move for a third time in January.  They are some really wonderful folks who I always enjoy spending time with and we’ve actually made ourselves a little family.  Enough so that on Fridays we have potluck dinners in my apartment. One of the girls upstairs is a level 5 celery sucker (anyone know that reference??) so we try to always ensure at least one vegan entree.  I also will make desserts occasionally and I do my best to make a vegan dish so Moogles can eat it as well.  One week Gizmo, my current roomie, was out with Moggles and they brought back a HUGE batch of strawberries from the famer’s market.  They figured that I’d bake something with them if no one ate them up quickly enough.  I took one look at them and knew that I’d end up making Strawberry Rhubarb pie.  Read more

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