The lime pie was a simple Key Lime type pie...except with normal limes. Since I didn't look at the recipes before I went shopping I had no idea how much lime juice I'd need for a single pie. Not much, it turns out. I think I bought like 12 limes and used only 4. I guess I'll have to make some more pies. Or limeade...yummy.I took all 3 pies to John and Chirstina's house-warming party on Saturday. It turns out that the orange and lemon pies didn't "set" very well so they were sorta runny. Luckily they tasted pretty good! The orange was very slightly bitter from the orange peel that I added. I didn't add much because I knew that the bitterness could be a problem; I have to admit, though, the bitterness sorta worked with the flavor of the pie. This is perhaps because when you eat an orange you ultimately end up eating some of the bitter white pith. So maybe that slight bitterness really made the pie authentic. (Next time I make the orange variety I think I'll use blood oranges so the filling will be a dark reddish color...how cool would that be?)
One of the people at the party gave me a hard time because I apologized for the texture of the runny pies and then apologized for the slight bitterness of the orange pie. He scolded me, saying that when I dis my own food it makes other people find fault in it, too, whereas if I praised my creation then other people would realize how wonderful it is. Well, I think that's showing off. Plus I usually don't think my foods taste so good that they need showing off; after all those hours of cooking/tasting/smelling something for so long they've often lost their appeal for me by the time we sit down to eat it.
For example, a few weekends ago I had a craving for Pepperidge Milano Cookies so I spent a good 3 hours making some. I found a "copy-cat" recipe online. Well, I thought I did. It turns out that these cookies were basically butter cookies, not light and delicate like Milanos are supposed to be. To get each cookie the same shape and size so as to facilitate the slathering of melted chocolate between them, I had to measure-out level teaspoons of dough and then roll them out into little log shapes. Because the butter wasn't so soft by the time I'd measured out all those little teaspoons of dough, I had to hold each one between my palms for a few seconds to warm it up enough to roll. A few seconds can really add up when I have about 398343202309327324 little pieces of dough to roll out. Seriously. It would be so much easier (and yummier) to find--or create?--a lighter dough that I can pipe into pudgy lines directly onto the cookie sheet.
So after all that I couldn't even eat a whole cookie. All I wanted to eat after 3 hours of fake Milano-making was something savory and spicy, not sweet and buttery. Even though the cookies were too rich for me (and not at all like the Milanos I was craving), Dave and Michael took pity on me and ate some of them. Ummm...I mean all of them.Last Sunday Dave had to work (grrrrrr!) so I occupied myself by harvesting all the remaining beets from the garden. We ended up with 5 more 1-gallon bags of greens in the freezer but only 6 more pints of beets to pickle. There was another pint or so of beets that I could have pickled but they were very fibrous and tough so they ended up in the compost pile instead. We had two varieties in the garden: standard red beets and Chioggia beets, which are pink and white stripped. I kept those separate to show of their unique color. Sadly, the pink disappears when you cook them so they just look pale in the jar. I can't wait to taste them in about 6 weeks. Lucky for me Dave hates pickled beets. Well, he claims to. He also used to hate fresh tomatoes, any kind of Brussels sprouts or zucchini preparation, green olives, stinky cheese, and spicy lettuces like Arugula. Then he started dating me. Now he likes all of these foods. So I'm sure it is just a matter of time before he starts eating all my pickled beets.
That's all for now! Thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment