You're Doing It Wrong

This week’s pie was inspired by Sue (Awesome photos if you’ve never seen a saving white sturgeon photo essay.)

I told her I was working on pies and she said she’d had a terrific margarita pie with a pretzel crust. That sounded worth checking out.

Some of the first recipes I found involved stirring margarita mix into Cool Whip and then scraping into a graham cracker crust. I didn’t think I’d learn much from making that so I held out until I found a super complicated recipe with lime curd and frothing egg whites and folding whipped cream. A recipe that would get every dish in my kitchen, except the frying pan, dirty.

I had trouble with it. I get nervous with recipes that say, “mix until just combined” which is why my cornbread always has big flour lumps in it.

In this case, “lightly fold just until streaks are gone.” I was folding and folding and folding and more streaks appeared. By this time I was tired and had a million dishes to do so I finally scraped it into the crust and hoped for the best.

It’s not pretty but it tastes okay. The recipe called for the pretzels (the Madison pretzels, btw) to be ground fine but I think they could be a little coarse. I’m not the biggest lemon meringue fan and this is basically lemon meringue only with lime and tequila added. It’s worth eating and I learned something, I guess, but measuring “how much I like it v. how much trouble it was to make” I would say we probably won’t be having this again.

Two lukewarm results in a row. I need something epic. There should be fresh fruit by the time I get around to making my next pie.

The other day I saw Mr. Oranges up in the apple tree digging his little paw around top there. I figured there must be something birdlike in there that he was trying to get into. I tried to sneak out to get photos.

I’ve read a couple of Julia Child related books in the last year or so. I read My Life in France and just finished a book of correspondence.

I’m sure I’ve seen snippets of her shows before, but not for years and years.

In fact, I probably have a better memory of seeing Dan Akroyd do Julia Child.

As soon as he saw me he jumped down from the tree and came over to say, Hi. Later I saw a bird sitting up there looking forlorn. Sort of like, “My wife is going to kill me when she gets home and finds out I ruined the birdlets.”

As it turns out, PBS does repeats and I taped one and Bob and I watched it last night. (There are shows online, too.) It was hilarious.

I very rarely watch cooking shows. I don’t have a lot of excess time for TV and I find it tough for me to watch cooking. I want to be doing it. Or, as usually is the case for me, learn by doing it wrong.

The episode we watched is from 1971, La Tarte Tatin, and I was surprised by how awkward it was. Julia knocking over the utensils and then the Tarte coming out (spoiler alert!) a big mushy disaster which she waves off and tells us how we’re going to fix it. But there is a pause where she’s disappointed that she can’t show us how pretty it’s supposed to look. “What a shame.”

Mr. Oranges feels no shame. I still see the bird flying around there so either the cat was unsuccessful or the bird is trying again or I am completely misunderstanding what’s going on in my apple tree.

It’s nice to know you can still find her out there. I already learned something from that one clip which is that it’s possible to make pastry a lot more casually than the way I go about it.

I read about this pie in a travel article a few months ago. It’s a specialty at a bakery in Hawaii. I’ve been trying to improve my pie making and I wanted to try it.

I found a recipe here.

I don’t have coconut extract and didn’t want to buy it and I’ve never seen a measurement for chocolate like that. At first I thought it meant powdered chocolate. It also calls for a regular pie crust which I didn’t think would cut it.

I used the crust from Cook’s Illustrated Chocolate Cream Pie recipe: 16 Oreo cookies zoomed in the food processor and then mixed with 2 Tbls of melted butter and pressed into the pie pan. You put it in the fridge for 20 minutes and then bake at 350 for 10 minutes.

For the chocolate I used 7 oz. of high cocoa content chocolate. I’ve read a million articles about chocolate but I still don’t completely get the cocoa content thing. I used Lindt Excellence, one bar of 90% and one bar of 70% because that’s what they had at Fred Meyer.

It came out fantastic. Pretty and good tasting. I didn’t even bother with the whipped cream topping.

Now I’m super full but happy. Highly recommend.