Baking

Pe-can, Pe-cahn, Pe-kin, it doesn’t matter how you say it, to most of us it means deliciousness. In general, pecan pie consists of corn syrup, eggs, spices and pecans. But I was looking for something more than a sticky sweet pie with nuts (excellent though that may be).  Like my not-pumpkin pie recipe ,  I wanted to mix things up a little.   A reinvention of this popular pie, taking what we love about it and adding something more. First off, the crust.  Guess what?  You don’t need pastry for this pecan pie! I decided to go with a graham cracker crust.  Graham crackers, with their honey ...

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  For Thanksgiving this year you could: Buy a premade pie crust, open a can of pumpkin, open a can of evaporated milk, throw in some eggs and some spices and be happy. Make your own pie crust and proceed as above. Do something completely different and make a pumpkin pie but better! I am not a food snob.  If you chose to go with option a, that’s fine with me.  But I’m not a huge fan of pumpkin pie so every year I find myself searching for something that will make the pumpkin pie fans happy and that I will like too. This year I think I found it. The secret?  It’s not ...

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Apple Pie         My mother took the phrase “Mom and Apple Pie” to heart.  I don’t know if it was because we lived near an apple orchard or if she had a genuine love for apple pie but we ate a lot of apple pie growing up.  Fortunately she made a great apple pie. Her apple pie was filled with apples, not flat thin slices but big chunks of apple.  Her pastry was a high dome of crust over cinnamon, sugar and apples and nothing else.  To me this is how an apple pie should be.  (And apparently to my children as well. Once my daughter was looking at table full of pies brought to a Thanksgiving ...

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Welcome to part one of All About Pie!  This is intended to be a fun way to get you to the Thanksgiving table with a lovely homemade pie.  I promise I will always show you the finished cooked pie (because it always looks great before you put it in the oven) and I will share my mistakes and lessons learned as well as my successes. On to pie! Pies were an important part of my upbringing.  My mother made wonderful pies for every occasion.  My father loved her mince pie, a carry-over from the British traditions of her family.  My oldest brother loved her lemon meringue pie with its tart lemon ...

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Saturday is the last day of summer and we can break out thoughts of sweaters, and pumpkins and pie! One of my earliest memories is of the orchard near our town where my mother bought MacIntosh apples by the bushel.  They were stored in the garage where their sweet scent greeted us on every trip.  (The smell of an apple today sends me right back there.) Fresh apple cider was drunk by the gallon and extra stored in a large freezer in the basement.  We ate applesauce and baked apples and, of course, there was pie.  My mother’s pies were piled high with large pieces of apple which sank down ...

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I moved to Paris in 1981. It was a time when people held dinner parties.  We used the Limoges china we had received as a wedding present and pulled out the good silver.  We had formal dining rooms, not kitchen/great rooms, and people dressed up. And that was just in New York City!  The French elevated this to a whole other level. In Paris, every dinner would be four courses:  the appetizer (entrée in French which makes so much more sense as a name for the first course, or entry, than for the main), the main course, the cheese course, and finally dessert. We learned at our first ...

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