This isn’t so much of a “when life gives you lemons” thing, as a “go out and buy lemons so you can make this!” sort of thing. You need no excuse to make lemon pie.

I’ve mentioned this pie before – it’s what we had for a snack when I took Kate McDermott’s Art of the Pie class last year – but I hadn’t made it myself until now. What I like about it is how easy it is to make – you just need to think ahead a little to give the lemons time to macerate in the sugar – and how much it’s really about the flavor of the whole lemon. I made it for Easter brunch and, while it was eclipsed a little by the rhubarb custard pie I made at the same time, we ended up needing to make copies of the recipe to hand out to our guests. This is good pie.

Lemon Shaker Pie

Thanks to Kate McDermott for the recipe!

• 1 recipe for a double pie crust (mine is just 2 cups flour, 1 stick butter, salt, and ice water)
• 3 large lemons
• 2 cups white sugar
• pinch of salt
• 4 eggs, beaten

Wash and dry the lemons. Slice them as thinly as you can (we used a mandoline to good effect), pick out any seeds, and combine them with the sugar in a container. Stir well and allow to sit overnight, or at least 4 hours.

Preheat the oven to 450°.

Roll out your bottom crust and lay it in a pie pan. Give the lemons a stir and mix in the eggs and salt, then pour this into the pie shell. Top the pie with either a lattice or a solid crust (make sure to cut steam vents if doing a solid top) and put it in the oven. After 15 minutes, turn the heat down to 375° and bake another 20-25 minutes, until set. Let cool before cutting.

Depending on the tartness of your lemons, you might serve this with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

Last week I was asked by the editor of Grow Northwest magazine to shoot a cover photo for their November-December issue. The catch? I’d need to bake an apple pie. Oh, darn.

Although I like other apple desserts and baked goods, I’ve never actually been that fond of apple pie. This is probably because I’ve never put much effort into baking them – if I’m going to go to the trouble to make a pie I’d rather it be rhubarb or pear-custard or blackberry. But I had a big bag of apples left here by my parents, and I wanted the photo to look like an apple pie – tall and rounded and golden - so I put some back into it.

I made my usual crust – two heaping cups of flour, a pinch of salt, a stick of butter, and ice water – but added my last spoonful of leaf lard to give it a little extra oomph. I based my filling on Kate McDermott’s recipe, which uses ten cups of apples, half a cup of flour, half a cup of sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, but I added a pinch of cardamom as well and completely forgot to add vinegar or butter. I shoved as many apples into the crust as I possibly could, then draped the top with dough – it made an impressive dome. I brushed the top crust with milk and sprinkled a little sugar on, for prettiness. I still had apples left, plus the dough I trimmed off the pie, so I made a little galette in a small skillet and baked that alongside.

It was easily the most successful apple pie I’ve ever made. The apples (mostly Jonagolds and Goldens) were flavorful but not juicy, so they stayed intact in the pie and didn’t shrink too much. The crust was flaky and totally non-soggy, and the pie sliced beautifully.

I spent the rest of the morning taking pictures of the pie and sending them off for approval. I couldn’t eat the pie until I was sure the assignment was done, of course, but I ate the galette – it was fabulous. And we ate the pie for dessert that night, with homemade vanilla ice cream, and for breakfast for days afterwards.

In general I live by the motto, “When life gives you pears, make pear custard pie.” But sometimes pear muffins are a good substitute, especially if you only have one pear that needs using.

I’ve posted this recipe before (ripped off from a Williams-Sonoma catalog many, many years ago), in the form of part-whole-wheat rhubarb muffins. This time I just used all-purpose flour, replaced the rhubarb with one bosc pear, peeled, cored and diced, and added a heaping tablespoon of chopped crystallized ginger. As usual, the muffins baked up perfectly. Pear is a more subtle addition than rhubarb, but it goes nicely with the ginger and makes charming pockets of soft sweetness. We have a bag of these in the freezer now, ready for quick weekday breakfasts.

Here’s a nice breakfast dish that I had forgotten about. Usually when we have apples on hand, if I haven’t already turned them into applesauce, we saute them in butter and serve them as part of a German apple pancake. Last weekend, though, some fresh Jonagolds were crying out to be used and Jon remembered the apple popover recipe from the San Francisco Chronicle cookbook.

We used to make this a lot, and my parents still do (they often throw in blueberries, which is nice). It’s basically a clafoutis, with a lightly sweetened egg batter baked over apples that have been precooked with butter and cinnamon. As with many dishes of this sort, you could use any sort of fruit or seasoning – I haven’t tried pears, but I bet it would be fantastic. Maybe with a little nutmeg?

You never know how this is going to turn out – we never know if it’s to do with humidity, or temperature, or the fruit, or what. Sometimes the whole thing poofs up into a perfect dome, sometimes you get a craggy mountain range. This one refused to rise at all, but produced fantastic caramelized edges. Certainly nothing to complain about. We ate half on Sunday and saved the rest to reheat for Monday breakfast, which worked very well. It would also do nicely as a dessert, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Giant Apple Popover

from a recipe by Flo Braker, in the The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook edited by Michael Bauer and Fran Irwin

• 2 apples, peeled and sliced
• 4 Tbsp butter
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/8 tsp ground cinnamon
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 1 Tbsp oil
• 2 packed Tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 425°.

Melt the butter in a large skillet and saute the apples until beginning to soften. Add the sugar and cinnamon and cook just a little more, until soft but not mushy. Scrape them into a pie pan, arranging them to cover the bottom, and let cool.

Combine the eggs, milk, oil, brown sugar, and vanilla in a bowl and beat well, then stir in the flour and salt and whisk thoroughly. If necessary, let the mixture sit to dissolve the flour, then beat again to make sure it’s smooth. You can use a blender if you want.

Pour the batter over the cooled apples and put the pan in the oven. Let bake 20 minutes, then turn down to 350° and bake another 20 minutes or until golden on top - do not open the oven door while the popover is baking!

Serve the popover in thick wedges. Good hot or cold.

For our end-of-summer party this year, we let ourselves be inspired by the latest issue of Saveur and made food with a Greek or Mediterranean slant: dolmades, tzatziki, tabouli, grilled flank steak, lemon chicken, grilled eggplant dip, hummus, and so on. For a while we were considering pastitsio (sort of a Greek lasagna), but decided on a greens-filled phyllo pie instead. I thought this would be spanakopita, the classic buttery spinach-feta pie, but then I discovered hortopita.

Hortopita is like spanakopita, but better. It uses any sort of greens mixture (horta in Greek) plus scallions and fragrant herbs, and instead of butter you brush the phyllo with olive oil, making it much less rich. I ended up making this twice this week – the one I made for the party disappeared almost instantly, and since there was phyllo left over I figured I’d just make us another one.

The first one used a gorgeous bunch of rainbow chard from a friend’s garden, plus some fresh beet greens. The second pie was made of purslane from Blue Heron Farm and a bunch of ruby chard. Both were great. Purslane is remarkably like spinach, and melts down into practically nothing, so you can use a lot. This is a great way to eat a huge quantity of greens!

Fresh herbs are key to the flavor of this pie. The world’s not going to end if you don’t have them, but I was really struck by the earthy quality of the blend of dill, mint and parsley. Quantities are highly variable, however. This is very much a use-what-you-have sort of recipe.

Hortopita

adapted from The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook by Nancy Harmon Jenkins and the Aug/Sept 2010  issue of Saveur

• 1/2 cup olive oil, plus more for brushing the phyllo
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• 16 scallions, chopped
• 2 pounds greens (chard, purslane, beet greens, spinach, dandelion greens, etc), washed and chopped
• 1 cup each (more or less) fresh dill, mint, and parsley, minced
• 12 oz feta, crumbled
• black pepper
• 12 sheets storebought phyllo, thawed

Preheat the oven to 375°.

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet and add the garlic and scallions. When they begin to soften, add the greens and herbs. Saute, stirring occasionally, until the greens are cooked down and soft, about 15 minutes. Add black pepper to taste and lightly stir in the feta so it stays chunky. Set aside to cool for a few minutes.

Lay out your sheets of phyllo on a damp cloth or wax paper. In a 9×13″ roasting pan, lay a sheet of phyllo into the bottom and lightly brush it with olive oil. Lay another sheet on top, crosswise if possible, and brush with oil. Continue until you have six layers. Pour the greens filling into the pan. Lay six more layers of oil-brushed phyllo on top. Put in the oven and bake 30-40 minutes, until golden brown and bubbling inside.

Serve hot, warm or cold. It’s all good.

You may have noticed by now that I don’t make a lot of sweets – I honestly don’t have much of a sweet tooth, and when I do crave dessert it’s usually chocolate chip cookies. One type of dessert I do go for, however, is custard. Whether it’s an old fashioned cup custard, a fancy crème brûlée, or a pear custard pie, I love the creamy tartness of it.

I had had a piece of plain custard pie – no fruit - a few years ago when we happened across the Pie Lady’s shop in Blackwater, a tiny town in central Missouri. It was incredible, and I always said I was going to make it at home – then, of course, never did. But I recently became aware of the existence of something called chess pie. A plain, very sweet custard pie, it’s a classic Southern dessert often made with cornmeal and lemon, but sometimes buttermilk. I had buttermilk in the fridge this week, and decided to see what I could do with it.

After some hunting, I found that I had a few recipes for chess pie, buttermilk and otherwise, but I decided on this version I found at npr.org because it had adjustments for the less aggressive sweet tooth. It doesn’t have cornmeal, though, so I might need to try it again replacing the flour with corn. It was one of the easiest pies I ever made – once I had the crust ready, I just needed to whisk all the ingredients together and pour them into the shell. The hard part turned out to be waiting a whole hour for the pie to bake, as it filled the house with golden buttery smells.

It puffed up a lot during baking, then settled into a lovely crusty smoothness. We served it with fresh local blueberries, which perfectly suited the sweet-tart-butteriness of the pie.

Buttermilk Chess Pie

Borrowed from Natalie Y. Moore on npr.org.

This is the only version I’ve made so far – next time I’m substituting cornmeal for the flour. For a more traditional, sweeter version, omit one egg and scale the buttermilk back to 1 cup. A little lemon zest would probably not go amiss here, either.

You could use a boughten unbaked crust here, but I used my usual pie dough approach of 1 cup flour, 2 Tbsp butter, 2 Tbsp lard, a pinch of salt, and ice water.

• 4 eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons flour, plus a little for dusting
• ½ cup melted butter
• 1 ½ cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell

Preheat oven to 325°.

Beat the eggs and add sugar and flour. Then add melted butter and mix well. Whisk in the buttermilk and vanilla.

Dust the unbaked pie shell with a little bit of flour. Pour batter into shell, and then sprinkle a little more flour on top.

Bake at 325° until the custard is set and the pie is golden on top, approximately 1 hour. Let cool before serving.

I was so thrilled when I finally found a copy of Nancy Silverton’s pastry cookbook at Powell’s a few weeks ago. Of course, I still haven’t made the recipe I bought the book for (the incredible homemade buttermilk crackers we had at Duckfest), partly because my eye was immediately drawn to the ricotta-stuffed muffin recipe. Our favorite goat cheese vendor had fresh ricotta last week, we just had to do it. Really, could you have resisted?

The muffin batter itself was a lot like my usual muffin recipe - yogurt and oil, not too sweet. The difference was the addition of ground toasted fennel seed into the batter, a fabulous idea in itself – plus a creamy center of ricotta mixed with a bit of sour cream, that spills out when you bite into the muffin. Mmmm.

I did run into a few difficulties. My muffin tins might not have been large enough, because even after I filled them past the point I thought was wise, I still had enough to scrape into a small bread pan. The dough was much stiffer than I expected and was rather hard to work with; on the other hand, the filling did not leak at all and the muffins didn’t explode in the oven, so maybe that was how it was supposed to be.

If I make this again (probably not for awhile, as we still have most of this batch in the freezer) I may switch it up a little. The batter seemed like it had too much flour and possibly too much baking powder, and it surprised me that it had no salt. The Gothberg Farms ricotta is so fresh and tender it doesn’t really need the sour cream added in, and I think a bit of sugar, vanilla or maybe fresh herbs might be good additions. We ate our muffins with lots of fresh raspberries on the side, but you could toss berries into the filling instead. I can think of lots of different directions to go here – what would you do with this muffin?

Ricotta Muffins

Almost (but not quite) as written by Nancy Silverton, from Nancy Silverton’s Pastries from the La Brea Bakery.

batter:

• 2 tsp fennel seed
• 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 Tbsp plus 1 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 1 1/2 cups yogurt
• 3/4 cup vegetable oil

filling:

• 1/2 cup (4 oz) ricotta
• 4 Tbsp sour cream
• salt

Preheat the oven to350°.

Toast the fennel seeds in a small pan. Let them cool and grind them in a spice grinder or mortar.

Combine the ground fennel seed with the flour, baking powder, baking soda and sugar. Make a well in the center and pour in the yogurt and the oil. Mix them together, then incorporate the dry ingredients from the sides. Mix well, making sure to get all the flour from the bottom of the bowl.

Mix the filling ingredients together in a separate bowl. Grease your muffin tins with oil or butter, then spoon in batter until the cups are 1/3 full. Drop in a spoonful of the ricotta filling in the center of each cup. Top with the rest of the batter – the cups should not quite be full (extra batter can be baked in loaf pans or additional muffin tins).

Bake 25-30 minutes, until golden brown on top. Serve with berries or jam.

We made this cake for my grandfather’s 97th birthday. I’m not going to write down the recipe for it, because you really should just go buy Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours, and make it out of that (it’s the one on the cover, with cake crumbs patted all over the outside). I do recommend our one embellishment, which was to stuff the frosting layers with fresh raspberries, and have lots of additional raspberries available to scatter over the top. Raspberries + chocolate cake + marshmallow creme frosting. Oh, yes.

It was a bit of a messy dessert, as the marshmallow frosting got soft and melty in the sun, and the raspberries were so ripe they turned people’s hands crimson. But it’s not like that was a real problem.

Ever since I brought home a tub of leaf lard from Art of the Pie I’ve been itching to use some of it in a savory pie. My chance came this week, as we had a bunch of spinach from Frog’s Song Farm, a bag of mustard and kale greens from Blue Heron, and a wedge of fresh goat feta from Gothberg Farms. If that doesn’t say “savory tart” I don’t know what does.

I began by completely screwing up my pie dough. I usually stick with a part-whole wheat, all-butter crust for my quiches, but I wanted this crust to taste distinctly of lard. Unfortunately I added too much lard, especially given the warmth of the kitchen, and the dough became unwieldy. I ended up patting it into a tart pan with my fingers instead of rolling it out all the way. Then I prebaked it for a few minutes to make sure it would set and not just melt in the pan. It actually worked OK, so I got started on my filling. 

I wanted this to really be about the greens and feta rather than the binder, so instead of following my usual quiche formula I made up something a little different. I blanched the greens in salted boiling water, then squeezed the liquid out and chopped them. I mixed up two eggs, then added the cooled greens, some sauteed shallot, the crumbled feta, a dollop of cream, lots of freshly ground black pepper, and a pinch of nutmeg. I piled all this into my tart crust and baked it for a while at 375° – sorry, I wasn’t really paying attention, but I think it was about half an hour. Basically, when the egg had set and was beginning to puff up, I called it done.

We let it cool briefly, then carefully (as the crust was very tender) cut wedges and ate them with glasses of chilled rosé. Despite the haphazardness of the preparation, it was really, really good. How about that?

I tend to think I make a pretty good pie. Last Easter I made a strawberry rhubarb pie that vanished within seconds, and the Easter before that the blackberry pie I baked caused grown women to wander around the house moaning softly with delight. Every Christmas I bake sweet potato pie with bourbon (one of my personal favorites), and my Missouri-born husband thinks I make the best pecan pie he’s ever had. That said, however, when Kate McDermott contacted me about taking one of her Art of the Pie classes, you can bet I didn’t turn her down. For every prize winner I’ve turned out, there’s also been a sodden mess somewhere along the line, and I’ve always been curious which things are truly important in pie baking, as opposed to simply customary. In other words, how does it all really work?

So last Sunday, on a muggy afternoon in downtown Seattle, I joined five other women (including my friend Patricia of the blog Cook Local - see her post on the class here), to learn more of the mysteries of pie. Kate sets aside four hours for these classes, which turns out to be about perfect. We sat down at 3, and by 7 we were all walking out with hot pies.

Unlike most cooking classes I’ve watched or participated in, this one really focused on learning to do things yourself. With so few students, we could all easily watch Kate as she demonstrated each step, and then we each made our own pie under her careful eye. There was plenty of time for questions, and she made it very clear that there was no wrong way to do it. She began with a pep talk on Crust Fear (a common phobia), then made a batch of dough to demonstrate. She bakes the way I do, with a general notion of quantities but without being a stickler for exact measurements. When we all got up to the counter to try making our own doughs, we were given one measuring spoon and a coffee cup to work with, and expected to eyeball the rest.

Kate’s crust is made from very specific ingredients: King Arthur flour, Kerrygold Irish butter, leaf lard, salt, and ice water, whereas I tend to use Stone Buhr Shepherd’s Grain flour and Challenge butter.  The big difference between Kate’s crust and mine, though, is that hers is much shorter – that is, she uses twice as much shortening as I do. For a double crust pie, she adds 8 oz of butter and 8 Tbsp of lard. This makes a crust which is extremely tender, an approach I usually only take for tarts. It is, as you might expect, extremely tasty, and quite forgiving to work with. We all mixed up our doughs, patted them into rounds, wrapped them up in plastic and tucked them into the fridge while we started on fillings.

Since we’re not in any particular fruit season (rhubarb is past, strawberries yet to come, nowhere near apples), we each had a choice of frozen fruit: boysenberry, sour cherry or blueberry. One lucky person had the option of making a Shaker Lemon Pie, and Patricia jumped on that one (she then got to do lots of lemon slicing). I chose boysenberry. Our fillings, like the crusts, were not measured out very precisely – we simply dumped fruit into our pie pans to just below the rim, then put it into a mixing bowl with a handful of flour, a handful of tapioca, a pinch of salt and a grating of nutmeg. When our dough had chilled enough, we rolled it out and assembled our pies, then popped them all into the oven.

While our pies baked, checked frequently by Kate and making the kitchen (and the surrounding area outside, to judge by the number of passersby craning their necks) smell wonderful, we ate slices of a previously baked lemon pie and listened to Kate read us words of wisdom on the tao of pie baking. She believes firmly in the virtue of pie made with love and intention, and encourages us all to go out and share the knowledge of pie. 

Everyone’s pies came out beautifully. We headed home with our finished pie, a tub of leaf lard to play with at home, a set of Kate’s recipes, and a fresh appreciation for the art of pie baking. And the car smelled wonderful the entire drive home.