I wrote about my storied past with the humble apricot during the popsicle project. Here is a quick overview: I spent a summer working on an apricot orchard. I was in charge of slicing apricots in half. I didn't enjoy it but I learned some valuable lessons. As the father in Calvin and Hobbes would appreciate, I developed a bit of character. I also have a storied past with tiny things. The story is much longer, much happier, and much harder to distill. I can't say exactly when I started loving tiny things. I think it began when Eve and I drifted into a three year long sticker phase, where a perfect weekend would include taking a trip to a local stationary store, spending our savings on tiny stickers (or sometimes other tiny things like tiny pencils or tiny notebooks), taking our things home and then admiring them. A drawing of a pig is always cute, in my opinion, but a tiny pig? That is unbeatable. My mother thinks that my love for tiny things began with beanie babies. To me now, in 2019, beanie babies don't seem tiny enough for me. Make them smaller, I say! Whatever the origin, the love has carried with me to today. Any tiny version of an item moves my heart into a squeal of love. I had to make a tiny pie. I predict there will be more future tiny pies. I was inspired by Alison Roman's salted apricot-honey cobbler recipe. I thought that putting cobbler biscuits on top of a pie crust would be, as we say in the world of pastry, "too much," so I went with a crumble topping rather than a cobbler topping (summer is so wonderful. I am such a big fan). I still kept big notes of honey and even bigger notes of salt and it turned into a wonderfully syrupy, complex little pie. Note that the amounts below are very loose. You should figure out just how tiny you want your pie to be and go from there.
Salted Honey-Apricot Pie Yield: 1 mini pie | Total Time: 1 hour Ingredients Already-made pie dough 4 apricots 1 tbsp honey (adjust this based on how ripe your apricots are) 2 tsp lemon juice Healthy pinch of kosher salt 1/4 cup rolled oats Healthy pinch of flour 1 tsp butter or coconut oil More kosher salt Directions Preheat the oven to 400°. Cut off an appropriately small amount of pie crust from your in-the-fridge crust. To make the filling, slice your apricots and toss them with honey, lemon juice and salt. Place into crust. Cut together the oats, flour, fat and salt. Crumble over the top of the pie. Bake the baby pie until the apricot juice bubbles and the topping is golden-brown, around 25-35 minutes (depending on how tiny you went).
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Everyone, William Carlos Williams included, loves to celebrate the joys of a cold plum. This pie shows how exciting and poetic a hot plum can be. As it should be on a summer Thursday, I found myself with too many plums. I made plum jam with some of the excess plums. Then I chopped up some more plums. Then I thinly sliced the final plums. All of those plum preparations went into the plum pie, which gave it concentrated sweetness, great texture, and elegance, respectively. I felt pleased and justified when I opened the July/August Cook's Illustrated and found a whole wheat plum pie smiling up from its pages. This is not the recipe I used (I didn't use a recipe! I just put three types of plums into a whole wheat crust I had made earlier) but it SHOULD be the recipe you use, if you make a plum pie.
Tomato season has finally landed in northern California. The tired joy of biting into a sweet, warm tomato is the purest sensation of summer, rivaled only by playing tennis at dusk until you can no longer see the ball, spooning the puddle-juice at the bottom of a cobbler or crisp dish over vanilla ice cream, or screaming at your friend that your method of building a s'mores fire is better than theirs (team tepee for life). I knew I wanted to make a savory hand-pie as part of the project. This one is loosely based on a recipe from my new Sister Pie cookbook. I used their hand pie dough, but swapped most of the AP flour for wheat (for more of a RUSTIC feel. I bring rustic energy to suburbia! and I can't apologize for that) and took out the olives (some of my closest friendships have taught me to never make an olive-heavy dish for a dinner event). Instead, I smeared some creamy goat cheese on the base of the dough and then piled the tomatoes high. I also mixed the tomatoes with some basil that I had packed into oil about a month ago (again, the decadence of summer and what-not). They were, according to Miles, "very good." Heirloom Tomato Hand Pies
Yield: 10 hand pies | Total Time: 1 hour Ingredients For the dough: 1 cup all purpose flour 2 3/4 cups whole wheat flour 1 1/2 tsp kosher salt 3 sticks unsalted, very cold butter 3/4 cup very cold water, with some (live your truth) apple cider vinegar mixed in For the filling: 4 heirloom tomatoes 2 tbsp julienned basil 1/3 cup spreadable goat cheese Directions Preheat the oven to 450°. To make the dough, combine the dry ingredients and then, in a pastry blender, cut the butter in until small lumps form. Add in the water mixture and pulse until loosely formed. Transfer to cling wrap and smush into a ball. Chill the dough while you prepare the filling. To make the filling, roughly chop your tomatoes. Mix in the basil. If your goat cheese is not pre-spreadable, gently mix milk into your goat cheese until it can be easily spread with the back of a spoon. Once your goat cheese and filling are ready, take your dough out of the fridge and roll it out. Choose a glass that is the size you want your hand pies to be and stamp out circles for the pies. Spread goat cheese on the bottom round, pile some tomato mixture on top, and place the second round on top. Use the tines of a fork to crimp the hand pies. Egg wash them if you are feeling fancy. Bake the hand pies until golden brown, around 25-35 minutes (depending on size). |