A very belated happy pie day

I am kicking myself for having recently been such a bad food blogger. My excuse, sad as it might be, is that I recently purchased Lightroom (Adobe's photo editing software). This was supposed to be the amazing software that is also user-friendly. Well, perhaps it is wonderful and does transform and restore one's otherwise mediocre photos into halfway decent pieces, but it's also a hell of a lot more challenging to use that I had hoped or anticipated. Meanwhile, I have tons of food photos on my camera that I now feel are un-blog-worthy in their unedited state. And so they've been sitting untouched,  unblogged, unviewed, and utterly unloved. Until now.

Finally, I am breaking down; I haven't had the time to go through the lightroom tutorials, and the program is far from being point and clicky easy, and so I'm posting the raw photos in all their unedited glory--dark, overexposed, blurry, uncropped, etc. Forgive me.

And forgive me again-I can't even begin to recount everything that we've cooked in the past month and a half or so.

However, one of the highlights-no question-was Pie Day.

Oh yes indeed, the American Pie Council declared January 23 National Pie Day:

"National Pie Day? Well, why not? Pies have always been a sweet treat to warm the cold winter days and with the holiday celebrations a fading memory, this is a great way to warm up a January cold snap"

See here for more information: http://www.chiff.com/a/american-pie-day.htm

On the website the pie council offers many suggestions for ways to celebrate this holiday. For example:
1.) Eat pie
2.) Bake pie
3.) Share pie
4.) Teach pie making
5.) Hold a pie night...

...

Hmmm hold a pie night. What a good idea. 


You may or may not be aware of my minor obsession with pie baking. Given this, I of course had to celebrate the holiday in some way or another. I invited a few friends from my graduate program over for a pie potluck (after all there is no better way by which to drown one's graduate school misery than by baking and subsequently eating one-- or several --pies). I made a pie-music play list to go with the pie eating. Among the tunes on the list were: Custard Pie (Led Zeppelin), Pumpkin Pie (Joe Thompson), Country Pie (Bob Dylan), Bake That Chicken Pie (Uncle Dave Macon), Honey Pie (the Beatles), and everyone's favorite, Making Pies (Pattie Griffin). We baked, and then we listened to the pie inspired music while we ate. Oh yeah, and we drank lots of coffee (goes well with pie + we're sleep-deprived). We also drank some yummy ginger liquor-to counteract the coffee effects.

 

And oh, it was wonderful. We ended up with five pies at the event:  Key lime, lemon custard, pumpkin, apple cream with meringue topping, and tomato and cheese. I prepared the latter two pies, and so these are the ones for which I can provide recipes. I give the recipe for the tomato corn pie below; I am saving the recipe for the apple cream pie for another post!

In the meantime I just can't wait until the next pie day. I've heard of people celebrating pie on March 14 (3.14=pi, get it?) Ohhh the possibilities.

 I have previously referred to the tomato and cheese pie recipe. However, last time I made this pie, I tried to make the recipe "healthier" (always a bad idea) by creating a butterless, whole wheat crust and using ricotta cheese instead of cheddar cheese and mayonnaise. Well this time I did not hold back. And good lord was result a good one.

I found the recipe for tomato and corn pie here, on the smitten kitchen blog--the recipe she adapted came from Gourmet Magazine.

Basically, first you make a biscuit-type crust, using 2 cups of flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, and 3/4 tablespoon of salt-whisk those together, then blend in 3/4 cup of cold butter using a food processor/pastry blender/your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse corn meal. Then you add in some milk (3/4 cup, whole milk preferred but use what you have on hand) until you get a nice dough that you can form into a ball. Divide the dough into 2 parts, then roll out one part and place as the bottom crust into a pie dish. Place the second part of dough into the fridge until you're ready to use it.

Even though this is not recommended in the recipe, I prebaked the pie crust for about 15 minutes (place a sheet of buttered aluminum foil on the bottom crust, place some pie weights or dry beans on top of that, and bake for about 15 minutes at 400 degrees).

Then, construct the pie: layer tomatoes (I used one and a half 28 oz. cans of whole plum tomatoes, which I drained very well), grated cheese (7 oz.), herbs (1 tablespoon of chives and 1 tablespoon of basil, chopped), pepper, corn (1.5 cups-i used frozen corn), and a mayonaise (1/3 cup) and lemon juice (2 tablespoons) mixture, then roll our your second half of dough and place on top of your layered pie. Brush the crust with milk to create a nice brown color after baking.

Bake the pie for 30-35 minutes in the oven, at 400 degrees.

Again, you can find the recipe on the smitten kitchen blog. I honestly think that this pie is probably hard to mess up. I substituted canned tomatoes for fresh ones, and frozen corn for fresh corn. The pie was still delicious. I recommend straining the tomatoes in order to avoid a puddle at the bottom of your pie.