Saturday, November 26, 2011

lemon lime pie

Clement & I have a long history of making published and invented variations of lemon cookies and lemon cakes.  Ever since he discovered the puckery pleasure of sucking on lemon wedges, that has become his favorite dessert flavor.  For this Thanksgiving we branched out & made a lemon pie  or tart  (texture similar to lemon squares we've bought in bakeries).  

We made some changes to a recipe published in the November 2011 issue of Glamour.  I started getting it as a substitute to longtime Domino subscription after it folded. Glamour it turn adapted it from Food52 cookbook by Hesser and Stubbs. 

The recipe calls for Meyer lemon which we didn't find in the store.  We used an organic lemon & peel & a lime (no lime  skin, I tasted it first & rejected the colored/pesticidey? yucky flavor).  We used our Vitamix blender which really pulverizes stuff to a fine consistency.

Lemon lime pie recipe
Anyhow, I peeled the lemon skin off,
put the skin & lemon minus the pith & seeds into the blender.
Added a lime, no skin, no seeds.
1.5 cups regular sugar (recipe said superfine, but the blender ground it up just as well)
1 stick soft butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 eggs (like sister Eymard taught, broken one at a time into a cup, pick out shells, toss if spoilt,
if clean & good only then toss in blender)

pulverize

pour into shell (open faced)

We made recipe for 2 shells from my first cookbook by Doubleday from about 1979

Recipe for 2 pie shells
2 cups flour
2/3 cup Crisco (we used butter flavored)
a tiny bit of icy water

cut first 2 ingredients with 2 butter knives, the a little bit of water,
mold into 2 balls, roll with rolling pin cut to fit tin.  Wisteria was a big help with the rolling. 
It's very freeing to delegate kitchen duty to offspring especially since it felt like playtime to her.

Sweet potato pie freeform recipe
The second shell we used to make invented sweet potato pie. 
So, baked sweet potatoesand/or butternut squash,
(I like the dry fluffy texture of these combined, maybe you like pumpkin, I don't so much, seems it comes out too wet/stringy for my taste, I don't like most banana breads for the same reason)
use your own good guestimate
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
some cardamon, ginger, pumpkin pie spice (which typically includes cinnamon & nutmeg)
to your taste

pour into shell (open faced)

Our oven's dial is kind of deformed,
so we baked each pie at some mediumish temperature for about 40 minutes. 
I kept checking, so things didn't burn up.
If you can regulate with some accuracy, 350 degrees is probably good.

One of my favorite sweet potatoe pie memories was a former roommate's mother coming to visit for Thanksgiving weekend.  She brough with herself 4 sweet potato pies. 4 days later they were all gone.  Before leaving Sunday she baked more to leave behind.  What a kind, gracious person.

Technical note: the blender definitely speeds things up.
But grating the skin and squeezing the juice and  mashing things up would be fine too.

Before the weekend washes away in the rain, the children and I will make a second round to ease us into the week.

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