Burning off the winter

The Groundhog Party 2019: A Summoning of Spring, was a huge success.  We had a new winner of pin the shadow on the groundhog, the groundhog apple pie in cheddar crust was as delicious as ever* (and there was enough food that I we had leftovers for breakfast), clouds wafted from the punch, and we twirled fire.

For the 26th year of groundhog parties (the first was in Boulder in 1994), a dear friend drove down from Kansas, we baked gorgeous pies, and we added witchiness to the celebration.  At first the witchiness felt a bit forced-- what can we do to end witch year with a party?  And then I started reading about pagan sabbats and investigating Imbolc and suddenly it all made so much sense because the Groundhog Party has always been a pagan celebration of the coming of spring.  This year we added extra flowers, made the pies extra sunny (traditional Imbolc foods are wheat and round and golden), lit candles throughout the house, and burned away the greens of winter (in this case adding some kerosene to a giant sedge I had brought home from work).  

It was a great party.  I don't think anyone resented that I made them make name tags and did formal introductions because it led to guests meeting other guests and actually talking.  People asked for pie recipes.  We started making plans for practice sessions with the fire torches so that more people will want to pull them out next year.  At church this morning, three weeks after the party, a man went out of his way to thank me for inviting him. 

I'm writing this to remind you (and myself of the future) that people are longing to celebrate.  It doesn't take a witch to bring people together for frivolity and good food, but the synergy can make magic. 

JMM with Shaker Blood Orange Pie

Welcome of witches, hedgehogs, and seasonal
guessing game

Shaker Lemon: J.M. Moody Photo

Flowers!

 *The Sausage Apple Pie and the Shaker Lemon and Shaker Blood Orange are all from Kate McDermott's The Art of the Pie.

I'm Still Counting

Pie year continues through the Lunar New Year or such time that I decide the new theme begins, so, have no fear, there are still chances for more pie.

I baked three pies over the weekend, the two Epiphany pies shown below, plus a ham, leek, ricotta pie the next day, and surprised myself by not being able to give an accurate count when asked how many I've baked during Year of Pie. Obviously, what I need to do on the first night of class is sit down and count some more.

When I last counted in early September, I had baked (or directed the baking of) 47 pies to date.

Since then

September (1 in addition to the 7 listed earlier)
S'Mores Pie for the Mister's birthday

October (5)
 2 sweet potato for Race, Religion and BBQ discussions (more on both the pies and the issues sometime in the future) which are the best pies I have baked.
3 variations on chocolate chess for the Fall Festival at Church

November (10)

Nov. Student Baking: Sometimes One Forgets to Style the Pies

Lemon tart, Chocolate Chess, Chocolate Pecan, and Chocolate, Cinnamon, Coffee, Pecan with students (all good, but as the Mister declared, none as good as the sweet potato).
Pumpkin and sweet potato for the harvest breakfast
Mincemeat, cranberry mince, pumpkin and sweet potato for Thanksgiving

December (3)
Cranberry rhubarb, mincemeat and Shaker orange for Christmas

January (3 so far)
Sausage and apple, Epiphany Pie, and Ham, Leek and Ricotta

68 pies to date!

Variations of chocolate and pecan.  All good.  None better than
straight pecan or straight chocolate.

Pies Parading On

Thanksgiving

I chipped a small piece of my wrist in November, while talking.  Yes, the longest blog post hiatus of the ten year I have been doing this can be attributed needing to wear a brace from talking too enthusiastically.
Anyway, all is not fully healed, but I am now four days without a brace and soon I will be typing at full speed again.  In the meantime, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Epiphany Pies.

For Thanksgiving, The Mister cooked most of the meal at the Mister's parents' house.  I baked pumpkin, sweet potato, and mincement pies and a cranberry mince tart, while my parents drove from Colorado to Kansas to join us, bringing pecan pie, a cranberry walnut tart and my niece.

In my mind, Thanksgiving has a set pie tradition, and adding chocolate to those mentioned above would be about as far as I deviate from it.  Christmas, on the other hand, is not normally pie time in my household, and while the Christmas Eve meal and desserts are set, Christmas Day is fairly open.  I baked three pies, intentionally making them not predominately sweet.  I attempted to improve upon the homemade mincemeat from Thanksgiving and ended up with a very dense mincemeat, heavy on the allspice, ginger and cloves.  Cranberry rhubarb was tart and bright and the shaker orange with teh snowflake top crust included the peel, so it has bitter notes along with the tart and sweet.

We had friends over for dinner last night and decided to make it an Epiphany/Three Kings Day/Twelfth Night celebration.  We had a sausage apple pie in a cheddar crust and almond frangipane in puff pastry, which I am insisting on calling an Epiphany Pie rather than a Galette des Rois or a Kings' Cake.  Aster was very involved with the baking of both Epiphany pies and is planning what next year's kings' cake will be.  I explained to him the tradition of the "lucky" recipient of the charm being required to bake the next cake, and that he can do it any time until Mardi Gras, he doesn't need to wait until next year.  The Mister suggested that he bake a Martin Luther King Cake next week for after the march.

Joining Families at Thanksgiving on the Ranch

Mincemeat and Cranberry Rhubarb: Christmas

Shaker Orange: Christmas

Sausage and Apple in a Cheddar Crust: Ephiphany

Epiphany Pie-- or Galette des Rois

Pie Party

Last weekend was the annual croquet party at my parents' house.  As per recent tradition, we didn't actually play croquet.  In keeping with longer-running tradition (this is the 30th year of the party), we had great food.

The theme of the party was PIE (in all caps) and I baked a great variety: coconut cream, plum, lemon meringue, beet, chocolate chess and a gluten and dairy-free plumberry meringue.  My mother baked a key lime and other friends brought strawberry rhubarb, fruit pizza, ice cream pie, another key lime and rhubarb with a crumble top. It was my kind of event.

Plum prior to baking

For those following recipes-- the chocolate chess, an overall hit, is from the first or second recipe that pops up on google (the one that calls for 5 Tbs of cocoa).  The lemon meringue from Art of Pie is slightly easier (no double-boiler required) and slightly more lemon-y than that from Susan Purdy's As Easy as Pie (which my mother had baked a week prior to almost instantaneous devouring from my family).  The beet, which was a beet-forward rich custard with lots of beets, from Martha Stewarts early 1980s Pies and Tarts, was the best sweet beet pie I've ever had, but it wasn't great and I'm not that interested in beet pie to figure out how to make it great. The coconut cream is from the Magpie book, as were my crusts. The plum was made following the basic recipes in Art of Pie and the Plumberry included all sorts of fruits left in my parents' kitchen, cooked with some sugar and folded with microwaved marshmallows and placed in an almond flour-coconut-pecan-date crust.  Indeed, I made that one up.






As I am keeping records, I should add that I baked a rhubarb-blackberry with a twisted lattice earlier in June while we were still in Oklahoma.  For it I made the cream cheese crust from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible.  It was flakier than the Magpie crust while warm, but didn't necessarily taste better and the texture did not hold to the breakfast leftovers.

Poultry Fowl

Yep, "Poultry Fowl' is intended to be a pun on "party foul" but it doesn't really make sense.  It's the alternative title because I was afraid that the original, "Eating Birds" has some sexual connotation that I'm too naive to know about.

Turducken

During bird year, I have eaten chicken, cornish game hens, quail, goose, duck, pheasant, and turkey at home.  Almost all of these have been roasted by The Mister, who is both a great cook and a great companion.

Cranberry walnut, pumpkin, chocolate pecan and mincemeat

Here's the turducken breast he roasted in New Mexico for our "we're going to be away so we should keep it simple" four-pie Thanksgiving meal (A traditional (??) turducken is a whole chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey. We bought a product labeled as "turducken breast" which included lots of bacon in addition to meat from the three birds.
 Also pictured are the beer can duck being roasted (after having been dried for two days) on its way to becoming Peking Duck with little Mandarin pancakes and three new radishes I bought at the Asian grocer in Denver.

Peeking at the Peking Duck

Korean radish, Chinese daikon and Yuan radish, I believe.
The middle one was pithy but the other two types excellent