Doomless pies

[pameladean]

I have made three pies today, my contribution to the Thanksgiving dinner at my mother's place tomorrow. The mince and the vegan pumpkin behaved beautifully. I think the O-ring on the blender needs replacing, but it did puree the tofu all right. I got bored with the standard piecrust recipe and, for the apple pie, decided to do a whole-wheat crust I've done many times before. It refused to hang together even after I put in about twice as much water as called for. I patted some of it into the pie plate and went to slice up the apples. Coborns' had sent the wrong kind. I ordered Haralson's and they gave me Courtiers, whatever the heck those are. Well, actually, now I can tell you that they are a crisp and vaguely tart apple. Not being mealy is good, but Haralson's have a much better punch. I did have two large Haralson's apples left from an eating stash, so about half the pie is the right apple.

The top crust was even worse than the bottom. I figured I'd better make a lattice since it clearly was not going to work out as a circle, but even the strips broke. I just kind of scattered them over the top and am hoping for the best; the pie is now in the oven.

In other news, taking no diuretics at all is not a winning strategy. They put me back on a small dose, which removed the retained fluid but did not significantly bring down my blood pressure. (It's not dangerous, just rather higher than optimal.) Also, I had three migraines and several half-migraines in the ten days we tried this regimen, and when I went in to be checked I had a pulse rate of 106. So they upped the beta blocker to 150 mg, though 100 mg is generally described as "maxed out." I was a little concerned about this, but so far it's been fine. No migraines and no tachycardia, hooray. I don't know what my physiology is so agitated about, though.

We have mice upstairs. Ari has been hunting them, but it's pretty cluttered up here.

I'm well into Chapter 4 of Abiding Reflection. This one is reusing material, but it all has to be rewritten because the characters originally involved have been removed.

I am grateful for many aspects of my life, including all of you. Yes, that means the ones I haven't friended back who comment anyway, too. I hope your holiday is not stressful and that you get what you want from it.

ETA. Wonderful, I burned the apple pie. I didn't hear the microwave timer beep. I think perhaps I was answering the telephone for my brother to convey from my mother the question of whether we would want breakfast or lunch tomorrow when we arrived at an ungodly hour for David to cook the turkey. But I'm not sure.

Pamela

Comments

[casacorona.livejournal.com]

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, too.

I hope the BP regimen change helps.

[1crowdedhour.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. Every time I see the half-jar of mincemeat in my fridge, I think of that pies of doom incident. Glad this year cancels it out. Have a lovely day.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Happy Thanksgiving!

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

Wishing you a great Thanksgiving weekend (I don't normally comment because incoherent squees of glee get a bit silly after a while.)

I wish we had a similar November celebration here in the UK. We have had rain and floods and horrible weather this year, and could really do with a celebration like yours, which seems to me to be at an ideal time, when the weather is yucky -yucky-yucky.

Mice: yep, been there, done that, borrowed the neighbour's cat to try and chase 'em away. In the end we had to call on the local authority's ratcatching department - but all they did was lay down old-fashoined mousetraps everywhere. It's the mouse-poo everywhere that is most revolting. Ewww! As Buffy would say. Good luck!

[aedifica]

Well, maybe just a little doom. But not much. Hooray for the mince and pumpkin pies! (And I mistyped "mince" as "mice" at first.)

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

Mice: We have had some success with little sonic devices gotten from the hardware store that annoy the mice into leaving at an ultrasonic frequency. Both I and Evil Rob have pretty sensitive hearing at the upper end and they don't bother us at all. The devices need an outlet and the results don't travel through walls well but the mice left the kitchen*. So that's a win.

Pie crust: Alton Brown has recipes with alcohol that can use more liquid because the alcohol doesn't glutenize the crust the way straight water does. You might look up the recipes on Food Network and see if they'll help you in the future.

*Kitchen is a non-standard shape but has cheap standard cabinetry. This means there are large inaccessible areas where mice can safely congregate. Our tortie's eyes were so big as she sat waiting, waiting, waiting...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That is quite enough doomfulness and entirely too many migraines. I hope things improve from here.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

I have really *not* had any luck with vegan pastry so far. If it held together at all, you're doing better than me.

Of course, I'm now all inspired by my oven class, so maybe I should try it again tomorrow...

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Golden crisco.

I made quite good Singer-safe pastry with potato and chestnut flour and golden crisco.

[pameladean]

My standard pastry recipe was already vegan. It's just the basic Betty Crocker one with Crisco. This is not, of course, exactly healthy or natural, but the same cookbook also has a recipe for oil pastry. The instructions are silly, since you can't really cut oil into flour until there are pea-sized bits, but as long as you use waxed paper and flour it and the rolling pin, the oil pastry behaves well and is very good. It's more crispy and less flaky, but I like it.

I think a lot of pastry is what you're used to, though, because a feel for the dough is really necessary, both because of varying moisture content in the flour and the vagaries of weather. Or at least, I've found it so, have you?

P.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Half-migraines? You mean only a quarter of your head feels as if heavy construction work is being done? My sympathies. I went through a couple of years in my teens during which migraines were frequent.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Don't think we have that in Australia. What is it, exactly?

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

I'm not really confident with any kind of pastry, yet (possibly because the weather is more than usually vagarious around here, or possibly because I'm just not good at pastry), so that probably doesn't help! I tried an italian vegan recipe using olive oil when rosemaryinwheat was here, but couldn't get it to hold together at all.

Is Crisco a vegan margarine, by any chance? Or something else?

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

On a completely irrelevent note, I've just realised that my autotranslate function read Margaret Fulton for Betty Crocker without even noticing until I thought, wait, they have Margaret Fulton in the US? That's really cool! ... and realised that no, you didn't, I just read Author of Cookbook Which Everyone, And Their Mother And Grandmother Owns and decided that could only be Maggie...

(and now I feel an almost overwhelming urge to send all my overseas friends copies of Margaret Fulton, because surely everyone is supposed to have a copy on their shelves...)

[pameladean]

Crisco is solid vegetable shortening; these days, you can get it as partly hydrogenated soybean oil, which has trans fats, or as palm oil, which is saturated all to heck but has no trans fats. It is vegan but not margarine -- no salt or any other attempt to make it seem like butter. It's the vegetarian equivalent of lard.

Golden Crisco, I think, is an attempt to make Crisco more buttery; I am not sure what they do to achieve this, never having used it.

P.

[pameladean]

I certainly feel that I should try to find a copy now!

P.

[pameladean]

Hee.

No, I mean that I felt a migraine coming on and managed to squash it before it really got going. This usually means no pain but still some neurological nonsense -- audio and photo-sensitivity, difficulty in focusing, stuff like that.

P.

[pameladean]

Thank you! Day Three, still no migraines. I haven't had time to check my actual blood pressure, but really, if the migraines and tachycardia will stay the heck away and they have to give me something else to get the pressure down where it needs to be, I'm okay with that.

P.

[pameladean]

Thank you, and you too!

It's a pity about the apple pie, but maybe next year they will all be fine.

P.

[pameladean]

The same to you, you farmer's-market fiend!

P.

[pameladean]

Thanks, you too.

We have had a weirdly warm and pleasant November, and that meant Thanksgiving felt as if it had sneaked up on us.

We have had a full-blown mouse infestation, which I cleaned up under the erroneous impression that all mice carried hanta-virus; but this appears to be two mice, or maybe just one very fast one. I hope it doesn't bring any friends.

[pameladean]

I sincerely hope we do not have enough mice to make a whole pie.

I think this was not doom, just minor destruction.

P.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

mmmm pretzel-rolls!

[pameladean]

Yes, really the only value of indoor mice that I can see is that it is a lot of fun for the cats.

We have some odd cabinetry ourselves, alas.

I will look into the sonic devices. I take it they didn't bother the tortie either?

P.

[pameladean]

So far, so good. Thanks.

It is not very doomful compared to last year, or whenever it was that both baked pie shells slid off the oven shelf and did a perfect flip to land upside down on the floor, after which I realized that I should have baked the filling into them.

P.

Hi!

[gypsy1969.livejournal.com]

Doesn't bring any friends or have any babies! That's what happens here, they hide unknown to us until their prodigies come and infest the place. Then we go on a killing spree, counting them up on the fridge, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7!

I hope your holidays are happy. I don't have time much for LJ it seems because I'm too busy with 9 grad. college hours (3 classes) and of course Facebook which eats a lot of time.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Sounds a little like Copha, which I believe is coconut oil in some form, and smells exactly like candlewax when melted. It's the key ingredient in chocolate crackles (the must-have children's birthday party food, involving rice bubbles, cocoa, copha and desecrated coconut, with optional choc-chips [my variation], glacé cherries, sultanas, etc).

Might be worth a try, now I think of it.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

She tends to get billed as the mother of Australian cooking, and was the Australian Women's Weekly food editor for years, I think (the AWW has produced an enormous number of very useful cookbooks of all kinds of cuisines, as well as their famous children's birthday cake books). I haven't used her savoury stuff, much, but I learned scones from her book, and her buttercakes and cupcakes are also the base from which one works for all sorts of things (especially children's birthday cakes). And, actually, she has stuff like bechamel sauce, and bread and cheese charlotte, and peas with lettuce, and all this stuff I recognise from my grandmother's cooking but which I don't use much due to Andrew's particular pickiness about food. And I've made most of her quiches.

Her encyclopedia of cooking is even better - much better than the Stephanie Alexander ones - because not only can you look up any ingredient and get told what to do with it, but if you look up 'sandwich' it gives you a bunch of classic recipes, including pinwheels, and the two-colour kind, and club sandwiches, or if you look up 'cake' or 'soup' or 'salad' and so forth, you get lots of good, standard recipes for those. Also, it's the book which I resort to when I realise halfway through a recipe that I don't have self-raising flour and can't remember the proportion of baking powder you need to add to plain in order to make your own...

Not my favourite cookbook, or my most frequently-used one, but it is the one I go back to when I don't know how to do something, because you can be sure the method you are looking for will be there, and that it will work. Sort of like a grandmother in book form...

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Ah. I don't think they have it in Britain either, certainly I never saw it before I moved to Canada. You know Trex, solid vegetable oil, or "vegetarian lard" as my aunt calls it? In the US and Canada it's called "Crisco" and identical. But "golden Crisco" is solid vegetable oil made to resemble butter for baking purposes. I was surprised how well it faked, well, baking marge. Most vegan marge in my experience is just pathetic.

[pameladean]

The only vegan margarine worth its salt, or any of its other ingredients either, is Earth Balance.

P.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Interesting. We have Nuttelex here as our vegan/dairy free margarine brand, and it's pretty good - they have a number of varieties, some of which use olive oil, or are kosher, or unsalted, etc - and I've used it happily in vegan cupcakes. It is a little on the too buttery side for my taste, but still good.

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

I hope that you had a suitably splendid Thanksgiving. I sympathize with your pie-related difficulties, as I have talent for burning baked goods. Thankfully, in recognition of my talent, people often bake them for me.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

The cat doesn't seem to mind the sonic devices in the least. My dad is looking to see if they make a version for rats because he'd love to put one in his attic. (Norwegian roof rats; nothing like finding one of those eviscerated on the doorstep of a morning.)

[lcohen]

ah, now your pie advice has so much more context! but i cheated and used a store-bought crust. the apples i used were winesaps and jonathans--i have no idea if these are good cooking apples, but the pie is fine.

[pameladean]

It's partly just a matter of taste, but as a rule, you want crisp, tart apples. Winesaps and Jonathans fit that description pretty well.

My only real problem with store-bought crusts is that so many of them have either butter or lard in them, and I can't eat either.

P.

[eredien]

Do you have the recipe for vegan pumpkin? I made one this year and it was sweet and delicious but lacked body and was rather more like a pumpkin custard.

[pameladean]

This may have the same problems -- I hadn't had any actual pumpkin pie for so long when I first made this that I really don't know. It's been compared to pumpkin cheesecake by omnivores, though, so maybe that is hopeful.

Note: I've never seen a 16-oz package of silken tofu, but the 14-oz one works fine. Twelve ounces also works, but the pie is less dense then. Don't use the low-fat version of silken tofu -- if you do that the filling tastes like tofu and has a weird texture. I have tried making up for the low-fat tofu by putting in extra oil, but I can't recommend that.

Other Note: I tend to do heaping versions of all the spice measurements except the cloves, which I do a scant version of. Sometimes I leave them out altogether and put in cardamom instead.


1 16-ounce package of silken tofu, drained

1 15-ounce can unsweetened pumpkin puree

3/4 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1 9-inch pie shell

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Blend tofu and pumpkin in a food processor until combined and looking orange. Add sugar and vanilla and blend until well-combined. With a rubber spatula, scoop mixture out of food processor bowl and into a medium mixing bowl. Add remaining ingredients and stir by hand until they are well-integrated. Pour into 9-inch pie shell. Place pie shell on a baking tray, which goes into the oven.

Bake at 425 for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 325 degrees. Bake for about 45 minutes, until filling is nearly set. You may also notice slight cracks, which is a good indication that filling is set.

Remove from oven and cool about 1 hour. Cover with foil and place in refrigerator until cold, at least one hour. Best served cold.

[pameladean]

Final note: If you don't have a food processor, you can puree the tofu in a blender, cream it by hand or with a regular mixer with the pumpkin and sugar, mix in everything else, and have a perfectly fine pie filling. Some versions of this recipe have you put in all the spices except the ginger before the oil and vanilla, and add the ginger at the end, but I'm not sure what that's about.

P.

[eredien]

Thank you! I really appreciate the recipie!