Roger's View of the World, Love and Seafood Gumbo!
Seize the Day! Put no trust in the morrow! — Horace
Don’t even ask how many calories are in a pistachio pie, let’s just say that one slice can feed a grown Hobbit for a week!
What you see is what my pistachio pie looked like… a nice custard with a variety of sized pistachios… whole , chopped and ground. BTW, Pistachios are fairly buoyant and work their way to the top in the baking process. The slice above is topped with a rum flavored whipping cream which is easily prepared.
Now time for a nap! 😉
Roger
I don’t blame today’s cooks or chefs, they are merely designing recipes for the person who wants cheap and simple. Recipes that take more than 30 minutes to prepare, contain more that 3 ingredients, use salt as their primary seasoning or cost more than a dollar a serving are quickly discarded from consideration. However, if you do this, you miss one of the wonders of desserts… a Pistachio pie.
Pistachios are mainly used as a ‘flavoring’ or as a garnish to recipes and this is an unreasonable compromise to cost as one never quite reaches a true Pistachio ‘high.’ Don’t believe me, but look around the internet and you will find recipes for a ‘cream Pistachio pie”… which means it has a few pistachios on the top with a flavoring of Pistachio in the cream. Take a look at the Pistachio trade groups and you will see that they mention Pistachio recipes in passing as almost an afterthought. At trade shows, Pistachios are often shown in the bag… salted or unsalted, roasted or not, Jalapeno or other flavors… but nothing more exciting than that. The reason is that the world is only beginning to see Pistachios in any quantity.
It is important to remember that in parts of the world where Pistachios are plentiful there are many recipes.. some of them are actually good. I can’t imagine — for examples– a Baklava where Pistachios isn’t the primary ingredient!
Pistachios have some challenges putting them into pie form… but not insurmountable but the texture and variety needs to be addressed … stay tuned for the final recipe.
Roger
There is nothing more disappointing than to bite into something you believe to be extraordinary and find it wanting… however, this was not the case! I have found all too many Pecan pies overly syrupy, overly hard or much like the famous soup where only 1 Pecan swam through. The problems were clear… even in the best recipes, cost dictated taste…. obviously, this presented wonderful opportunities for improvement!
What makes this pie so special is that it contains more eggs, no corn syrup just 100% honey and brown sugar, more pecans prepared three ways (meal, caramelized & chopped and whole), more butter, a candy quality thickener and a crust to die for!
This was a trial for Laura’s Birthday and she loved it… so that’s what matters.
Roger
Have you ever done something that you weren’t suppose to do…. but you knew it just HAD to be done? A while back I blogged and twittered about coming up with a better Pecan Pie recipe and I heard about how wrong this was… one person even (gasp!) referred to me as a ‘Yankee’ and that cut deeply…. y’all know what I am talking about.
First, many recipes call for a certain brand of corn syrup — some of you know who I am talking about. Unfortunately, I won’t use it … as it is a cheap substitution for something a lot better and secondly, it has been ‘cut’ with high fructose corn syrup. HFCS — we wizards know — has a dramatic effect of reducing our cooking powers… then, there is the fact that I don’t believe it to be too good for you. Alternatively,there are a wonderful variation of sweeteners that could be used… such as honey ( make sure you use a honey that is not ‘cut’ with corn syrup).
The next issue is in thickeners which detract from the dessert such as corn starch or flour… there is a better way (arrowroot). How many eggs is too many? What about using real vanilla beans and not just poor flavorings? The pecans themselves are sometimes soft, chewy or gummy as they are prepared, but steps can be taken to avoid this ( do we just toast them or do we further caramelize them?).
Lastly, a good pie need not have a bland or disappointing crust ( how about a little Mace?)… so we make this ourselves.
Ah, the work goes on…. if you want something better.
Roger
Vacations don’t have to be exotic, expensive or bound to long away locations. However, vacations do need to take you away from what you are doing and put you somewhere else to experience another of what life has to offer.
Karen had plans and we thought about tagging along and seeing an intersquad scrimmage among Southern Cal’s Trojan football team. It was a nice sneak peek into the world of Trojan football and a time to revisit SC again. We stayed at the Radisson just off campus giving us a chance to visit and eventually end up at the old hangout ‘el Chollo’s’... Los Angeles’s finest Mexican restaurant.
I am sure the coaches saw sparks of brilliance and some things they are going to work on… but from my perspective there was enough there to worry most people. I would have liked to see the quarterback run more… but that’s just me.
It was all fun!