apples in pie shell

As I said, I love the Moosewood Cookbook. The recipe for Apple Custard Pie was easy to follow and tasted great. Cartoonist said this was one we had to make again.

This called for 2 cups of peeled and sliced apples, put in to a pie crust.  I am really bad at making  pie crusts. They just down’t want to roll out. I made a simple cold water crust, which is flour butter and water. I used white rice flour.  I tried rolling it out three or four times, and finally just put it in the pie shell and pushed it down with my fingers. Sigh.

Then Cartoonist put the apple slices in, and then we mixed up the 4 eggs, 1/4 cup of raw sugar, 1 cup of yogurt, 1 tsp of vanilla, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, and 1/4 tsp of salt, all mixed up in the blender, until frawthy.

Custard and apple in pie shell

Cartoonist poured the custard into the pie shell and we put it in the oven for 45 minutes at 375F. We had no idea if it was going to turn out, but Cartoonist made sure to tast it before it went in the over, to make sure it at least had a fighting chance of being good.

Finsihed Apple Custard Pie

When we took the pie out, the crust could have browned a little more, but the whole pied tasted so good, we couldn’t wait until it cooled off to sample it. We are now adding that to the list of things we want to try to make again, and improve on. (One thing I’ve got to learn to do is make a better pie crust). I used rice flour and coconut again.

Tapioca, watermelon, and cream cheese

Crust made from potatoes and almonds and rice

Crust with filling

Meringue spooned on

So this time I suggested thickening it up with tapioca. Here is a picture of it cooking. We tried draining the watermelon, but when you pulp watermelon, you basically get watermelon juice, and not much more. There is nothing to thicken it up on its own, which is why I thought of tapioca.   Perhaps corn starch next time?

Then came making the crust, and keeping with the glutton free theme, which I will mention tomorrow, I made the crust with potatoes, almonds and some mix of rice flour. As usual, nothing is ever written down, so who knows how much of each I put in. I found the basis for the recipe in the Broccoli Forest, again. Great book for experimenting with. One of these days I’ve actually got to follow the whole recipe and see what happens.

So, then we poured the tapioca watermelon mix into the pie crust, and decided to go all out and add meringue. I suppose we could have just stopped there, but the last time we made this, we cooked the crust, then cooked the meringue separately because we felt the filling didn’t need to be cooked. But since I had already boiled it down when adding the tapioca, I figured it couldn’t hurt to cook it some more.
Now, the last time we made meringue, it turned out soupy, so this time we added the ingredients before whipping the eggs. I had also read that one shouldn’t handle the egg whites, so we were very careful with that, doing it the way my mother showed me, which is to toss the yolk back and forth in the shell.

The finished pie

And the meringue came out for once. It cooked up nice an fluffy.

Unfortunetly, the pie was not quite what we wanted. The meringue was great, and now that we know how to make it right, we shall do that part again. We used six egg’s white, 3 table spoons of raw sugar and a dab of vanilla and almond, before we started beating it. This seemed to work better.

And the crust wasn’t bad either, and might work well for other things.

But all together, this pie is not one we will keep much beyond taking photos of it. Like the recipes that Edward Lear wrote, I feel we should throw the whole mess out the window to finish it off.