roasted parsnip pie

I made a parsnip pie back in 2007, and here's a new version. 

Crust:

• 8 oz. flour
• 4 oz. lard
• 1½ oz butter
• ⅓ c. water
• ½ tsp salt

Filling:

• 18 oz. parsnips
• chicken stock
• butter
• allspice berries
• thyme
• 8 oz. crème fraîche
• 4 eggs, separated
• nutmeg, grated (I used about an ⅛ of an inch nutmeg)
• salt, pepper

Make the crust as you would any other (that's modified from Tartine's recipe), or use your favorite recipe. The lard seemed like a good idea for Thanksgiving. Chill overnight or at least while preparing the parsnips.

Chop and roast the parsnips at 375ºF with some allspice, thyme, and a few knobs of butter, with a half inch of chicken stock in the pan.

Meanwhile, roll out your crust, bake for ten minutes (also at 375ºF) with foil and pie weights and another eight without, until it is fully baked.

When the stock has evaporated form the parsnips, replenish, and roast until they are soft and caramelized (about an hour).

Purée the parsnips, adding enough stock to make it smooth. Pass this through a conical strainer (chinois), food mill, or sieve, so that the allspice and any fibers are taken out.

Add egg yolks one at a time, then fold in crème fraîche and season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and more thyme. Beat the whites to soft peaks and whisk into the parsnip mix (you don't need to be gentle—it's not a soufflé, it's okay to beat to get it smooth).

Pour into the prebaked shell and bake for about 45 minutes at 325ºF, until set.

And here it is:

sour cherry pie

One of my favorite things about living in Chicago in the summer is being so close to Michigan, one of the few places that produces sour cherries, which, I would argue, are more complex and have more flavor than sweet cherries. They are also better for baking.

I was over-zealous with the cherries, so they bubbled up over the lattice. Nonetheless, this was an incredible cherry pie. Just 1½ quarts cherries, a cup of sugar, 3 tablespoons of tapioca, some vanilla and almond liqueur, and a bit of salt. Sour cherries are complex, never cloying, and this was remarkably well-balanced, especially with a scoop of good vanilla ice cream.

shaker lemon pie

Shaker lemon pie really is more grand with Meyer lemons — I do wish I had taken a photo of a slice before we devoured it all.

pear-quince-apple pie

Poached quinces. Apples (two varieties, whose names I forget, but both hardy, heirloom baking ones). Bosc pears. And an all-butter crust.

the devil and the shakers

I made a Shaker lemon pie using Meyer lemons last week -- it came out quite well. I might have used a bit more sugar -- or let the lemons macerate longer than over overnight -- but I was mostly satisfied. That -- as well as my next adventure -- came from Tartine. Just lemons, sugar and eggs in a flaky crust -- I was very careful to have a low-moisture crust and almost mangled it, but the extra work paid off as the crust was wonderful.


Next, for J.'s birthday, I made a devil's food cake with ganache and caramel filling and a ganache and crumb coat. The cake was a straightforward devil's food cake, rich with butter, cocoa and buttermilk.

It's four layers, with a layer of caramel and ganache in-between, then coated in two layers (a crumb coat and a smooth coat) of ganache. Then, before it cools, it gets coated in toasted cake crumbs (from the domes of the cakes) that have been pulverized in the food processor. I wish I had taken a photo of it sliced.

autumnal

I've been thinking about parsnip pie — I'd like to make one (or some) for Thanksgiving — so I gave it a go last night. Two medium parsnips were roasted with salt and olive oil and then puréed with a clove of garlic, two eggs, milk and pepper. I baked them in small tart shells made with a sage-thyme crust.

And voilà... they were quite good. Not as cute as I'd hoped, but I thought quite delicious.

Then there was homemade pasta with sautéed purple cauliflower, purple kale and bâtons of sunchoke. Last week I made mashed sunchokes — this was a much better use of the sunchoke.


And then there was an ad hoc bosc pear crisp (we were out of apples): simple, very very good — and I tried whipping some crème fraîche that I had made and it was incredibly good. Tangy, not sugary-sweet like whipped cream. Really quite delicious.