Candy Pie

So I had a family dessert request for pie. A chocolatey creamy kind of pie, and so I consulted my cookbooks since I am not a spur-of-the-moment baker type and decided on a standard recipe from the Betty Crocker's New Cookbook (1996 printing).
 
I had my trusty kitchen hound beside me:

I had an apron on, Martha had the chef hat. Note her stunning new white eyelashes now that she's an older lady. We sallied forth in the kitchen.

This pie is a type of icebox pie, which was OK with me, since it is now summery around here and I don't feel like firing up the oven much. I adapted the recipe to be gluten-free and combined a couple of Betty's variations on Caramel-Peanut Butter Pie Supreme and came up with this version of:

CANDY PIE

Pie Crust:

1 chocolate cookie crumb crust:  (next time I would use a peanut butter cookie crumb base to go better with the flavors in this insanely sweet confection)

I smashed up most of one (6.3 oz.) box of Enjoy Life (GF) Crunchy Double Chocolate Cookies (used 11 of the 14 cookies inside) mixed with 3 Tbsp. melted butter and pressed that into 9 inch glass pie plate. Baked  10 mins. at 350 degrees F. Let it cool.

Pie Filling:


1 (11 oz.) bag vanilla caramels, the soft chewy kind. Check that they are GF (Kraft brand was). Reward the person who unwraps 30 of them with the extras left in the bag (about 5 or 6)

1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans, toasted briefly in a frying pan until the smell of the nuts hits you. Don't let burn!

2 T. butter
2 T. water
1 (3 oz.) pkg. cream cheese, softened
1/3 cup powdered sugar
 1/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1 c. heavy cream, whipped and lightly sweetened

While crust is cooling, melt caramels in a sauce pan with butter and water, stirring constantly. As soon as they are completely melted, pour over cooled crust. Sprinkle on toasted pecans. Cover with plastic wrap and chill in refrigerator until hardened, about 1 hour.

Beat cream cheese, powdered sugar and peanut butter together until smooth. Fold in 1/3 cup whipped cream and spoon over caramel layer. Cover again with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to serve.
Slather remaining whipped cream over the top of the pie.

A super-sweet candy pie, which I was not so keen on, but the rest of my family raved about and snuck slices of for the next couple of days. It's sort of like those Seven Layer Bars in a pie plate. Next time I would leave out the caramel layer and make a peanut butter cookie crust instead.

Martha got excited by the task of licking the peanut butter jar clean after we had used up its contents. She lost her toque in the frenzy.

And then the grand finale of the pie.

Verdict: Pretty easy to make, but ridiculously, over-the-top sweet, so I wouldn't make this version instead. I think a simpler Icebox Peanut Butter Pie would be better. I think my dentist would concur.

Still, I am sending a slice over to Beth Fish Reads, a marvelous blog combo of books and cooking, and her weekly blog event, Weekend Cooking. Head on over to see what other clever and creative cooks made in their kitchens this past weekend.

Gluten Free Product of the Week: Cheese Crisps by Kitchen Table Bakers

How times change. When I started this blog back in 2007, there weren't too many Gluten Free snack options on grocery shelves besides rice cakes, but there has since been a smorgasbord of GF crackers and chips made from all sorts of wheat-free and gluten-free ingredients.

Here at the Crispy Casa we love those Nut Thins, those Mary's Gone Crackers varieties, those Riceworks crackers and we even love making our own crackers from time to time. Now there's yet another tasty GF snack cracker which proved to be a real hit in the Crispy Cook test kitchen.

Kitchen Table Bakers is a New York company whose line of products consists of various flavors of these indulgent, crunchy Cheese Crisps, made of Parmesan and flavorings. They were wonderful snacks that disappeared quickly in my house. They remind me of fricos, those crisp shavings of Parmesan that are crisply fried on both sides and then decorate fancy restaurant salads and appetizers. They were thicker and harder than a frico, but just as decadent.

We love the Cheese Crisps as is, without any topping, as they were satisfying and rich enough on their own. They were excellent accompanied by a glass of dry red wine (try Pinot Noir) and with a side salad, I think you have a nice light meal in the making. Kitchen Table Bakers sent me a package each of Aged Parmesan and Rosemary flavors to sample, and both were equally good.

Locally, you can find Cheese Crisps for sale at Honest Weight Food Coop in Albany, or you can order them online from the Kitchen Table website for $4.99 a package plus shipping.

Two Crispy Thumbs Up for Kitchen Table Cheese Crisps!

Eggs The Color of Tea

Way back when, the Crispy Cook was a young sprig who served as an Au Pair for a family one summer. On my time off I would ride a bike into the little touristy beach town nearby and prowl around, but for a teen in a strange town with no money, there wasn't much to do besides poke around the local antique and souvenir shops. After a couple of these sojourns, I just ended up spending my down time relaxing and reading in my room.

The house was well-stocked with books, and being a foodie in training, I often picked a cookbook out of the shelves to peruse. I remember writing down many recipes out of the 1000 Recipe Chinese Cookbook by Gloria Bey Miller and being fascinated by the variety of intriguing ingredients and types of cuisine that were presented in its pages. One of the recipes I remember vividly was for Tea Eggs, hard-cooked eggs steeped in black tea and fragrant spices.

I never did get around to making these eggy delicacies until just last week, after having read the latest selection for Cook the Books, the online book club that I and three of my blogger buddies take turns co-hosting every other month. Our featured book this time 'round is The Color of Tea, by Hannah Tunnicliffe, and the author herself has graciously agreed to serve as the judge of our contributed posts about the book and the dishes we were inspired to make.

The Color of Tea is an interesting novel about an English woman married to an Australian man, who emigrate to the south China island of Macau after husband Pete lands a job supervising construction of a new gambling casino. Macau is a former Portuguese colony and the culture is an amalgam of Eastern and Western influences, as our heroine Grace discovers in her new life.

Grace and Pete are recovering from multiple rounds of unsuccessful infertility treatments, and as one way of clawing her way out of her malaise, Grace decides to open up a tea shop that specializes in delicately colored and flavored pastries, including many varieties of macarons, those delicate French almond and meringue confections. That's when I really got into the novel, with its descriptions of the customers and coworkers that Grace befriends. The reader finds out the intriguing back stories of these people and of Grace herself, which makes her a lot of more sympathetic than she was to me at the beginning of the tale. I also enjoyed learning more about the issues that foreign workers face which is an integral thread in the novel as well.


One thing that really irked me, though, was the front cover art. It's a delicious looking cover, alright, but given that our protagonist was a redhead, I kept waiting for some explanation of who the long-lashed brunette was featured on the cover. Shouldn't the art department have some conversations with the editorial department at the old publishing house before the book is cranked out?

Back to the Tea Eggs....Reading this book provided the perfect opportunity to finally eggs-periment with making Tea Eggs, as I imagined that might be something found on the menu at Lillian's, Grace's Macau cafe. I found a recipe over at Tiny Urban Kitchen, and it was simple enough: hard boil some eggs, then tap the shells to crack them all over and then simmer (for two hours!) in a mixture of black tea and star anise. I didn't have star anise, but did have some five-spice powder, so I made a small batch. They were beautiful colored with a crazed pattern of brown and white, but to me they weren't much different in taste from a plain old hardcooked egg. They were rubberier in fact, from all those extra minutes in the pot and had that greenish ring around the yolks that one gets from overcooking eggs. Ah well, at least I finally satisfied my curiosity about this dish and I remembered how delicious five-spice powder is, so I will utilizing that more in the kitchen.

Please join me in visiting the other Cook the Books posts about The Color of Tea back at the blog. Deb of Kahakai Kitchen is our wonderful hostess this round and she will be shortly posting the roundup of writings and recipes about our featured novel.

And feel free to join the regulars in our foodie book club in reading our June/July book pick, M.F.K. Fisher's collection of essays, "How to Cook a Wolf". 

A Sicilian-Inspired Dish for Inspector Montalbano

It is time for another round of Cook the Books, the fun foodie book club that I and three of my best blogger buddies take turns hosting. This time we read the first Inspector Montalbano mystery by author Andrea Camilleri, "The Shape of Water". Montalbano is a policeman with a lot of wisdom, heart, common sense, a wry sense of humor, and a love of food. Perfetto!

In our featured book, Montalbano looks for the truth behind the suspicious death of a local politico found in a car in a seedy and desolate part of the Sicilian town of Vigata. His Commissioner wants the details of the death hushed up and tells him that it is "wonderful..that someone in this fine province of our ours should decide to die a natural death and thereby set a good example. Don't you think? Another two or three deaths like Luparello's and we'll start catching up with the rest of Italy."

Montalbano doesn't buy it, and he unravels the rest of the mystery and helps out a few innocents along the way. The dialogue is great and the humorous asides cracked me up ("Ingrid apparently belonged to that category of woman who cannot resist the sight of a bathtub.") (Yes!)  The lover of all things literary and foodie will also find literary snacks strewn between the pages, from paper cones of calia e simenza (roasted chickpeas and pumpkin seeds) to expertly prepared boiled shrimp. Montalbano's housekeeper, Adelina, is the mother of some repeat offenders that our hero has apprehended himself, and leaves him homey dishes in the refrigerator.

I perused my cookbook collection and found a simple recipe for a Sicilian country dish called Pollo e Pomodori in Carol Field's mouthwatering cookbook "In Nonna's Kitchen" (NY: HarperCollins, 1997), which I highly recommend if you're one of those category of women who cannot resist a good cookbook that also contains a lot of stories and folklore. I added a few ingredients and subbed out some others, and this turned out to be a quite "blogworthy" dish, in the words of my dear husband. I served it up with a side of roasted potatoes with rosemary and garlic and I think Inspector Montalbano would have tucked into this too.

Pollo e Pomodori (Chicken with Spiced Tomato Sauce)

3 boneless chicken breast halves, cut into four smaller portions
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 red onion, peeled and diced
1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes
1 apple, peeled and diced
Salt and pepper to taste
1/2 tsp. allspice

Heat olive oil in heavy frying pan. Add onions and saute until soft, about 5 minutes. Add chicken and brown, turning often, about 15 minutes. Add tomatoes, apple, salt and pepper and allspice. Stir, cover pan, and cook over low flame another 20 minutes, or until chicken is done.

The flavors really come together in a spicy tomato gravy that seemed very exotic, though this was an easy dish to make.

The deadline for this round of Cook the Books ends tomorrow. Please visit the Cook the Books blog to see what others have thought about our featured book and what they have cooked. I will present a roundup in a few days after the deadline.

Our next Cook the Books selection is the novel "The Color of Tea" by Hannah Tunnicliffe. Feel free to grab a copy of the book and blog up your thoughts (and cook up something inspired from its pages). Anyone can join in the fun.

Pignoli Cookies for Katniss and The Hunger Games

One of the things I love best about book clubs is that the book selections are often not what I would have picked to read myself. Case in point, The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, which is the current book selection for Cook the Books, the online foodie book club. This month, our host Heather, the Girlichef, chose this title for our reading pleasure and our viewing pleasure, as Cook the Books teamed up with Food n' Flix, a blog event that features foodie films.

The result is that I got to read a book that I normally would have passed by as being "one of those books for young adults" and which I really enjoyed. The set up is that the United States has undergone some kind of nuclear/global warming catastrophe in the future and there is a new country, Panem (Latin for bread), which consists of a decadently wealthy Capitol with twelve outlying districts, for which the virtually enslaved residents provide resources. The heroine of the Hunger Games is Katniss Everdeen, a resident of the coal-mining District #12, who lives with her shell-shocked mother and younger sister, Primrose. Every year the Capitol requires that the districts produce human "tributes" to a a gladiator-like event, the eponymous Hunger Games, in which entrants fight a bloody battle to the death.

When Primrose is selected in a lottery to represent District 12 at the Hunger Games, Katniss volunteers to serve in her stead. She is joined by a local boy, Peeta, son of a baker (so of course I kept thinking of pita bread whenever I read his name) and I won't spoil the rest of the book for you all by revealing further details. I will just say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and all the allusions to ancient Rome. I even gobbled up the rest of the trilogy, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, though I think the first book was the best written and had the most captivating plot.


I wanted to also join in the fun with Food n' Flix, so I rented the Hunger Games movie and really enjoyed that as well, though I do think the book was much more entertaining. I don't think the movie captured as many details as imaginatively as I envisioned them (the costume changes, the descriptions of Katniss' internal moods, the songs of the Mockingjays were all not as vivid for me), though I though actress Jennifer Lawrence made a splendid Katniss. (If you would like to see her in another strong role, check out Winter's Bone some time).

And now, for the "cooking up some Hunger Games-inspired grub" portion of this post. Much of the book (and film) features the cotnrast between what the haves and have-nots eat. The Capitol residents gorge (and purge) themselves on rich, gourmet foods, while the poorer District residents are perpetually hungry and supplement their meager rations with black market purchases and barters or else forage and hunt for themselves. Katniss is a master hunter with her bow and arrow and she also has a great working knowledge of how to use wild plants for food and medicine, care of her parents.

I was taken with a passage in the book where Katniss is wandering through the forest, hungry as usual, and she pulls off a bit of pine bark and chews on the pith underneath. I thought about foraging around my neighbors' fields to scrounge up some eats, but then I thought about pine nuts. That led me to investigations of pine nut recipes and voila, I saw a wonderful recipe for pignoli cookies at Simply Gluten-Free.

The recipe was very easy and I've made two batches since. I just found that I need to rotate the cookie sheets in the oven halfway through the baking time to prevent the lower trays from browning too much on the bottoms. They are chewy, satisfying, and (with a pinch of pine-y smelling ground rosemary mixed in the batter), a really nice herbal, chewy cookie.

So here's to Katniss and all the strong women out there that nurture and protect their families. I toast you with a glass of milk and a couple of pignoli cookies!

Please stop by and check out the roundup of all the other Hunger Games blog posts over at Cook the Books. Our lovely guest judge, Wendy, the Bookcooker, will be reviewing the posts and picking a winner after today's deadline. And please don't hesitate to join Cook the Books over the course of the next couple of months, as we read and cook from Andrea Camilleri's first Inspector Montalbano mystery, The Shape of Water.  Submissions for that round of Cook the Books, (which I am hosting and which will have a surprise guest judge or two!) are due Monday, March 23, 2013.