The Friday Pi(e) Slice: Pi(e) Day Edition

1st slice. Happy Pi(e) Day! It's that time of year when nerdy mathematicians and nerdy pie bakers get to geek out together. For more history on the holiday, check out American Food Roots feature, which includes two Nothing in the House recipes & a video of our 2011 celebration by Ashley Melzer. More Pi(e) Day parties past here.

2nd slice. Looking for a good pie to make on this pie holiday? Check out our recipe index. I'm working up 9 or 10, including S'more Pie, Coconut Custard Pie, and a Grapefruit version of this Atlantic Beach Pie. I'll share some photos later here and throughout the day on Instagram.

3rd slice. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) 3-D edible printers are not yet a reality (or maybe they are?), so I had to make Elena's Skillet Tarheel Pie for myself. It'll also be on the pie party table tonight.

The tasty crumbs. Yossy's Lemon Meringue Pie for Food52 is inspirational.

Photo of Teeny Pies' Bourbon Bacon Pecan Pie from last year's DC Pi(e) Day

Buffalo Chicken Fried Pies

In being the keeper of a pie blog, I've come to be a recipient of a lot of harebrained pie ideas. Last year around this time, Brent came to me with one. Buffalo. Chicken. Fried. Pies. His vision was for a self-contained Super Bowl snack that captured the flavor of chicken wings, complete with hot sauce, carrots,  celery, and blue cheese dressing, but was encapsulated in a pie crust and able to be held in the hand while watching the game (or Beyonce as the case may be).

I was skeptical but willing to give it a try. We were invited to a Super Bowl party by our friend Lars, who also happens to be an organic chicken farmer, and when we arrived on Sunday evening with a grocery bag full of ingredients and cooking oil, Lars had the chicken ready to go--already cooked and marinated in hot wing sauce. The result was obnoxiously good. The frying warmed all of the ingredients, melting the blue cheese while keeping the carrots and celery still crispy, as in a buffalo wing chaser.





I've apparently haven't really stopped thinking about them since, because this summer, I mentioned it to my friend, pocket food afficianado and video maven Mackenzie Smith, who I met at the LongHouse Scholars Program. She brought them up again a few weeks ago, and last week I traveled to Brooklyn to whip up a batch while Mack filmed me (and my sous chef Justin). She put together this very fun little video on the new favorite snack! Kick it off.

Buffalo Chicken FRIED Pies from Mackenzie Smith on Vimeo.

Buffalo Chicken Fried Pies

Ingredients
Nothing in the House pie crust 
5 bone-in chicken thighs
All-purpose flour
Salt & pepper to taste
Oil for browning
1/2 bottle of Frank's RedHot sauce, plus more for dipping if desired
2 carrots, finely chopped
2 stalks celery, finely chopped
4 oz. blue cheese, crumbled
Blue cheese dressing, for dipping if desired

Directions
1. Prepare Nothing in the House pie crust as per the directions. Refrigerate while you prepare the chicken and other filling ingredients. 

2. Prepare the chicken. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a small baking dish, spread a thin layer of flour and season with salt and pepper. Coat chicken on all sides with the flour mixture. In a skillet, brown chicken with oil over medium heat. Transfer to a heavy baking dish and cover with hot sauce. Bake for 35-40 minutes until chicken is cooked through. Let cool completely before removing skin and shredding chicken with a fork. Set aside.

2. Once your filling is ready and pie dough has chilled for at least 1 hour, remove  from fridge and roll out onto a lightly dusted surface about 1/8 inch thick. Using a large biscuit cutter or top of a large mug or jar, cut circles out of the dough (you can make them as large or small as you like, just remember that the smaller the pie the less filling can fit inside). 

3. Mound chicken, vegetables, and blue cheese in the center of each circle--you'll want to aim for about 2 Tablespoons of filling total, but depending on how big your dough circles are you can use more or less. Remember it is better to under-stuff than over-stuff.

4. Moisten the edge of the pastry circle with your finger, then fold over the dough to form a half-moon shape. Press the edges together and flute with a fork to seal completely. Place the formed pies on a parchment paper covered baking dish and place in the freezer, at least 20 minutes and up to an hour.

5. Meanwhile, heat the oil (If you prefer to bake your pies, you can do so in an oven set at 375 degrees F for about 15-25 minutes). Pour at least 2 cups of canola oil (or 4 inches deep) into a deep and heavy saucepan. Insert a candy thermometer into the oil. Slowly heat on medium-low until the temperature reads 350 degrees F.

6. When the oil temperature reaches 350 degrees, gently lower one pie at a time into the heated oil and cook until golden brown (about 2 minutes per side).  Using a slotted spatula, transfer to a paper-towel lined plate. Repeat with the remaining pies.

7. Let pies cool slightly before serving, but they are best eaten when fresh and warm! Dip them in your favorite buffalo chicken wing sauce or blue cheese dressing and go team!

Big thanks to Mackenzie Smith for lending her many talents and vision to produce this video and photos. Mack is a Brooklyn-based multi-media producer and heritage cookbook editor and you can find more of her work here. Look out for a new food video project from her coming soon.

Photos and video by Mackenzie Smith

Related recipes:

Apple Fried Pies

Frito Pie

Spinach & Feta Fried Pies

Tomato, Bacon & Jalapeno Pie

Andy Griffith for Jello Pudding & Pie Filling

I spent so many hours of my childhood watching The Andy Griffith Show with my dad and brother. Though Lassie was my all-time favorite, I liked Opie's fishing trips with the neighborhood boys, when Andy would pick out a tune on his guitar with the Darlings, and most of all, I loved the way my dad would slap his knee and chuckle so uproariously at Deputy Barnie Fife's misadventures. I think the show reminded my dad of his family in North Carolina and sometimes when I go home, we still pop in an Andy Griffith Show DVD and watch the old episodes.

So I was sad to wake up this morning and learn this morning of Andy Griffith's passing. I remembered these old ads he did for Jell-O Pudding & Pie filling, a show sponsor; I actually thought I'd posted them long ago. But I thought it an appropriate day to share a few favorites (there's more on Youtube). I'm not sure I'll be making a pie with Jell-O anytime soon, but I am considering a Surry County Sonker, the official dessert of Griffith's hometown of Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Another Carolinian, Nancie McDermott, has a fine recipe.

A Raspberry Tart & Then We Start To Feel Much Better

A classic Sesame Street song (and "Hey Jude" parody) about emotional eating, with a list of comfort foods that includes bread, veggies (gotta set a good example for the kiddies), and a raspberry tart. Good thing Jim Henson also taught us how to share.

It's not quite the season yet, but if you're looking for a good raspberry tart recipe to quell those sad feelings, here's one from deep in the archives, and here are two (1, 2) that pair berries with chocolate. And if that's still not enough to turn that frown upside-down, this goat cheese tart goes very well with raspberry preserves...

Bebop-a-Rebop Rhubarb Pie

Alright, Garrison, sure, we hear him sing this every Sunday morning. But Meryl takes this to a whole. 'nother. sassy. level. More on the powers of rhubarb pie soon, though it will unfortunately not involve Meryl Streep.

Here is a Country Woman Making Rabbit Pies

Please regard this 1934 video from the British Film Institute's "Kitchen-Craft" series. As a vegetarian, I find the full skinned rabbit carcass a bit gross, but this video is full of hilarious one-liners ("Here is a country woman and she is going to show you how to make rabbit and pork into pies," "be generous with your bacon," "no bits, no mess, all in a tidy heap") and some interesting pie-making techniques, like the decorative "beating" of the crust. Enjoy and please let me know if you try out this recipe...

2nd Annual Pi(e) Day on the Piedmont

We celebrated the 2nd Annual Pi(e) Day on the Piedmont (see last year's here) at Johnny's in Carrboro, NC. It was a crisp, but sunny evening, the rain holding off until later in the night. Pies started arriving around 5:00, with eaters (many of whom I didn't know), champing at the bit, ready to eat at 5:30 sharp! Altogether we had a spread of 24 pies, plus several mini- and hand-pies, all made by our incredible 18 member Pi(e) Day Baking Team. Some were sweet, some were savory, some vegan, some gluten-free. Some had meringue, some were double crust, some had beautiful dollops of whipped cream (like Nicole's chocolate chess pie (below, left), but all were delicious. Here are a few highlights: Shannon's chocolate lavender (perhaps my favorite of the day) pie & my vegan avocado-coconut. Shannon said she used Smitten Kitchen's recipe for chocolate pudding pie then added about 1 tbsp more cornstarch to make it a touch less pudding-ish. To introduce the lavender flavor, she warmed the milk and added 2-3 tbsp dried lavender flowers and then let them soak for about half an hour before straining them out, then followed the Smitten Kitchen recipe. You could do the same thing using cardamom pods for a cardamom chocolate pie.

Ari's double banana bubble cream pies

My date butter pie. I used the recipe from the New York Times' featured date butter tart, but used the nothing -in-the-house crust recipe instead of pate sucre. I will write it out since I know the Times is moving to paid subscriptions... Ingredients:
35 to 40 deglet noor dates (can use another variety)
½ vanilla bean (I used 2 tsp. vanilla, for economy)
9 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 extra-large eggs
2⁄3cup plus 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1⁄3 cup all-purpose flour ¼ teaspoon kosher salt

1. Make the crust using nothing-in-the-house crust recipe at right (halve it as you only need a bottom crust). After refrigerating, roll out crust and place into greased and floured pie dish. Trim and flute edges.

2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Prick the bottom of the dough with a fork and line the tart shell with a few coffee filters, or with a piece of parchment paper. Fill the lined tart shell with beans or pie weights and bake 15 minutes, until set. Take the tart out of the oven and gently lift out the paper and beans. Return to the oven and bake another 10 to 15 minutes, until the crust is an even golden brown. Set aside on a rack to cool.

3. Make a vertical slit in each date and remove the pit. Use your fingers to press the dates back into their natural shape (I didn't need to do this as mine were pitted). Place the dates, slit side down, in concentric circles in the tart shell, leaving ½ inch between each date.

4. Slice the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and use a paring knife to scrape the seeds and pulp onto the butter. To make sure not to lose any of the seeds, run your vanilla-coated knife through the butter. Heat a medium sauté pan over medium heat for 1 minute. Add the vanilla-streaked butter and the vanilla pod to the pan and cook 6 to 8 minutes, until the butter browns and smells nutty. Discard the vanilla pod. (I just used 2 tsp. vanilla extract instead of a bean)

5. Whisk the eggs and ⅔ cup sugar together in a bowl. Whisk in the flour and salt and stir in the warm butter to incorporate.

6. Pour the batter over the dates in the tart shell. Sprinkle the top with the remaining tbsp. sugar. Bake 30 minutes, until the filling puffs, browns and is set. Cool the tart at least 20 min. before serving.

Andrew's bourbon chocolate pecan pie and my Shaker lemon pie (with pi to 13 places)

Emily O's pear-walnut tart (unfortunately didn't get to try this one, but it looks beautiful)

In addition to the ones pictured, the other pies were: swiss potato & cheese pie; mushroom, greens & leek quiche; key lime pie; crack pie; pecan sorghum pie; Mayan chocolate pie; apple mini pies; leek, nettle & ricotta pie; rhubarb cream pie with meringue; Jefferson Davis pie, strawberry-rhubarb pie, apple pie, purple sweet potato pie, spinach-feta quiche and apple hand pies.

Ashley set up a Pi(e) Day photo booth and snapped a few pie portraits (Stokes w/ pie lurker Zeke, Talula, and Emily & Alex, with more to be posted in a separate entry shortly)... The Wildegeeses (Charlie, Will, Zeke, and me) played... And we had a Pi(e) Walk, where the winner won a homemade maple pie. In the end we raised $400 for CEFS to develop a statewide youth food council, and celebrated pie, spring, and mathematics (pushes up invisible nerd glasses) with about 75 friends, new and old. Check out our flickr for more photos and don't miss this sweet, sweet video that Ashley made, perfectly capturing the lovely evening.

pi(e) day 2011: it's not just about me, it's about pie. from Ashley Melzer on Vimeo.

Special thanks to our baking team: Emily O' Sullivan, Alix Blair, Shannon Harvey, Ashley Melzer, Whitney Brown, Nicole Bogas, Sarah Schwartz Sax, Neale Stokes, Aaron Smithers, Emily Hilliard, Kelly Smith, Ari Berenbaum, Rachel & Nate Lerner, Carla Norwood, Janie Woodbridge, Andrew Aghapour, & Kim Tungate

Photographer/documentarian Ashley Melzer

And other helpers: Lora Smith, Emily Wallace, Alex Chassanoff, Kavanah Anderson, Lindsay Perry, Tes Thraves/CEFS, The Wildegeeses, Johnny's, and MATH! Plus all who attended, ate, and donated. THANK YOU!

PieLab

Nothing-In-The-House hopes to take a trip to this combination pie shop/design studio in the next year...

PieLab from PieLab on Vimeo.

"Pie + Conversation = Ideas / Ideas + Design = Positive Change"

Find out more about Greensboro, Alabama's PieLab here.

Bert & Ernie On Sharing Pie...

Pi(e) Day on the Piedmont

Here at Nothing-In-The-House, we've been celebrating pi(e) day, 3.14, for a few years now, and though I haven't been to any of the amazing TX pi(e) day parties, Pi(e) Day has never been as beautiful, full-force, or fun as this year's celebration.

My friend Lora lives and works at Celebrity Dairy Goat Farm in Siler City, NC. Awhile back we got to talkin' about a pie party, and she generously suggested (and offered to host!) that we have our Pi(e) Day celebration out at the Dairy where we could enjoy the industrial kitchen, comforts of the inn, adorable baby goats, and spring peeper chorus, out in the Chatham County country.

Most of the baking team gathered at the inn the evening before, where we made a large batch of pie dough and some of the icebox pies, then ate tacos, crackers and goat cheese, drank wine, played Exquisite Corpse and sang songs late into the night.


The next morning, the kitchen was abuzz with the 13 member baking team as we rolled dough, chopped fruit, whipped cream, and fluted crusts.

forks await folks

Altogether we made 26 pies, and not a bad one in the bunch. In fact, they were all delicious (at least the ones I tried, which was close to most). Lora made fresh goat's milk ice cream to top them off. Here are a few pie portraits, but for a list of all of them with their respective bakers, plus additional words and photos, see Lora's blog post here.

Brooke's delicious lemon goat cheese tart w. Lora's blackberry preserves, recipe here

Lora's Kentucky Pie

I tried my hand at this tart, from Michel Roux's Pastry

Shoofly! Don't Bother Me Pie by Lora

April's (of Farmer's Daughter) Sweet Potato Muscadine Pie

My Avocado Coconut Pie (vegan) recipe here

Pimento Cheese Tomato Pie by Emily Wallace, the day's favorite and first to go!

About 40 friends came out to the farm to help us enjoy the pies and the beautiful spring day. We gave away 2 pies in our pi(e) walk (walked in circle of circumference 2pi(e)r), done with live old-time music accompaniment.

Bill goes back for round 4

Do The Pie Walk

Molly, age 11, the youngest baker, made this video, documenting the day.

After the crowds departed and all the pie dishes were washed, the remaining few settled in for a relaxing porch sit, and viewing of hobo-movie Sullivan's Travels, which, though it had no hobo window sill-pie-snatching chase scene, did have two mentions of pie.

We did indeed have pie for breakfast the next day. 3.15, the (p)ides of March.

Thank you SO much to our team of bakers: Emily W, Chris, Lora, Shannon (who all also took photos), Ashley, Whitney, Brooke, Mary, Zans, Molly, Joe, and April with VERY BIG THANKS to Lora and Joe who really made the event possible.

Pie As A (Midwestern) Lifestyle

Over New Year's weekend, Heather and I paid a visit to Hoosier Mama, Paula Haney's great little pie shop in Chicago (where our good friend Abra occasionally works!). I'll post pictures and a review of our visit shortly, but in the meantime, check out this great video about it by Sky Full Of Bacon... "Just pie!...very simple and unpretentious."

Sky Full of Bacon 13: Pie As a Lifestyle from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

"Some of the best french food--it's poor food...all the cassoulet...all of that stuff is stuff people made to survive. And it just shows how resilient and ingenius they are and they made it taste WONDERFUL. So I start looking around, well that's the same thing all of my relatives, who I thought were so boring, were doing with their pies. They were feeding their family, they were coming up with things that tasted good."

Old cookbooks, desperation pies, and a crust of ALL-BUTTER and VINEGAR! A Hoosier girl after my own Hoosier heart!

Pie for Breakfast by HOME ITEMS

There once was a band-turned-creative collective called HOME ITEMS composed of 7 gal-pals in Burlington, Vermont. We like to make noise and music with domestic items and write and sing songs about food, the kitchen, and various other feminine/feminist topics. A while back, we wrote a song (lyrics by Michelle) called 'Pie For Breakfast,' (original post with lyrics here) about invigorating the New England tradition of enjoying pie in the morning. We recently re-recorded it and made this video so we could post it here.

  

Please enjoy and help us bring back the tradition!

P.S. I'd like to give a shout-out to our new fan/pie friend Michelle who posted about Nothing-In-The-House on her awesome "Blah Blah Blah Blog" here!

FRIED PIE (FRAH PAH)

I had been talking and thinking about fried pies for a while. On road trips my dad would sometimes buy those gas-station varieties for my brother and me, but I quickly developed an aversion, convinced that they gave me a headache (with the amount of preservatives and artificial whatever in there, they probably did). But when my Texas friends started raving about homemade pocket-size pies dipped in grease, I was ready to give the fried pie another shot.

A few Saturdays past, we were graced with 65 degree weather here in the Washington-metro area, so I ventured to Baltimore to visit friends and have an impromptu winter barbecue. After homemade black bean burgers (thanks Ben and Angela), cabbage soup, and beers, it was time to frah some pahs.

We used the recipe for "Fried Apple Pies" in Pie: 300 Tried-and-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie by Ken Haedrich, which calls for dried apples. Surprisingly, the local grocery store had none (though the dried fruit mix "Tropical Temptations" sounded appealing), so we went with fresh apples, cooked down. It was just as well, maybe better.

First, Bob prepared the pastry,

combining:
3 c. all purpose flour+ 1 Tblsp. sugar+ 1 tsp. salt in the food processor. after a few turns on pulse, he added 1 stick of cold, unsalted butter, pulsing 5-6 times. Then he added 1/2 c. shortening, pulsing 5-6 times. After that, he sprinkled 1/4 c. water, pulsing and fluffing the mixture, and then another 1/4 c. of water until it looked like coarse crumbs. he used his hands to form the dough into a ball, flattened it, wrapped it in wax paper, and put it in the fridge for about an hour.

Meanwhile I cut up about 5 baking apples and put them in a frying pan with some splashes of orange juice, 1/2 c. sugar, 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, and 1/4 tsp. nutmeg. Matt sauteed them until they became tender.We heated about 4in. of vegetable oil in a saucepan on medium high-heat, until it was hot enough to fry a test-corner of the pie dough. As the oil was heating up, Jamie made the petit pocket pies, rolling out about a 5-in. circle of dough,
  dropping on 2 dollops of filling, folding it over, and fluting it around the edges.

When it was hot enough, I dropped the pies, one-at-a-time, in the hot oil, frying them for about 4 minutes. It took some finesse to get it right (we overfried the first one, though it still was pretty tasty), but for the most part, frying pies is a breeze! This recipe made about 8 pies. For the first batch, we merely sprinkled the pies with confectioner's sugar,

but for the second, Bob took it up a level and made a glaze to coat the pies. WOAH! Beware, these pocket pies pack a punch--the frying accentuates the flakiness of the crust, their shape makes for a perfect, bite, every bite.

All in all, their small size, layers of crust, tender fruit, and soak in oil makes for an intense experience that goes straight to your head...just look what it did to these guys!

It also might make you play the banjo.

 

And as if we hadn't already had enough fry, Matt had the zany idea to use the oil for fried hash browns (he prefers to call them "latkes," when latkes are actually only shallow-fried) the next morning. I thought he was out of his gourd, but whaddayaknow...delicious.

Announcing the Nothing-in-The-House Great Obama Sweet Potato Pie (Presidential) Contest!

 

Obama: "A lot of people have been saying they can make sweet potato pie"

At a recent rally in Philly, we learned that Obama LOVES pie (and loves saying the word 'pie'), especially sweet potato.

In celebration of this exciting news, the pie-lovers at Nothing-In-The-House are sponsoring the Great Obama Sweet Potato Pie (Presidential) Contest!

We encourage you to host an Obama Sweet Potato Pie Party in your respective city, sometime between now and the election! Bake a sweet potato pie (with an Obama crust design preferred!), eat some pie, and get out the vote by calling/knocking on voters' doors in your area (for lists of folks to call and ways to volunteer, check out the Obama website). You could also hold a bake sale for Obama! Take some pictures of your event, and we'll put together an Obama sweet potato pie collage on the pie blog.

And if you've got a sweet potato pie recipe that could rival Michelle Obama's mama's, please share it here!