Pie Fixes Everything

Taken by Mark Ross at Market Diner on Harry Hines in Dallas, TX. Sent in by Nothing-in-the-House correspondent Stacy.

Eberly's apples, last days of summer, and pie

Photos by Abbi Hoiles Gee. See more of her photos of Eberly's here.

Every fall growing up, my family would drive out to Eberly's Orchard (previously blogged about when by friends Abbi and Michael made a visit with my parents a few years ago), near my grandparents' house in North Liberty, Indiana. Don Eberly, who still runs the orchard, but on a more limited scale, is a local hero former-school bus driver and a farmer, with a penchant for puns and folksy sayings. His apple barn is full of bags of apple varieties (including some heirloom varieties, like Northern Spies), folk art and handwritten signs with witty political messages and jokes.


As I recall, there were old metal toy tractors for kids to ride on, and bins of gourds and pumpkins. My favorite part though, aside from using the straight wooden ladder to reach the high-hanging fruit, was probably watching the apples go through the cider press, and tasting a sample, which Don would give us, straight from the spout. Eberly's is still my favorite orchard, hands down, even after my time in Vermont-- land of apples.

In keeping with our family tradition, my mom, grandma and aunt went out to Eberly's last weekend to pick apples and share stories of the old North Liberty days. This is my grandma Georgette, talking to Don at his cash register.

My mom made a pie from Eberly's apples they collected on this trip. Her apple pies always have the most delicious crumb topping. I've never tried to replicate it, because I'd always just rather eat hers.

No Pie

Hilarious. Thanks, Lora.

Muscadine Hull Pie

Last Saturday a carload of friends and I took a field trip to Herndon Hills Farm in Durham to pick muscadine grapes. A few days later, we got together and turned them into six pints of jam and one and a half pints of muscadine-ginger simple syrup. After we were done canning, we realized that there was a bowl of hulls still left in my refrigerator-- I had forgotten to include them in our sauce pot. So I scoured the internet for "muscadine hull" pie (which is really a thing, and a true nothing-in-the-house pie, at that!) and adapted a few different recipes to create my own.

Muscadine Hull Pie

Ingredients
Nothing in the house pie crust
4 c. muscadine hulls
2 c. juice from the hulls
1.5 c. sugar
1/3-1/2 c. corn starch or arrowroot
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. fresh grated ginger
1 tsp. lemon zest

Directions
1. Follow the directions for the Nothing in the House pie crust and refrigerate.

2. Remove the pulp and seeds from the muscadines (use to make jam or simple syrup!). Boil the hulls until tender in enough water to cover them. Drain and reserve the juice, setting the hulls aside.

3. Roll out half of the pie crust and fit into a greased and floured 9-inch pie pan. Return unrolled top crust to the fridge while you prepare the filling.

3. Mix together the sugar, cornstarch/arrowroot, vanilla, ginger, lemon, and juice. Pour this mixture over the reserved hulls and let stand for 20 minutes. Pour the hulls and mixture into the pie crust. Roll out the top crust, cut into strips and weave across the top of the pie to form a lattice top.

4. Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 375 degrees and bake for 45 minutes more.

I took the pie to the monthly Wednesday Old Time Jam at Nightlight, to be enjoyed by musicians, listeners, and bartenders!

Luby's Pecan Pie

from Luby's in Austin, TX. Another submission by Nothing-In-The-House Texas correspondent Brodie.

T n' T Homestyle Pies

From T n' T Bakery in Lancaster, PA. Sent in by Nothing-in-the-House correspondent Brodie.

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.

Appeltart voor ontbijt

On their recent honeymoon stop in Amsterdam, Lora and Joe stopped in at Latei for some pie for breakfast! This from Lora...

It's super cute. They use all local ingredients and they sell vintage items in the store- it's where I got your little snow globe. They do coffee (koffie) and pie (taart) along with sandwiches and on Friday nights they have Indian thali with all local ingredients.

Pie for Breakfast Internationale!

Wild Blackberry Lemon-Goat Cheese Tart

I'm working out at Celebrity Dairy Goat Farm for the month of July, learning to make cheese and filling in for Lora while she is away on her honeymoon. There are two things we have a lot of out here at the Dairy--one is goat cheese (clearly) and the other is blackberries. I've been foraging for them in the woods and from the patch outside the cheese room almost everyday. I needed to put all this usufruct to use, and remembered that Brooke, the Celebrity Dairy Inn Keeper, had made this Lemon-Blackberry Goat Cheese Tart on Pi(e) Day. See Lora's post about it here.

Wild Blackberry Lemon-Goat Cheese Tart
adapted from Maggie Foard's goatcheese. 

Ingredients
Nothing-in-the-House Pie Crust, halved
16 oz. fresh chevre (this is about $20 worth of goat cheese, which I wouldn't be able to afford, necessarily, if I wasn't working at a goat farm! Maggie's recipe calls for 8oz. chevre and 8 oz. goat ricotta, but I'm sure you could use the less-expensive cow ricotta to save $.)
4 extra-large eggs
2/3 c. + 2 Tblsp. sugar
1/4 c. lemon juice
1 Tblsp. lemon zest
Blackberry jam/preserves (I made a quick jam, with 1 c. of fresh berries and 1/2 c. sugar, cooked on low until thick)

Directions
1. Preheat over to 350. Blend chevre, eggs, 2/3 c. of sugar, and lemon juice. Zest the lemon and combine with the 2 Tblsp. of sugar. Combine the chevre & lemon mixtures until smooth. 

2. Pour the mixture into the tart shell, place on a cookie sheet at bake at 350 for 45 minutes. Let the tart cool on an oven rack. 

3. When cool, spread jam over tart, and garnish with lemon or fresh blackberries.


I took it over to my friends' Phaedra and Justin's house, where it was accompanied by Justin's delicious savory tomato goat cheese tart. Tale (or should I say tail? maybe not) of two goat cheese tarts.

Sour Cherry-Apple Pie with Oatmeal Crumble Top

Made by Bob in Baltimore.

Babies, Banjos, and Blueberry Pie

After my stint in the woods, I went up to Brooklin, ME for what has become an annual visit to Nathan and Clara, Magpie and Eleanor of Stoneset Farm (you may recall the pie potluck we had there last year). We caught up and discussed grad school and religion, Lady Gaga and Swan Lake (Eleanor, age 3, is into it now-- both Russian and American versions), farming and feminism, played a lot of blocks and a lot of music, and worked in the green house.

On my last evening there, we picked garlic scapes and made pesto out of them, which Clara spread on delicious homemade pizza. I whipped up a blueberry pie (using this recipe) with frozen Stoneset blueberries (it was not quite blueberry season yet). Jamie and Anna came down from Southwest Harbor for a lovely dinner out on the picnic table, followed by some banjo playing.

Blueberry Pie, with Stoneset Farm homemade apple cider and blueberry wine

Magpie lives up to her name

Jamie takes a cue from Magpie and maintains his platelikkin' tradition

Bert & Ernie On Sharing Pie...

Pie Thief Hits Baltimore!

Lock those pies in their safes, folks! Nothing-in-the-House Baltimore/Boston correspondent Jamie sent in this pie thievery report...



It was a delicious pie, made from: ~3.5c strawberries cut into big chunks and 3.5c chopped rhubarb. The fruit was mixed with .5c brown sugar, .5c regular sugar, .25c cornstarch, and 1t ground cinnamon. The crust was the NitH (Nothing-in-the-House) standard crust. The bottom was pre-baked and the top was formed into a lattice and brushed with a sweetened egg wash.


The pie was so good it attracted a real pie thief as it cooled on the windowsill of 902 Gorsuch St. in Baltimore.

Impromptu Sweet Potato Pie

I haven't been posting here lately, because I've been living the life of a transcendentalist luddite in the Maine woods for the past two months. But it is a known fact that despite other ascetic restrictions, pie (though probably only vegetarian) was a foundational item in the transcendentalist diet, especially for breakfast. So too was it for our own Walden/Fruit Lands-esque experiment.

While up at my friend's cottage in Southwest Harbor on Mount Desert Island (Acadia), I whipped up this sweet potato pie, after realizing we had no dessert to accompany our local seafood feast. I took the recipe from New Englander and 'Domestic Scientist' Fannie Farmer, whose cookbook was on hand. We ate it by the fire with Mille Bornes and banjo serenades.

Fannie Farmer Sweet Potato Pie

Ingredients:
1 pie crust (split recipe at right in half, used only all-purpose flour)
2 c. mashed, cooked sweet potatoes, cooled slightly
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/4 c. milk, half-and-half, or cream
1/4 c. sugar (I used brown, substituting some maple syrup)
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
2 Tblsp. rum (I used bourbon)
4 Tblsp. butter, melted and slightly cooled

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 425. Combine all the ingredients and mix until well blended. Pour into piecrust. Bake for 10 minutes and then reduce the oven temperature to 300. Bake for another 50 minutes or until the filling remains firm when shaken. Top with bourbon/maple whipped cream and enjoy!

Texas Pecan Pie at Salt Lick Bar-B-Que

Sent in by Nothing-In-The House Correspondent Stacy

Why I Like Pie

A few months ago, Whitney Brown, a talented cake baker and Folklorist who is writing her thesis on the local food movement of Carrboro, NC wrote to ask me if I could characterize my love of pie for her in 5 minutes or less. A surprisingly challenging, but exciting question to answer. It helped me clarify my thoughts and motivations, and here is my enthusiastic, albeit rambling, response...

Oh wow...this is such a big question, but one that is really exciting for me to think about. I'm just going to spill out some thoughts in a really unstructured manner...

So first, in my sustainable agriculture/local food systems/school food project work in VT, I noticed that interest in REAL food often skipped a generation--the 50s generation of food science and availability of "fast foods"-- but seems to be back among young people in search of some sort of...AUTHENTICITY (I said it). But who are also interested in health, local communities, radical leftist ideas, people power. One of my personal ideals is to restore value in HANDS-- I want to value things that are made by hands, by real people, and I also want to be able to do things with my own hands--do things for myself. I want to build as many "hand-based" skills as possible. I think this arises out of independence (rugged American individualism?!), perhaps a distrust in the modern world (at least in technology!), value of traditional arts and work, and certainly feminism.

When I think about why I love to bake, pie especially, I think about how it is a tradition, an art, and a love. The most amazing thing about traditional foods is that it is an artful expression and often a loving expression that you actually INGEST and make a part of you. Literally! I think that is so wild. So when you make a pie, you are calling upon all that past hand knowledge from so many women (mostly) of past generations. Then you invite other people to share that tradition and knowledge and love with you as you sit around the table, and then you EAT IT! It kind of blows my mind.

I also think about how the domestic arts were often the only outlet for women to creatively express themselves in past generations. Food traditions have had the best survival, perhaps, because food hits you where it counts--in the gut. Everyone has to eat, and I think it's where a lot of political change can happen.


For me there is something specific about pie in that it uses fruit, which calls awareness to seasonality and locality--place and nature. You bake with what is available at the time, and in the winter that's storage apples (maybe) and nuts and squash, and in the summer it's berries and peaches. Pies are tied to place and time.

My mom was always the pie baker in my family, and I didn't get into it until I started discovering all these mulberry trees and black-raspberry bushes all over Ann Arbor (where I was living at the time). It became a sort of ritual, often shared with friends, to go pick the berries--I did it nearly every day of the summer. We called it guerilla urban berry picking, and sometimes went at night, bringing along chairs to reach the high branches, feeling all the more guerilla. I became really invested in berry picking, and loved how I could get into a sort of meditative state while also being outside and doing something productive. (Thoreau has some great writing about going huckleberry picking--in his journals, Walden, and Civil Disobedience.) Since I was getting the berries for free, I began making a lot of pies, and would leave them on neighbors/friends doorsteps (or give them to boys I had crushes on).


So that's it. My love for pie. It is out of a desire for self-sufficiency, valuing of tradition, feminism, connection to the land and the seasons, and an artful expression of love that we injest-- make part of ourselves. Plus it's delicious. fun. WILD!

Jamie's Easter Quiche

Leek and Gruyere!

Other reported menu items at this Boston, MA Easter brunch were boiled artichokes with bearnaise, crepes with grapefruit marmalade and brandy, and broiled grapefruit.

Pies for Social Change: Georgia Gilmore and the Club From Nowhere

Here at Nothing-In-The-House we get very excited about ideas and examples of food (particularly pies, of course) and community and food as an agent for social change, especially through a re-purposing of domesticity. Georgia Gilmore was a Civil Rights hero who put these ideas into practice, starting "The Club From Nowhere," a group of women who baked pies and cakes to raise money for the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Mrs. Gilmore also opened her Montgomery, Alabama home kitchen as a meeting place for activists like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., providing them not only with a safe space to convene, but nourishing them with delicious home-cooked meals.

Check out this story about her and the Club from Nowhere, done by the amazing Kitchen Sisters in their Hidden Kitchens series. GO GEORGIA!

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.

texas pie pi party!!!

hi y'all! we had a super rad pi party. see more pics here. PEZ!!!!