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Are you getting your pie in gear for Thanksgiving? I am! Last week, I ordered 10 pounds of rendered leaf lard. Next week comes the traditional trip to Clarkdale Fruit Farm in Deerfield for pie apples. Following that, the traditional internet searches for better, nicer-looking crimps and troubleshooting pastry problems.
This week’s story looks at some recent cookbooks and some easyish, slightly non-traditional pies – an apple hand pie and a super-boozy whiskey crumble pie, and a couple of others- just in case you’re sick of your double-crust, or in case it’s giving you fits.
Click here to read today’s apple pie story in the Boston Globe. Hit the paywall? Click here for the PDF version (the links won’t work, but at least you can read the story!).
Just in time for what I call Fatstember and Carbuary – my two favorite baking months – the unapologetic and seductive new baking book from Dorie Greenspan. It’s French home baking, and a sight easier than the high-flying pastries you may think of when you consider French desserts. While there is one suitably neurotic macaron recipe, nearly everything in here is doable with the confectionery skills of a mortal.
This also marks my first collaboration ever with the Washington Post‘s terrific food section. I hope there will be more to come.
Click here to read today’s review of ‘Baking Chez Moi’ in the Washington Post.
Period poster from the heyday of absinthe.
Since I don’t have a cookbook review to post this week (I’m furiously testing for roundup season), here’s the audio commentary that ran this past Friday.
It’s all about that powerful and evocative spirit, absinthe – known to bohemians of every age as “the green fairy”. Just the idea of it was enough to make me fantasize, in my 20’s, about being an artiste in fin-de-siècle Paris.
For better or worse, I was and remained a fairly well-brought-up Asian-American girl with a good education and all her shots. Still, it was fun to dream.
The delightful poster was hunted down by NEPR’s ace producer Jill Kaufman. I’m not quite sure why the station’s post is titled “Absinthe makes the heart grow ponder“. But it’s certainly making me do just that.
Hear my radio commentary on absinthe here.
cookbooks for dinner 