at home with ann

I made this for our special Valentine's Day dessert.  Yesterday.  February 24th.  We don't go big into Valentine's Day around here, but I did bring out all the red and pink toned crayons and Colin helped me make a home made card.  He also tried to eat the crayons, so all the pink and reds have tiny tooth marks in them now.  I will, of course, take any excuse to make a special dessert, even if it is almost two weeks late. Cherry Pie 1 batch pate brisee  - the best pie crust 3-4 cups cherries (I used frozen, thawed, as it is the middle of the winter and cherries are about a million dollars a pound right now) 1/2 cup sugar 2-4 Tablespoons cornstarch, depending on how juicy your cherries are 1/2 lemon, juiced Make pate brisee.  Follow Martha Stewart's instructions .  They work for me every time. Form into two discs and chill in the refrigerator for at least an hour.  I like to take them out about 15 minutes before rolling, so they are ...

I started writing this post right after Thanksgiving.  And now we're looking at Christmas.  The shame.  Good thing apple pie is appropriate for all holidays. I've made a lot of apple pies, but this was a bit different.   We went to Friends-giving the weekend before the holiday and regular Thanksgiving, and I brought apple pie to both.  Although pastry crust is easy to make, I didn't want to do it twice, especially since Colin thinks the food processor is an evil demon sent to our house to scare him.  I made one batch of crust and opted for a streusel topping.  It's the best of apple pie and crisp combined.  Even after enduring the torture of the food processor, poor Colin is too young for pie.  I did sneak him a little bite of ice cream, though, and he seemed to forget the offense. Streusel Topped Apple Pie 1/2 batch pate brisee (if you aren't making two pies, you can freeze the other crust) 3/4 cup light brown sugar 2 tsp lemon juic...

I may have mentioned this before, but when we got married (3 years ago on the 18th!), my husband wanted wedding pie.  A bit of a stickler for tradition, I wasn't on board and we had a lovely and delicious lemon wedding cake instead.  Everyone loves pie, though.  Pie is also a great make ahead dessert, because a few minutes back in the oven during dinner and you have warm pie.  Warm pie topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, it's pretty much perfect. We celebrated my aunt's birthday at the beach this past weekend, so I made birthday pie.  When we arrived on Saturday morning I discovered that they had eaten pie the night before.  Good thing you can never have too much pie.   It's peach season, so peaches are ridiculously cheap at the market right now.  I bought a batch last week and we were barely able to eat them fast enough.  There's that 1-2 day window of peach ripeness, and you do not want to be on either side of it.  This batch...

Yesterday was Jon's birthday, so a few of the recipes this week will be parts of his birthday dinner.  Instead of our usual tradition of going to a fancy steak house, this year we bought fancy steaks to cook on the new grill!  The birthday boy came up with the menu, and blueberry pie was his request for dessert.   Making pie crust from scratch is not hard.  It really only takes a few minutes in the food processor.  It's a little more time consuming by hand, but still not difficult.  And if you read the ingredients on refrigerated pie dough at the market, you may find even more incentive to make your own.   Normally, even when I use someone else's ingredient list, I give my own version of the directions.  You don't mess with the baking queen herself, though, so I'll give you Martha's instructions straight.  With my comments in italics.  Pate Brisee (Pie Crust) recipe from Martha Stewart Ingredients 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flou...