Our first tomatoes

Corrie and I each had one tomato in our dinner salad tonight. I know we'll be up to our ears in tomatoes soon.

chocolate pie

I made a dark chocolate cream pie for the inaugural UNP Pie-A-Palooza this week. While I didn't win a coveted trophy, it was still a great opportunity to practice my pie crust-making skills, which is something I need to keep working on. I was pretty pleased with my entry-I made two practice pies in the past month, along with one try at just making the filling, which we ate as a pudding.


The pie and crust recipe came from King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion All-Purpose Baking cookbook, otherwise known as my baking Bible. The single crust recipe called for both butter and crisco-I think from now on I'm going to work on all-butter crusts. The filling was an interesting combination of milk, sugar, and corn starch, which you cooked until a thickening stage, then you add egg yolks and more sugar. Once it comes to a boil, you have what looks like vanilla pudding, then you add unsweetened chocolate, vanilla, and butter. I considered swapping in a different type of chocolate, like bittersweet, but I didn't try that ahead of time on the practice pies, so I didn't want to risk it on the competition pie.

The winner of the taste category as well as best in show was a rhubarb lattice pie with cardamom and orange. The baker found the recipe on epicurious.com and decided to make it even though the online reviews were mixed. Her gamble paid off!