Peach Pie and Plutonium Have a Lot In Common

It was there one moment, and gone the next.

High-speed filmography was only able to capture these few moments before the lovingly created pie you see here winked out of existence. You can see here that it has already been substantially depleted WHILE it was being observed - a quantum pie if ever there was one! Like plutonium, these things have a very short half-life, so they aren't meant to be stable under natural conditions.

We scarcely remember how delicious it was. This one held a blend of cling peaches that weren't great for eating raw, a couple of beautiful large freestones from the Sunday farmer's market, and we sneaked two nectarines in as well.

Like plutonium and most pies around here, this one took exponentially longer to be created than it did to be annihilated by the inexorable force of nature (in this case, the guy with the fork...). Those peaches were a booger to cut and peel, but the result, however fleeting, was delightful. You really cannot fail with good fruit. Fortunately, POPS acquired a new passel of peaches yesterday -- Last Chance, Summer Lady, and what was that other variety, Shropshire? Braunfels? Idaho Red??? -- so that we can make another. And freeze some fruit for later in the year.

Now is the time to be consuming your peaches and tomatoes like there is no tomorrow, because, as far as those plants are concerned, there IS no tomorrow. Freeze, can, make sauce, salsa, jams, conserves, slice, or just eat them. But above all, MAKE PIE WHILE THE SUN SHINES, my friends. And watch them both disappear.

Sac Pie Summer

Sac Pie has been on hiatus awaiting cooler nights. For as much as we love our pie, we dislike using the oven when it's warm outside. And we equally dislike using our air conditioner to cool down a house heated by an oven. Thus we are in the dog days of pie procrastination.

But just so you know that we are NOT doing absolutely nothing...we are dreaming of fantastical, improbable pies:

sweet tomato (maybe chutney?) pie
blackberry chocolate pie
cherry chocolate pie
melon-lavender chiffon pie
concord grape pie (not so improbable, but not made much)
fig, rosemary, and almond pie

• We are procrastinating the peach pie and the jumbleberry pie for just another couple of weeks.


• We have stocked the freezer with about 7 pounds of blueberries, and need to process some peaches for the deep freeze while the season is in full production.


• We mentally invent pie flavors that would be complemented nicely with Haagen-Dazs Five Ginger ice cream.


• We check the figs dutifully each day, but our back yard tree will only yield enough this year for a few snacks.


• We daydream about eating a slice of fruity, spicy, velvety pie on the porch on a breezy summer evening just before the sun goes down.

Truthfully, we have not been so crazy about spending a lot of time in front of the computer screen, or in the kitchen, when there is only so much gorgeous outdoor time to savor.

Therefore we must delay gratification with respect to pie until we've had our fill of indolent, indulgent, incandescent, incomparable summer. And we hope you are enjoying it just as much as Sac Pie.

Pie Spy - Z-Pie in Placerville

Pie Spy would be remiss if Z-Pie had not had a place in its annals. Do you not know? Have you not seen? Z-Pie, at 3182 Center Street in Placerville (www.z-pie.com) is serving up a full menu of savory light meal-size pies, as well as soups, salads, and desserts, in a comfortable and inviting space with white tablecloths, orchids, and cool background jazz. The most abundant choices for pie in Placerville are right there downtown.

Z-Pie emphasizes fresh and seasonal ingredients, and lists them all on the menu. The pie dough is made with butter, and each one is about 4 inches in diameter, golden brown, double-crusted, and fresh-tasting. No artificial ingredients and a commitment to recycling and reducing waste are a hallmark of this eatery. Z-Pie’s menu reflects the fruit and vegetable bounty of the surrounding orchards and farms in Placer County. Although they have a playful attitude toward their flavor combinations, we were pleased to see that they tweak familiar flavors into something distinctive, but don’t venture out on the flaky edge toward weirdness.

There are about a dozen savory fillings to choose from – plus two for breakfast. You can walk in and take the little pies home with you – frozen – for later. The restaurant also has beer and wine if that seems like the thing to have with your pie.

Best of all, you can get out of there with two happy tummies for under 15 bucks.

On scorching Sunday afternoon, Pie Spy and POPS made our first visit to Z-Pie. We walked down Main Street, ducked in at Sierra Rizin’ Bakery to cadge a few pastries to go (no pie!) and asked the attendant there where Center Street is. She explained with a puzzled look that she’d lived in Placerville all her life and didn’t know where it was. So we asked her instead where Z-Pie is. She said, “Oh - that’s my favorite restaurant! I can show you exactly where it is!” She walked us out the door and pointed at the parking garage next to City Hall. “It’s just across the street from the garage,” she said. Yet again, the mental map of memorable meals is often more enduring, reliable, and available for recall than any other kind.

Within a couple of minutes we were seated and ordering. We selected two vegetarian pies – the tomatillo stew and the Very Vege (do we pronounce that veggie or vedge-eh?). We toyed with ordering the fresh gazpacho with our lunch, but opted for caution because we didn’t want to over-fill. The pies were served hot, with flaky but substantial tops and bottoms, and came in cute little pie-sized bowls. This is a place after Pie Spy’s own heart, we thought as we dug in.






The Very Vege had a little bit of everything – zucchini, spinach, bean, potato, onion, pepper, hmm, many things all melded together in a red-brown gravy that provided just enough moisture and lushness. The first bite brought us a little too close to the taste of canned vegetable soup – highly salted, a pinch too much oregano for our taste. But did we eat the whole thing and smile about it? Of course we did.

The tomatillo stew pie was delicious with its black beans, cumin, hominy, poblano, green chilis, and jalapeno peppers. Most of these ingredients melded into the background and were not identifiable. The combination was magical and satisfying, though. And not just because we were very hungry. It was shocking, really, how quickly these charming pies disappeared.

Pie Spy had every intention of sampling the dessert pies (grilled apple or blackberry?) but used up all our capacity on lunch. So we will have to save desserts for our return visit (all desserts can be served with a heap of vanilla bean ice cream if you just can’t stop yourself).

Pie Spy loves Z-Pie and wants everyone to know about it. Satisfying, made with healthful ingredients, a place to enjoy the fare, attentive servers, and plenty of choices makes it a big win. It is worth a visit on your way to or from Apple Hill (where, depending on the day, you can find even more pies of every size and flavor). Or, if you love it even more than we do, ask them about opening a franchise down here in Sacramento so that we can visit you often. And don’t forget to tell them that Pie Spy sent you!

Pie of the Week - There's an Ap for That

Inspired by Mom's Apple Pie in Sebastopol, we decided to buy a few pounds of 'cots at the farmer's market to make a pie. Dear old Betty Crocker (as opposed to Betty Carr, a.k.a. Mom)...she told us that we would need five cups of apricot halves for a 9-inch pie. But we didn't have quite that many, so we downsized the recipe and put it in a smaller, 8-inch pan.



Like many of the recipes we've explored through this blog, this one was an experiment. The first surprise was that the apricots, although mostly very firm and a bit on the dry side, released a bunch of juice once mixed with sugar and flour. Although we cleaved to Betty's advice about the amount of sugar in the filling (almost three quarters of a cup!), we found that the filling is still a little on the tart side. We added some dehydrated ginger chips, crushed up - about 2 teaspoons - to the filling, but found that the flavor was not strong enough.


Because it was shaping up to be a gorgeous hot summer Sacramento day, we wanted to make pie very early. The great thing about apricots is that you don't have to peel them - that would have really slowed us down. Prep time was relatively quick. It was just a matter of getting the dough together (reducing Betty Crocker's recipe for a standard double-crust 9-incher, using 1.5 c of flour and 0.5 c of shortening) and rummaging around for that 8-inch pan, somewhere in the black heart of a mighty disheveled kitchen cabinet...must speak to POPS about his curation of the collection.


The wisdom on Mom's Apple Pie website holds that you should not be alarmed or dismayed on discovering that your pie "runs over" while baking or is a little gooshy inside. These things, Mom says, are normal. Good to know, because this one, while pretty much a textbook pie on the outside, DID run over (sorry about the burning smell, honey!), and was pretty juicy in the middle. We liked that the fruit cooked down to a soft, almost jamlike texture, but we weren't expecting there to be juice. So this would not have garnered a ribbon at the county fair - it turned the bottom crust all mushy. Next time, we must use more starch to absorb the moisture a little more effectively - two generous tablespoons of flour called out in the recipe was not enough. We were very pleased with the bright orange color of the fruit, very summery and enticing. The flavor was almost like peach, which made Sac Pie yearn for full-on peach season, but a little brighter and zippier. Would fresh grated ginger be a good enhancement the next time we bake this?


Even with all that in mind, apricot pie is not something to be scared of. One wonders why we don't see it more commonly here in Sacramento bakeries. Indeed, one wonders why we don't see bakeries more commonly here in Sacramento...We have received encouragement ourselves to be the next big bakery thing in this town, and the former Phillips building is still available, so....




As a candidate for breakfast, we can recommend the Betty Crocker apricot pie, modified as above, for your summer menu. We don't know if it's nutritious or not - surely there are some good antioxidants or carotenes in apricots, right? But then there's vitamins for that. Soon it will be too hot to bake, and the apricots will be all gone, so try this, improve it, and enjoy it! And let us know how it goes!

Pie Spy - Mom's Apple Pie, Sebastopol

DROP EVERYTHING AND GO TO MOM'S APPLE PIE, 4550 N. Gravenstein Hwy, Sebastopol

We once heard a comedian say that you should never eat at a place called Mom’s. Advice we had heeded throughout life, until June 5, 2010.

Pie Spy was out and about in the countryside of Sonoma County. Truthfully, we were looking for wine to taste. But we had dallied so long in Petaluma and Sebastopol that, by the time we made it out to Graton, the wineries were closing for the day. Disappointed, we turned back toward town. We knew that the birthday barbecue we were headed for would console us, and soon we would forget all about our disappointment.

And then, suddenly, there was Mom’s Apple Pie – open until 6:00 p.m. (momsapplepieusa.com). We felt better already. The first step through the front door let us know that everything was going to be okay: there were upwards of 20 full-size pies in the case, and a number of 7-inchers as well. There was a list of pie offerings posted overhead – a long list! There were cream pies galore in yet another case to our right. It's a charming place to sit and enjoy your meal.

Blackberry, cherry, apricot, strawberry-rhubarb, wild blueberry, apple, no-sugar fruit pies…by the slice, or by the whole thing. Made with no trans fats! Mom’s also serves sandwiches, soup, and salad in case you need something to eat while you’re making up your mind about the pie. It was an enticing display of Mom’s baking prowess and the orchard abundance of Sonoma County. And Mom, herself, Mrs. Betty Carr, was actually in the house while we were there, although not out front. She’s been selling her pies here since 1983. The web site will tell you more about what Mom's is all about - it's also very charming.

We spied a blackberry turnover in the case, and tested that first. Delightful pastry, poofed up prettily. We wished there had been a little more fruit filling in ours, but what there was of it, we really liked. It disappeared with breathtaking speed.

We couldn’t decide on just one pie, so we opted for two 7-inch pie-ettes. One of these easily would serve three normal people, or two pie freaks. They were beautiful in their simplicity. Here and there, a little bit of fruit filling had oozed out during baking. Of all the pies we’ve tasted on our safaris so far, Mom’s have been the best. The strawberry-rhubarb and the cherry ($6.95) were both, literally, like Mom used to make. Or does make. The crust was just perfect – we don’t know what else to call it. Beautifully flaky but firm, not sweet or salty or crumbly, and not the least bit shiny with butter. The fruits were also done just right, with bright flavors, soft textures, and colors that let you know it's all natural. The homemade quality of these pies made the heart sing. But it was not nostalgia that carried us away at Mom’s. The freshness of the ingredients and the care that goes into making the pies comes through in every bite.

The best part of having your pie here is that you can sit outdoors under an arbor that looks out onto the apple orchard.

If we had found a place like this here in Sacramento, Sac Pie would have had no reason to exist. Mom's Apple Pie has the best pie, at the best value, you are likely to find within 200 miles of this town. Go out and see for yourself!

Pie Spy in LA County

Spoiler alert! Serious foodporn follows.

Although no one responded to my blog request for suggested venues for our May Pie Safari, we were met with a wealth of choices, mystery spots, and Plan B-level selections when we arrived in LA County.

In addition to all the places we visited that did NOT have pie, Pie Spy and POPS managed to hit and sample many fine pie establishments in LA, Pasadena, Eagle Rock, and Altadena. The obvious choices were places that had the word PIE in their names, but we dug a little deeper for some true gems. No, gentle reader, we did not flinch from overeating in the service of research! This area is rich with great cuisine of all sorts, and every dining experience we had there was very, very good. A little bit of sticker shock in Pasadena itself - we agreed that we could have gone to France with just what we spent on food there - but otherwise, it was a delight to wander and find something really wonderful around every corner. The down side of that is, of course, that there are only so many spots you can visit in a short vacation. We will be saving many, many of them on our Next Time List.

That includes Larkin's, in Eagle Rock at 1496 Colorado Boulevard (larkinsjoint.com). Terrific, spiced-up southern cooking and BBQ, with one of the most interesting salad ideas we've seen in quite a long time - mixed greens with okra croquettes! We would have loved some of Larkin's mom's own sweet potato pie after dinner, but we were just too, too full after the salad, some barbecued portobello mushrooms, and two sides. In fact, we didn't even feel hungry the next day.

Next Time List also includes Auntie Em's - 4616 Eagle Rock Blvd., Eagle Rock (auntieemskitchen.com). Somebody beat us to the cherry-berry pie while we were ordering lunch, and they bought the whole thing. Even more of a pie nut than we are, apparently. Chef Teri Wahl does savory pot pies from time to time, as well as desserts.

So let's get rolling on the inventory.

Pie N Burger - 913 E. California, Pasadena (pienburger.com). The place looks like it's been there forever - since 1963, in fact. The menu is on the wall at the front and back of the diner. Lunch was a big salad and a garden burger, but that was only to buy us some time in making our selection for a pie slice. There were a couple of dozen pie choices, and many of them were fresh fruit. We settled on boysenberry. Win! Look how gorgeous this is. The flavor of boysenberry (a fruit that was perfected and made popular down in Orange County, at Knott's Berry Farm, not the amusement park) was clean and unmuddled by excessive refined sugar. Really, really great. Definitely $4.50 worth of fun. And we loved the clock!

Gourmet Cobbler Factory, 33 N Catalina Ave., Pasadena (thegourmetcobblerfactory.com) - While Pie Spy was busy being entertained in a stuffy conference room, POPS was out and about scouting for goodies. POPS has a nose for bakeries, which he follows faithfully, and it never fails. He snagged us a golden baby sweet potato pie from the cobbler joint. Try as we might, we could not damp down the almost radioactive orange color of this tiny pie in the photo. By the way, we appreciate that the POPS has the will power to delay gratification and share these yummies with yours truly, instead of snarfing them up when we are not looking. Creamy, spicy, definitely rich and flavorful, but not overtly sweet - we spooned up the sweet potato pie-ette as breakfast and were very happy. Props to the Cobbler Factory for selling fruit cobblers in foil tins from the personal to vat-sized.

POPS happened across a few Armenian bakeries with very reasonably priced treats, some of which were new discoveries. Why don't we have any talented Armenian bakers here in SacTown? Here are the highlights:

Old Sasoon Bakery - 1132 N. Allen Ave, Pasadena. Our favorite was their swiss chard turnover (panjar) and tiny spinach pie (beorag). Neither of these was anything like a traditional Greek-style spanakopita, or any other spinach pie we've tried. The swiss chard hand pie was made of a sturdy dough and a mysterious combination of seasonings (including tahini and onion) that imparted a reddish color and spicy kick to the filling. This is something we want more of - it makes an excellent lunch. No messy flakes or greasy fingers, either. Old Sasoon has a website, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Two other Armenian bakeries, close by:

Panos - 1649 E. Washington Blvd., Pasadena (panosbakery.com). No pie- all cookies, baklava, and other Mediterranean-inflected sweets. Which we sampled; many.

Vrej - 1074 N. Allen, Pasadena (vrejpastry.net) - All cookies, baklava, and gorgeous, lovely cakes. Half a pound of cookies was about three dollars.

(sigh)...Back to pie.

Dutch Oven Bakery - 2281 Lake Ave., Altadena. Sunday we found fresh apple turnovers at this very unassuming little bakery. This is not the kind of bakery that has a web site. No puff pastry and Denny's style filling here - just a simple, easy-to-handle firm dough and fresh apples with cinnamon. This little gem also sold peach cobbler in vats, as at the Cobbler Factory. One of their menu items is an old-school sweet bean pie, but none were available. It was Sunday, after all, on a holiday weekend. Put that on the Next Time List. Prices were very reasonable here, too.

EuroPane - 345 E Colorado, Pasadena. EuroPane has a newer location at 950 E. Colorado, where we had terrific blueberry brioche and apple strudel on our first day. We loved the large, rough-hewn wooden table made out of a single slab. The interior is quite beautiful and a great place to sip your coffee in peace. At the original location, which is smaller and more lively, we sampled the apple pie-ette with lattice crust. For breakfast, oh yeah! And it was completely satisfying in all respects - a very homemade quality, excellent flavors, and extremely fresh. POPS was able to use the Spy Cam to get into the prep area and snap a few shots of the pie master at work. Note that she is multitasking.

If we can digress for just a minute - You must visit Bulgarini Gelato at 749 E. Altadena Drive, Altadena (bulgarinigelato.com). It is in an unassuming strip-mall location that you may have to miss a couple of times before you find it. But it is definitely worth multiple visits. Handmade gelati of various flavors, including unconventional ones like goat's milk straciatella, Florentine salted chocolate, and best of all, plain yogurt gelato with olive oil drizzled on top. This last one was perfectly balanced between sweet and tart, and very rich - almost like eating cream cheese. The half-teaspoon of olive oil was an unexpected complement to the flavor. Our server told us that they serve this gelato often at wine tastings, and we can appreciate how it would be well received as such, but we could eat it every day, whether there is any wine involved or not.

Trails Cafe - 2333 Ferndell Road, Los Feliz (thetrailslosfeliz.com, not much of a website) - Just inside Griffith Park on Ferndell Road in LA is the very popular Trails Cafe. Just a few short years ago, there was nothing here but a Coke machine. We found out about the Trails through LA Weekly, and are glad we did. The cafe serves all kinds of snacks, a few salads, coffee, and more substantial fare in addition to pie. The line was long but the wait was not. We spied the very tall apple pie through the glass (see the photo at the top of today's post) and knew we had to have it. Our server told us there were also some individual cherry crisps on hand. We had to have that too, for back stock. All the baked items are 'from scratch,' a friendly sign informed us.


Our pie was served warm, a slice large enough for a village. It looks wonderful in the photo - that brown, flaky crust, chunky fruit, et cetera, right? The pie had skins-on chunks of Golden Delicious that were just firm enough, with delicate flavor. Leaving the skins on was not a good choice. The pie had a weird, stringy brown goo inside, which tasted cinnamony-sweet but was visually unappealing - it would stretch almost like warm mozzarella. We found the crust hard to pierce with a recyclable plastic fork. Make no mistake, though - we ate the whole thing! At $4.50 a slice, we felt we could not let any go to waste.

The cherry crisp was in the mini-pie shell on the upper left of the photo below. We saved it until we came home to Sac, and it traveled very well. The cherries were perfectly sweet/tart and chewy, with no goo. The pie shell was made of the same very firm dough formulation as the apple pie, but it seemed to work a lot better as a bowl for the cherries and oatmeal crisp topping. Worth the five bucks! Good job, Trails. Keep this one on the menu!

House of Pies, 1869 N. Vermont, Los Angeles (houseofpiesrestaurant.com) - No pie safari can be undertaken without at least a look in at the House of Pies, the last holdout of what was once a large chain throughout the LA region. The sign alone lets the imagination run wild. We stopped in about 30 minutes after we ate the apple pie at the Trails. In retrospect, this was probably too soon. At this point, all Pie Spy's pie receptors were redlined, and nothing in the case looked good. On view in the cases were multiple pies of the custard, meringue, and cheesecake varieties. We did not spy any fruit pies, and in truth, didn't want any! But we had to know. And now we do.

While we recognize that we were merely scratching the surface of potential pie opportunities, we think our trip was a total success. Pie Spy was inspired to find some new fillings to experiment with, to get brave with soft berries that are now in season, and to check in again with our local Sacramento scene and see what's on the menu. What have you had your eye on while we were away?

Pie of the Week - Blueberry

Ask us what our favorite fruit is. Go ahead.

No, it is not dragon fruit.

It's too early for this season's blueberries to make a fresh blueberry pie. But we just can't wait another minute. We need to make some space in the freezer for this year's supply, so we need to use up last summer's frozen bounty and get our taste buds ready for a season of abundant berry happiness. And, well, we need pie.

Way before Sac Pie was Sac Pie, there was a little kid whose family spent some summer weekends with another family in southern New Jersey, one of the berry-growingest places in the country. Blues love the heat and sandy soil of the Jersey coastal plain. We would wake up on a July morning, and go out before it got hot, with our moms and sibs and a picnic lunch - about a dozen of us, in two enormous station wagons - to pick blueberries for a few hours at one of the local you-pick farms. The moms would split up the take, and bake and freeze and sprinkle blueberries every which way. Our families had full-size freezers, as was the rage in the 1970s, so the moms learned how to freeze and package blueberries so they would last us all year.

We gorged on the fresh, warm ones straight from the bushes while we were picking because we were naughty and unruly little people. We whined about being hot and thirsty and about the bucket of blue getting too heavy to carry. We chased each other down the endless rows of bushes. Our collective harvest was 20 or 30 pounds each time, so the farmer definitely did not lose money. In the days following our descent upon the berry farm like a swarm of locusts, there were pancakes, coffee cakes, ice cream, shakes, and fruit salads full of blueberries. There were eight or nine happy little kids with blue tongues, teeth, and fingers. And there was that one kid who got scarred for life picking blueberries and never willingly ate them again. Overall, it was really great. Our moms are gone now, but they made a life-long memory for us of the joy of picking delicious fruit while the sun shines.

The blueberry makes for pie nirvana. Today, we've got the semi-good-for-you whole wheat crust with palm oil shortening (with no trans fats and no cholesterol), about 5 cups of blueberries so plump they look like concord grapes (don't forget to remind everyone that you're getting a potent dose of antioxidants), about 3 tablespoons (to taste) of organic cane sugar, a third-cup of tapioca mixed in with the fruit, and some fresh grated lemon zest from the back yard tree. If you have your own stash of last summer's haul in the freezer, you might as well use it up, because more blueberries are on the way soon. If you are not stocked, go to Trader Joe's and buy their frozen blueberries, which are consistently good and not expensive (how do they do it?). As with any other frozen fruit filling, you will need to bake this pie a little longer than the fresh-fruit version.

Try this and see if it doesn't taste like summer. Or, at least, enough like summer to make you hang on for this year's crop. The unassuming, wall-flowerish blueberries are transformed into something jammy, and their perfume blends with that of the lemon zest to create a sillage, almost like roses, that evokes sitting among the berry bushes in the summer sunshine. You can almost hear the birds chirping. No, wait - those are real birds.

With juicier fruits like these, we like to make a mound of berries in the middle, and then press a subtle moat into the top crust before we seal it. The moat will catch any boiling juices that escape through the slits on the surface of the pie. It may take expanding the circumference of the upper crust by another 2 inches, so you have to plan ahead. But this way, we can further postpone cleaning the oven.

How's your crimping technique?

We learned this fluted edge from one of our favorite moms. We like it even better than the way we learned it from our own mom. And it is much, much, much more interesting than the freshman-level fork-crimping method. You just pinch the edge (from the inside of the pie pan) with thumb and forefinger of one hand (the left, in the example below). Then use the forefinger (or forefinger knuckle) and thumb of the other hand to push in and shape the edge from the outside of the pan, with just enough pressure exerted from both sides to seal the edge at the same time. As you practice this more, your flutes will become more uniform, and you will find that you can adjust the size of them so that the last flute you make blends seamlessly with the first one.

We are getting more confident with the use of whole wheat flour (this time, pastry flour) as a sub for half of the white flour in the dough. It added a definite tawny color to the final product, did not warp or ripple, and improves the firmness of the crust. Be advised that the dough may dry out faster than the usual formula - so you may have to roll it out more quickly than you would otherwise. But otherwise, no adjustments should be necessary.

Use caution, and a big spoon, if eating this pie in a hammock or on a white couch. That blueberry stain may come off your teeth and fingers, but it does not, not, not come out of fabrics!

Pie of the Week - Quiche and Tell

There are few dishes that we can think of that can be served up as breakfast, or lunch, or dinner. Depending on the filling, a burrito may fit the bill. Of course, the revered Freeport Bakery Knish is a winner. Spanakopita could also work (have we mentioned Petra yet, at 16th and L? Wait 'til you see their monster spanakopita). In each case, it's got a combination of savory ingredients and interesting spices with something soothing and plain, like potatoes, pastry, or eggs. The dishes that are successful meal tri-fectas also feel substantial - enough to last you awhile - but not gratiutously rich.

And where are you going to get a dynamite all-day burrito in this town? It's not as easy as it should be. Especially if you don't eat meat. This is a source of frequent lament at Sac Pie.

Now where were we?

Oh, yes - it's time to make a quiche. Or more accurately, a vegetable-egg pie. It won't be six inches tall, as we see it in some bakery and specialty grocery cases. But then, it won't cost $20, either. It will be fitting for Sunday breakfast/brunch with fresh fruit, or an elegant brown-bag workday lunch, or a light evening meal with a fresh tomato or beet salad. Great for springtime. It has some good protein in it, and green vegetables to make you big and strong. If spinach isn't your vegetable of choice, try some finely chopped steamed broccoli instead. If you make a whole wheat crust, then you can feel especially virtuous when you eat it. It's pretty easy to toss together, with ingredients you probably have in your refrigerator or freezer right now. You will find, after a few times making it, that you don't even need a recipe. It can be a unique work of art every time you make it. Let's cook!

Ingredients:

Basic pie dough for one 9-inch crust

Four eggs (room temperature)

[Optional: water or milk]

1 c (dry) chopped frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed

[Optional: 1 potato, peeled and thinly sliced]

1-2 T finely chopped scallion

1 to 1.5 c grated cheese, such as Gruyere, Iberico, Swiss, Havarti, or a combination

Seasonings to taste: ground pepper, dried tarragon, chervil, thyme, chives

Directions:

Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Place the pie dough in a 9-inch pie pan or quiche dish, pressing dough into the corners and allowing it to drape over the edge.

[Optional: Line the bottom of the pastry with the thinly sliced potatoes.] Sprinkle the onions evenly across the bottom surface.

Separate three of the four eggs. Beat the one whole egg with the three separated yolks until well mixed. You may decide to add a tablespoon of water or milk to this mixture. Mix in the chopped spinach with the eggs until evenly combined. Add all but a handful of the grated cheese, Add to the mixture whatever herbs and spices you wish. Then whip the remaining egg whites (in a clean bowl) until stiff peaks form.

Using a spatula, slowly and gently fold the egg whites into the egg-spinach mixture. This is what will give your quiche an oven bounce that won't completely deflate after it cools. Use even, circular motions and continue until the whites are evenly mixed in with the egg-spinach combination. Don't overdo it or the mixture will probably deflate.

Pour the filling into the pastry-lined dish. Trim the edge of the pastry and bake. About halfway through the bake time (i.e., when the middle is starting to be less jiggly), you may garnish the top with the remaining cheese and perhaps a few thin slices of tomato or red bell pepper. Bake until the center of the quiche is firm and the top golden, about 40 to 45 minutes.

Cool 20 minutes before slicing and, no matter what time of day it is, you will have pie-that's-a-meal, fresh and ready.

Pie Spy - On the Road to SoCal

Hey, pie lovers! Pie Spy is hitting the road again at the end of May, bound for the sunny south. POPS (Partner of Pie Spy - thank you for the acronym, Kim!) is also going on the adventure and is compiling a list of eateries to check out. We have some pie destinations in mind, and our voyage may splash over into Orange County. So we wanted to give all of you who enjoy SacPie a chance to contribute your suggestions for new or favorite places we should spy on.

Please post in your comments any pie stops that come to mind. Check out our posting of 19 March, Pie in Los Angeles, to see the hallowed ground we have already trod (trod?). We will not be revisiting those, but we will do our best to visit as many of the new ones as we can. Anything especially offbeat or just plain odd would place high on our growing list.

We will also be spending quality time on the beach in Orange County, so pie stops in Newport Beach, San Clemente, Seal Beach, or other coastal spots will give you double credits! So please help us plan our road trip and get in on the pie safari. Post your suggestions in comments by 21 May 2010. Thanks!

Pie Movie - Waitress

All right. Maybe you want to think about pie, but without having to make or eat one yourself.

(Really?)

The couch is too comfortable, the kitchen is too warm, your belly too full, the cupboard too bare. In that case, maybe today is the day to see "Waitress." If you didn't see it when it came to the Tower Theatre in 2006, you can get it on DVD. We just watched it again the other night (thank you, McClatchy Library).

The film features Keri Russell as the young, small-town titular waitress, who is even more of a pie baker than Sac Pie. Unlike Sac Pie's pie thing, though, pies help the troubled Jenna express her feelings, and at the same time, assert some measure of control and accomplishment in her very out-of-control life. She even gives pies as gifts, and her pies are the talk of the town.

The movie was directed by Adrienne Shelley, who also plays the role of one of Jenna's two waitress friends. I fell in love with Adrienne Shelley in Hal Hartley's movies, "The Unbelievable Truth," and "Trust," but that's another story.

They made a lot of pies in this movie - the pies were uncredited as co-stars, however. There's I Hate My Husband pie, I Don't Want Earl's Baby pie, Naughty Pumpkin pie, Vanilla Custard Pie With Banana Hold the Banana, and several others. Not an expected normal pie among them, sweet or savory. There is a song about pie that Adrienne Shelley wrote for the movie - kind of a pie lullaby.

Amidst all of the inventing and making of pies, there is a very real and compelling story of a woman who has lost her way. There is romance, desperation, sparklingly funny dialogue, wayward men, and a tasty plot twist. We watch Jenna make (and sometimes unmake) several pies in the kitchen of the diner where she works - and there, she is in charge and restored to herself. The pies look gorgeous, most of the time, and we get to see several people digging in to them. Adrienne Shelley claimed that she added several pounds during the filming, because of all the pie.

This movie has a wealth of elements that we all can identify with: small town charm, what we learned from our parents, friendship, doomed relationships, the fears of being a parent, living with our mistakes, and figuring out how to be happy are among the themes in "Waitress."

It's a sweet and lively movie, and Sac Pie loves it for many reasons, but especially for putting pie in the foreground for those of us on the couch!

Testing 1-2-3-Whole Wheat Pie Crust

If you are a purist about pie - seasonal fruit, organic ingredients, all natural - then it makes sense that you would eschew white flour in favor of a more healthful option for your pie crust....If it makes the pie better, that is.

Whole wheat pie crust: just the words seem to connote hardpan, hockey pucks, hippies, humorlessness, heaviness, and humdrum. On the flip side, though, there are the health benefits and perhaps the fun of experimentation with a new approach to pastry.

The challenge is to find a recipe that not only does what pie dough should - rolls, stretches, flakes, browns, and tastes good - but provides those attributes without requiring some other ingredients that subtract from the good reasons to use whole wheat flour. Whole wheat crusts that we've tried in the past were made with cooking oil instead of shortening, and they were, to be blunt, miserable to work with, unbeautiful to look at, and unpalatable to eat. Let's see if this one is an improvement.

In this inaugural attempt, we had to start somewhere...and Sac Pie can almost hear you moaning about this already...so we picked a recipe that included some familiars - butter as well as shortening, white flour as well as whole wheat. We know, we know. We hope you whole wheat zealots will not be too disappointed. We need a jumping-off point for continued experiments, and we figure we can gradually reduce butter and white flour and stop before we reach that "humdrum" end point. We are going to follow the recipe to the letter and see what happens. This trial is also a first for us using butter in pie dough ANNNNNDDD using our Cuisinart to make the dough.

This recipe comes from WikiHow. We chose it because it could be done in relatively few steps and without ingredients that we wouldn't otherwise use in a pie pastry.

For this recipe, we decided to make a pie with the remaining frozen peaches from last summer (which were luscious, were they not?). So that, if the crust was a bust, we would at least have that lovely fruit to spoon up.

As with most pie dough, the key thing again is that your liquid is ice-cold. If you do use a food processor to blend the fat into the flour, open it up and lift the bottom ingredients upward with a spatula or spoon, to make sure nothing is getting trapped in a clump on the bottom.

All right, here is the recipe, from WikiHow for pie dough with whole wheat flour:

Ingredients:

2 c all-purpose white flour

1/2 c whole wheat flour

1/2 c butter

1/2 c shortening

ice cold water (several tablespoons)

1 tsp(ish) salt

1 T(ish) sugar

Instructions:

Add the dry ingredients to the bowl of a food processor and pulse, roughly 5 times at 1 to 2 seconds each pulse.

Cut the butter into small chunks.

Add the chunks of butter to the bowl and pulse again, roughly 5 times at 1 to 2 seconds each time. With a spoon or spatula, lift the mixture from bottom to top all the way around the bowl.

Add the shortening, in small chunks to the bowl and pulse again. Lift again. At this point the mixture should look slightly crumbly.

Add the water in 1-2 T increments, followed by a pulse of the processor (and a lift). Repeat until the dough begins to clump and pull away from the sides of the bowl.

When you reach this point, feel the dough by squeezing it lightly. It should be moist, pliable, and slightly sticky. Remove it from the food processor and into another bowl, and shape into a ball.

The dough should be worked with rather quickly to keep the butter from melting. You may elect to cover it with a damp towel if the day is warm and dry.

You can see that the dough forms a ball quite easily, is moist and not crumbly, and that the butter and shortening are well distributed.

Follow this recipe and you will end up with almost enough dough for two pies. In addition to the pie shown above, we made a small 7-incher with the extra dough (also with double crust). You will find that the dough is very easy to roll out - possibly a little more elastic than our usual recipe. As with our usual recipe, it is, however, still slow to brown. We left this baby in the oven for nearly an hour (fearful of overcooking), the last 20 minutes on the top rack.

We encountered almost immediate shrinkage of the pastry as it began to warm up. You can see a little warping of the edge in the picture below. Interestingly, this did not happen to the small 7-inch pie made with the same pastry. Hmmm. Was it the result of two different pie pan materials? Was it anything to do with the differences in the two fillings? Sac Pie is mystified. We only know that it's not the dough itself that causes shrinking.

It doesn't look like it's going to taste bad, does it?

Well, it was perfectly fine. We wanted it to be a little more flaky on top, so there is room for improvement. We could not discern the benefits of the butter in either taste, appearance, or texture of the crust. We detected a slightly dry feel to the crust, but this might have been the result of the pie's bake-a-thon in the oven rather than the ingredients. With all of those things in mind, we still enjoyed snarfing up this pie and the first one gives us confidence to try again: less butter, maybe a small increment of whole wheat flour to replace the white flour.

Don't be intimidated by the novelty of this recipe. It behaves well, tastes good, and is pleasing to the eye. It makes a fine package for your frozen peaches, and is a homey, comforting product.

Pie of the Week - Lemon Tart

It's time.

I have been putting this off all winter. I look at those Meyer lemons bobbing on the tree out back and think, "I gotta do something with those." I've made lemonade, limoncello, and lemon-juice ice cubes. And there are still so many lemons out there. Look at them all! Next I must consider preserved lemons.

After I get finished with lemon tart, that is. Tart is just another word for pie with no lid.

My web research on lemon tart led me through the looking-glass and into a vast lemon tart alternate universe. I never knew that this was a tart people became passionate about. And, as with everything else one searches for on the web, there are gazillions of recipes - and all of them called THE BEST LEMON TART RECIPE -EVER!!!! Sac Pie could make an entire career out of comparing all the lemon tart recipes side by side in an enormous early spring bake-off - amount of butter/eggs, ease of preparation, presentation, taste, yadda yadda - but Sac Pie already has a full-time job, such as it is, and other leisure pursuits besides eating. Please don't act all surprised about that.

So far, I'm able to make three decisions: I will use the backyard lemons, and look for the recipe that maximizes lemons (counting the juice and the zest this took four); I will use the standard pie crust for the tart shell (just to see what happens); and I will not strive for a low-fat, cooking-light recipe but start out with the full schmear - eggs, butter, sugar. Based on the outcome, I will modify the recipe if needed, because I will still have a thousand lemons.

So all I need is a recipe for the tart filling. This is not going to be lemon meringue pie, no no no. Sac Pie does not do lemon meringue. This filling is going to be something between a lemon curd and lemon sauce - soft but firm, viscous and low-rise, not stiff and airy like lemon pudding. It seems wise to pre-bake the shell because 1) the filling is delicate and, loaded with sugar, prone to scorching, and 2) the liquidy filling will be less likely to make the bottom of the shell turn mushy if it's baked first.

Here we go.

I followed this recipe, which I found at David Lebovitz's site, www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2009/05/tart_au_citron_french_lemon_tart.html.

This one looked the simplest and the least sugary and finicky to me. Because I'd never made a lemon tart before, I figured I ought to start with the simple approach and build some confidence before going for something more elaborate. And if David Lebovitz can make a delicious tart with egg yolks that have been in suspended animation in his freezer for a few months, odds are good that a novice's will come out okay. Right?

If you are using a standard 9.5-inch tart pan, I would advise doubling the recipe below, otherwise you end up with barely enough filling to make the dessert not just low-rise but, er, thin. To the point of stingy. Not especially enticing.

Are you ready?

Ingredients:

1/2 cup (125 ml) freshly-squeezed lemon juice 


grated zest of one lemon, preferably unsprayed


1/2 cup (100 g) sugar 


6 tablespoons (85 g) butter, salted or unsalted, cut into bits


2 large eggs


2 large egg yolks

One 9-inch (23 cm) tart shell.

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350F (180C.)

NOTE: If you pop the tart shell into the oven at 350 degrees F to bake until golden, you can have the custard filling ready to go into it at the exact time that it is finished baking - about 20 minutes.

1. In a medium-sized non-reactive saucepan, heat the lemon juice, zest, sugar, and butter. Have a mesh strainer nearby.

2. In a small bowl, beat together the eggs and the yolks.

3. When the butter is melted, whisk some of the warm lemon mixture into the eggs, stirring constantly, to warm them. Scrape the warmed eggs back into the saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and almost begins to bubble around the edges.


4. Pour the lemon curd though a strainer directly into the pre-baked tart shell, scraping with a rubber spatula to press it through.


5. Smooth the top of the tart and pop it in the oven for five minutes, just to set the curd.

6. Remove from the oven and let cool before slicing and serving.

That was easy! A dusting of confectioner's sugar and a few twists of fresh lemon on top, a sprig of mint, perhaps, and you are off to the races with this simple, elegant confection. Or skip the decorating and just slice into it. Your pastry shell should be firm enough to hold up the dense, silky curd. The filling made with this recipe was balanced between sweet and tart; if you like it more tart, you can reduce the sugar. In the picture directly below, you can see the little flecks of lemon zest in the curd and get a sense of the smooth consistency of its surface.

This was one of Sac Pie's homelier-looking works, mainly because it was an experiment that we were prepared to throw out if it didn't work. But it works just fine. We will double the filling and dress it up when we make it for Susan's ranch picnic this weekend.

If you have some lemons to use up, this is an easy and delicious way to enjoy their freshness. Let me know how you do with your version of this tart.