A Taste of Summer: Exquisite Key Lime Pie!

Recently, my grandma had a birthday. Judging by the dessert she gravitates to almost every time we go to Applebee's for dinner, I decided to make a homemade (from scratch) key lime pie to celebrate at our family get together. I had this gorgeous picture in my mind of a lime green pie in a black crust, so I opted for a chocolate Graham cracker crust.

The recipe I followed was from one of my favorite cookbooks, Cook's Illustrated Cookbook from America's Test Kitchen. It tests different proportions of ingredients, etc. and gives you the absolute best version of the recipe (my favorite carrot cake recipe is also from this book-- not too oily, dry, crumbly, or gooey. Perfect!)

Unless you live in southern Florida and I'm jealous of you, key limes are not readily available. This book suggests the use of Persian limes (the kind you find in any and every grocery store), which saves you from juicing 20+ tiny key limes (you're welcome!)

First, zest limes and get the juice from 5 of them. I misread the instructions and zested the 5 limes, too, so a) the pie was extra lime-y and b) I was so sick of zesting. You'd probably only need to zest 2 or 3, unless you're an overachiever.

I might make this my background photo. My favorite color is lime zest. 

One of these things is not like the others...

I think the zested limes look just like tennis balls. They are also delightfully fuzzy.

Any recipe for a custardy pie like this one will require egg yolks. I like to use the 3 bowl method that I learned from volunteering at cooking school. Basically, you want to crack your eggs over one bowl, and have a separate bowl for yolks and one for whites.

This method is more important if you're using the whites (to make a meringue or something fluffy), because they're the ones that will really flop if they get any protein (yolk) in them. Using this method, if the egg that you just cracked gets some yolk in the white, all the other egg whites you have aren't compromised and you don't have to start over. It's sort of a mini insurance policy. On your eggs. Trying to think of a funny pun.

One of the things that makes me cringe the most is when a recipe asks you to separate eggs, then only uses the yolks or the whites. Whichever 1/2 you have to use (yolks or white), you can scramble the other half. No waste! (If you do it the other way, you're LITERALLY throwing half the money you spent on eggs down the trash chute. If you're spending $6/dozen on organic eggs from free-range, self-aware, happy-go-lucky chickens that poop rainbows, that could add up.)

While the custard was thickening, I made the crust. The best way to finely crumble your Graham crackers is to put them in a Ziploc bag (if you're reusing one, make sure it's fully dry and has no holes), then roll it over with a rolling pin.

 I opted for a glass in a bowl. We're high-tech in my kitchen. Try to keep up.

If I were to do anything differently, I would not add extra sugar to the pie crust, just because I was using pre-sweetened chocolate Graham crackers. The crust turned out extra crumbly, and I'm wondering if that's why. 

I used the same glass to press the Graham cracker dust into the pie pan after adding melted butter. Make sure it's pressed down well, then use a spoon to press it into the edges. You can lick the spoon. And/or the bottom of the glass.  You'd have to have surveillance footage of my kitchen to prove whether or not I did that last one... 

The pie crust needs to bake a few minutes, and the custard filling recipe should tell you whether the crust should be warm or cooled completely before the custard is added. In the case of this recipe, the crust should be warm. In a moment of poor judgment and hyper-impatience, I poured the custard into the fresh-from-the-oven pie crust, so that's another possibility for why the crust was crumbly.

Cooking and baking is truly 99.9% following directions. You see how well I do that.

Regrettably, I didn't get a photo of the beautiful finished product-- apparently the love of key lime pie is genetic in this family because this was snarfed up in a flash.

You can also just buy a crust. That would save you some time and energy, but I just really REALLY like making things from scratch as a way to show my peeps how much I care. Stay tuned to see if I still say the same after this weekend's Easter dinner... :)

Message me if you'd like this recipe in full! Or, do yourself a favor and buy this great cookbook . I promise I'm not getting paid for advertising. 

Now featuring... The Brewmeister's Beef Stew!

Greetings all! As we near the close (hopefully) of the dreary winter weather, here comes a classic cold weather go-to meal for me. And I might mention that this will be a bit of a cameo for the "brewmeister", who will remain anonymous at this point ; )

Anyway, one of my favorite winter meals is a rich, flavorful beef stew. Not only is this perfectly tasty, but also a very low maintenance meal, granted you are able to plan ahead about 6-8 hours. So, first step here is chopping a bunch of veggies up into bit size pieces (the more irregular the better). For this version I went with a sweet potato from our local farmer's market (I wish I took a picture of this bad boy, must have been 4 pounds or so), 4 carrots, 1 white onion, and 4 stalks of celery. Your finished product for this step will look something like this.

Now you can put this aside and focus on the star of the show-- BEEF!! What I like to do here is coat the beef in a flour/salt/pepper mixture. And just as an FYI, nearly all grocery stores will have some stew ready meat already chopped up for you. I used about a pound and a half for this recipe. So once you have the beef evenly coated with your flour and spice mixture, throw some oil in a pan and crank up the heat. Once your oil is ready, throw your meat in there and get all sides nice and brown. This step is key to locking in the tender goodness of your meat. So once your meat is good and brown, toss it in your Crockpot. Don't forget to scrape in every last morsel of flavor from your pan here.


So now we are ready to toss everything (veggies, beef, liquids, and spices) into the pot and let the flavors meld like a well orchestrated symphony. For flavor, let's invite the following friends to the party:

So we have some beef broth (I used two cups here), a couple bay leaves, about a tablespoon of paprika, 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, and my favorite, 3 cloves of minced garlic. These are really more about personal preference, so listen to your heart. And I can't forget, living up to my nickname, I also topped off the pot with some home brews. These happened to be of the gingered ale variety : ) 

Quick recap: veggies, beef, liquids, and spices are all in the Crockpot. At this point, our work is nearly over. Just set your Crockpot to the setting of your liking; low and 8 hours was my choice since it was a weekend and it was too cold to go golfing. In the meantime, read a book, have a few more beers. or catch some good TV; whatever tickles your fancy. After a few hours, check on your stew, and make sure everyone is getting along nicely in the sauna!

This meal goes really well with some yummy cornbread, or bread of any kind. Well, that is all for now, folks! Hopefully it's not too late to put this recipe into action. If it is, there's always next winter, or you could move to a more northerly latitude. 

I will gracefully stand aside now because as we all know, the women run the show...