Rye Cooks

Lemon Meringue Pie

 

My oven was billowing smoke and everything went wrong with my pie this morning. Well, actually only my pie crust, but I spent much of yesterday afternoon on it.  

I have made pie crust before, but the problem is that I don't have one go-to recipe.  I search my cookbooks and the internet to find "the one I've used before" and hours go by.

I relied on my favorite blog and then I somehow did it all wrong.  The advice was to keep some of the butter in visible pieces, that butter was going to be my flaky friend.   Additionally, the dough should chill for at least an hour. That  made it a two day process because I'm just no good after Modern Family anyway. 

So, today, my friend, Clumpy Butter, made herself comfortable and relaxed all over the sides of the pie plate and dripped onto the oven floor.  See billowing smoke above.

I spent a ton of time reading all the comments on Epicurious as to the actual filling and meringue topping.  148 opinions, to which, which after the crust fiasco, I felt I should pay some mind.  Thankfully, the filling and the meringue went just fine, as written.  

Of course, the problem with pie is that it can't be tasted in advance.  It does look pretty good, though.  Just hoping for the best.  And, oh yeah, thank you Pillsbury, thank you for your pie crust.

Clams without Sand, Cooking with Mark

 

Costco has such a wide variety of items, it is a bit weird to pick up two dozen clams along with new socks and an extra large Advil. Couldn't resist the clams, it has been years since I attempted linguine and clam sauce.

I had no recent recipe in mind and I knew there was something tricky about getting the clams to spit out sand.  I referred to the most useful cookbook I own:  Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, Simple Recipes for Great Food".

The bright yellow cover just sings "I will help you, I will lead the way. There is nothing to fear."  And he never disappoints.  One day I would love to meet Mark Bittman. He writes the Minimalist food column for the New York Times, and it is possible that a certain photographer for same newspaper may be able to wrangle an introduction???

So Mark says (to me), scrub the clams with a soft brush (I used a the scrubbie back of a clean blue sponge) put them put them in a broad saucepan or skillet with a cover, along with 1/2 a cup of white wine and a pinch of cayenne.  I do believe the cayenne is what makes the clams spit out the sand, but Mark does not elucidate. No matter!

Cover and turn heat to high.  Cook 3 minutes and check to see if most of the clams have opened.  Transfer clams to a bowl and pass the juice through a sieve lined with cheesecloth to remove all traces of sand.  

Now, here I am going to offer some tiny changes of language because, Mark, with all due respect the two words that MAY turn readers away are SIEVE and CHEESECLOTH.  Not all of us have these things hanging around. (I had some cheesecloth, but we used it to clean out these recorders third graders get by mandate in music class all over the the state of New York.)

You can do as I do: use a new pair of those nylons or white tights your littest one has outgrown and stretch them over a small bowl and pour the liquid through.  Make a little indent before you pour so the stuff has somewhere to go.  Then at Costco, just pick up a few more cheap nylons for your kitchen use.  Personally, I think this is one of my more brilliant uses for household objects.  Well, there's your sieve and cheesecloth.  And now you have pure, de-sanded clam juice with which to start your linguine and clam sauce.

  

 

 

Father's Day Metal

Baby new potatoes, brussel sprouts and garlic roasted on the grill, Metal-Day style.  ©Rye Cooks

We were shooting at Paula's house.  She was saying something about Metal Tuesday in Rye, while dumping baby potatoes into this metal thing she'd rescued from the pile.

I'd never seen anything like the grilling basket, but I can say the baby new potatoes she grilled in them were the best-tasting baby potatoes I'd ever had.

That is saying something.  I'm from North Syracuse, New York, where our local delicacy is the salt potato.  In the long shadow of the Salt City, its packaging perfected by clambake king Hinderwadle's on Taft Road, the salt potato is your basic baby spud, boiled in uber-salted water until it absorbs all that salt through its skin and develops a delicate crust on the outside.  Hinderwadle's puts the raw potatoes and a big pouch of salt together in a sack and sells them locally for clambakes and barbecues. They're usually slathered with butter.

But I bought a brand-new grilling basket at Kohl's, and gave it to John for Father's Day.  Paula gave Drew a smoker like the one that sits, Appalachia-style, on our front porch, next to the still.

My K-Cup. It Works!

 

I love my Keurig K-cup single-serve coffee maker the kids gave me for Mother's Day.  I hate the way the coffee itself is served with a ladle of guilt: overpackaging in non-recyclable containers, and my contribution to the 1.6 billion or so K-cups sent to the landfill after seconds of use.  Google "K-cups" and "landfill" and you'll get the picture. 

I looked into a greener alternative to using the K-cups, and believe it or not, the solution came from Keurig themselves.  They make the My K-Cup: a little reusable filter basket into which you put your own ground coffee, for use in the machine you already own.  Perfecto!

But it was not so.  The My K-Cup invariably splutters clear water out the sides and into your cup, along with a thin stream of coffee brewed so weakly, it is nearly unpalatable. 

I've been tinkering.  And today, I think I nailed it:

1.  Empty out a used K-cup and steal the little filter therein.  Put the cleaned filter into the filter holder of the K-cup, below the filter basket itself. 

2.  Add the coffee and reassemble the unit.

3.  And now -- and I swear to God this is the only thing that has produced a decent cup of coffee -- cover the top of the whole My K-cup assembly with a piece of foil.  Stretch it over the top of the screw-on lid and snug it up under the lip. 

4.  Put the My K-Cup into the brewer and fire 'er up.

The problem with My K-Cup, as I found out after many field tests, is that the water quickly fills the unit and then runs out over the top of the lid, causing the clear water to sputter and never to touch the grounds.  HOWEVER, if you create a tight seal over the lid (as in the pre-packaged units), the water and the coffee are trapped together in a brief-but-steamy, perfect-cup-yielding lambada.  It loves.

Measuring Spoons at Anthropologie

©Suzy Allman

Gorgeous measuring spoon sets, both ceramic and silver-plated, from Anthropologie on Putnam Avenue, in Greenwich.  They are $18.00 a set.

I've always owned several sets of measuring spoons so I don't have to stop and wash up midway through mixing something.  I've never paid $18.00 for a set before today, though!  They'd make good wedding shower gifts.