Back in the Saddle

Ah! A new year and a new attempt to maintain a blog. Let's see if we get past May this time...

We're off to a good start, with two pies at once (and our first savory "pie"). Friends of ours at church recently had their first child and we volunteered to bring them dinner during the first week their daughter was home. This couple was the grateful recipient of a number of our pies last year (including the disastrous Grimace Pie), so I figured we'd take them a "pie" supper as a little wink-wink chuckle.

Pine Nut Pie

This will be a brief post. While this week's pie is amazingly good--and amazingly, not that bad for you, relatively speaking--I have a Mississippi River bargeful of other things to get done tonight. And to top it all off, I'm nodding off at the keyboard.

Pine nut pie. It's nuts on top of a sweet, slightly gooey filling, so kinda like pecan pie, but totally different. My wife strongly dislikes pecan pie. I had to sacrifice and eat the last piece of Pine Nut Pie because her self-control (and mine too, truthfully) was stretched to the limit.

The nuts come out soft and don't carry much flavor (not that pine nuts often do, in my experience), but the texture is appealing. The filling includes brown sugar, corn syrup, eggs, and flour so it comes off more solid than your standard pecan pie. "Nougat-y" was the wife's comment on the filling.

The recipe for Pine Nut Pie comes from Ken Haedrich's book Pie and I strongly suggest you go and look it up. Depending on your current household economy, you may want to hold off the baking, though, unless you find pine nuts for a decent price. A cup of pine nuts set me back about $11, but admittedly I didn't go hunting for a better price very diligently. I will, however, remember the recipe for the filling and I am looking forward to trying it with other nuts (walnuts, sunflower seeds?, pepitas?) in the future. Maybe even pecans.