Strawberry rhubarb pie

Recipe and notes below:

Southern California adventures

Lots of adventures over the last two weeks!

Clementine meringue pie

We made this pie from this recipe:

Adventures in homemade pizza

Last winter (2009-2010) I came across a particularly...opinionated pizza recipe by Jeff Varasano. His "they're wrong; I'm right; do this" style is very similar to Ken Rockwell's, and I am gradually accumulating evidence suggesting I'm an absolute sucker for that kind of writing. So I made some pizzas.

I think I'd describe them as...unique.

This was before I'd figured out how to make bread, so I was very concerned about the crumb:

I had a problem with the dough getting soggy from the sauce/toppings and not baking properly.

But if baked for longer, the dough dries out and develops a very thick crust (in the "bread crust" rather than "pizza crust" usage):

And then I guess I lost interest, because that last picture is from January of 2010.

Last week, the farmer's market had some awesome tomatoes and so I decided to try again.

I used my bread recipe for the crust, and I think it turned out better this time. I'm still using a preheated baking pan instead of a pizza stone, but I have an electric oven now, which I think is better suited for pizza. The heat is drier (natural gas makes 40g H₂O per MJ), and I think the stronger radiative transfer results in selective heating of the black enameled baking pan. I baked at 500 for 5 min and then turned on the broiler for a few minutes to brown the top of the crust.

For one pizza, I tried using a 1/8" thick sheet of aluminum 6061 instead of the baking pan, but I don't think that worked out as well. I also got a pretty weird smell from whatever cutting fluid residues were left on the metal. I wonder if it's still T6 anymore...

Anyways, to address the sogginess, I seeded the tomato before crushing it and used it very sparingly. It still got soggy, but it feels more like the dough got wet after cooking rather then being too wet at the beginning and refusing to cook properly.

The big revelation, however, was in the mozzarella. This time I used "Precious" brand fresh mozzarella from Mollie Stone's, and it tastes far better than any other mozzarella I've bought before (both fresh and low-moisture). Pretty awesome. Does release a lot of moisture, though - in the second picture, I put the cheese on 5 minutes into baking thinking it'd keep the moisture locked in the cheese, but this just succeeded in creating a layer of water over the pizza that didn't get a chance to evaporate before I pulled it out.

In conclusion: maybe I got better at making the crust, or maybe it's just the electric oven. Pizza is still soggy in some places, but the cheese and sauce taste awesome so it's okay.

I Love Blue Sea

A while back, we got a Groupon for i love blue sea, a San Francisco (they also ship nationwide) seafood distributor that provides incredibly fresh (sushi quality) sustainable seafood at good prices (definitely cheaper than the local supermarket for comparable items).

Over the weekend, we placed an order and drove up to the city to pick it up (their warehouse is open for pickups from 12-1pm, Monday - Saturday). They filled our little cooler and with ice and seafood. With the pickup discount, we got:

• 1 dozen Hood Canal Bay oysters ($16)
• 1.5 lb Hawaiian pole-and-line albacore tuna ($20)
• 1 lb Prince Edward Island mussels ($6)

The oysters were amazing. Difficult to open (we both ended up stabbing ourselves with a 3" paring knife), but delicious.

It turns out we were storing them a bit colder than optimal (ideal is 35-40 °F, with adequate oxygen supply), but we ate them over the course of 36 hours without ill effect.

At only $6, I think the mussels were best deal of all. We ate a few raw (I don't recommend it - they're kinda bitter) and boiled the rest to make a sauce for linguine (olive oil, white wine, mussels, bell pepper, tomato). All the mussels were alive, and there was enough for 2 plates like this:

That's lightly seared tuna on top, because we had a ton of it. Per pound, it's a great price, but the 1.5 lb minimum order puts us into a region of diminishing returns.

It's not actually green; that's unfortunately how fluorescent light comes out on film. Anyways, we made a lot of tuna-and-avocado rolls with the winter-ripening bacon avocado we'd gotten from the farmer's market by Moss Landing. It was awesome.

We then had seared tuna for lunch the next day. The searing adds a welcome complexity of taste to the surface, while the bulk maintains the texture of the raw fish. We want the surface temperature to reach 150°C for the Maillard reaction, but want to minimize the region that exceeds 60°C (turns opaque and flaky). So if raw albacore tuna has a thermal diffusivity of 0.15 mm²/s and we start at an initial condition of 0°C, this is starting to sound like a parabolic PDE...

The boundary condition is problematic. Making it isothermal with the pan defeats the purpose of our modeling; perhaps constant heat flux is more appropriate. Furthermore, the meat's heat capacity becomes ∞ for a while when it reaches 100°C, but we can approximate this effect by adding f_MΔH_vap/C_P to the goal temperature, where f_M is the tuna's moisture content (63%), ΔH_vap is water's heat of vaporization (2257 J/g), and C_P is the specific heat of tuna (3.1 J/g K). This gives us a target surface temp of 610°C...

Okay, looks like ΔH_vap is a bigger player than I initially thought. Within the fish, conduction would be best modeled with an isothermal boundary condition at 100°C. Using the semi-infinite slab solutions (which is actually just an ODE after nondimensionalization), we get T(x,t) = T_surfaceerfc(x/√4αt). We're interested in when/where T = 60°C, i.e. x/√4αt = erfc^-1(60/100) = 0.37. For x in mm and t in s, this comes out to x = 0.29√t. So that ~1 mm "cooked" layer in the picture would have taken 12 sec.

The next question is to find how long it takes for the fish surface to reach 150°C. Unfortunately this requires more information, including the heat flux into the surface and some sort of diffusion length for the movement of moisture from the bulk into the rapidly-dehydrating surface. These are the primary factors in determining how long it will take to brown the surface.

As a side note, I have got to figure out how to put LaTeX into blog posts; formatting formulae in HTML is terribly unwieldy.

Anyways, we still had leftover fish after the seared tuna lunch, so we've salted the rest in much the same way as we did before.

More French bread iterations

I've given my French bread recipe a couple more tests now, and I have some more thoughts:

• Moisture is the most critical parameter. When it's wet, it's very elastic and sticks to everything. It doesn't shape very well, but still rises nicely. The crumb is nice and open, but the bread is still denser than I'd like. Maybe I need to bake it longer to drive out the extra moisture? When it's less wet, it's easier to work with, but sometimes the crumb comes out very dense. I think all this indicates that I have poor control of moisture, and that the ideal level is somewhere between the extremes I've tried.
• The knob on our oven temperature control has a ton of backlash, so I don't have good temperature control. Baking temperatures are +/- 25 deg F, maybe more.
• Fairly sensitive to salt. Once I accidentally put in a whole teaspoon of salt (the ink has rubbed off all our plastic spoon measures), and that was far too salty. At 1/2 teaspoon, you can taste the salt in the bread. At 1/4, it's just right. Haven't tried it without salt.
• 1/2 C whole wheat flour is a bit much. I went down to 1/4 C for a while, and am now doing about 1/8 C (2 T). I like the taste better with less whole wheat.

Food updates

Over the last month we've made some interesting food:

Not that interesting, but a sushi feast! There was crab (cooked), roast eel (from a can), and some kind of raw fish. It was actually really good, so I'm disappointed that we forgot what it was. All I remember is that it was the only thing at Mitsuwa that wasn't on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch "Avoid" list.

Next time, we'll try i love blue sea, a San Francisco distributor of sustainable, sushi-quality seafood.

We'd also gotten some wild Alaskan salmon. We salted it. That is, we put salt on it (and a little pepper), put it in the fridge for two days, and then ate it.

It was really salty.

I'm not quite sure what to make of that, but SC's Russian friend says it's the best way to eat fish.

We bought turkey hot dogs from Safeway at an incredible discount ($0.49 for a standard pack of 8). Ever since we went to Chicago three winters ago (January of 2008), we've been trying to replicate Chicago-style hot dogs (I can't believe that place has a Wikipedia page). At some point we gave up on matching it exactly, but we still try loading up on toppings.

This one has horseradish mustard, diced tomatoes, grated Colby Jack cheese, onion, slightly questionable avocado, sliced pepperocinis, ground pepper, and celery salt.

We decided to make chicken Parmesan, with some modifications. We used thigh meat, which we like more than breast, and we didn't have bread crumbs, so we dredged one in whole wheat flour and the other in oatmeal. They actually both turned out about the same - a whole lot like fried chicken. And that's the secret to chicken parm's success as an American staple: it's fried chicken...with cheese.

Chicken stock

We've gotten into the habit of making chicken stock from scraps and it's been working out pretty well! We save skin and bones, and when we have two small tupperwares full, we boil them along with some chicken feet. We've been experimenting with adding other things: onion, celery, carrots, and various spices. Most recently, I tried thyme, but that didn't turn out so great.
Anyways, we do the first batch in this stockpot (pictured outfitted with my crocheted pot cozy). Afterwards we transfer the bones (discarding the skin) to the insulated pot and do a few batches there. I like adding some vinegar to dissolve the bone.

The stock we get is not as strong as the stuff at the store - it's easily overpowered by other ingredients - but it has a ton of dissolved (or is it colloidal?) gelatin, which gives it a deeper texture. It's also supposed to be better for you.

Pumpkin pie

After our failed trip to the Half Moon Bay pumpkin festival, we bought a pumpkin at Safeway with the intention of making pie. Turns out those Jack-o-lantern pumpkins are different from those typically used for making pie (i.e., larger, more watery, less sweet, and grainier).

Still, we went ahead and made pie following this recipe. We made a graham cracker crust and used fresh ginger and only 1 can of evaporated milk (I didn't realize that it's so different from condensed milk!), but otherwise followed it exactly. If you're wondering what the Cateye bike light is doing in the photo below, it's how we look into our oven, for there is no window nor light in there.

It turned out quite nice! We drained a lot of liquid out of the pumpkin puree just by letting it sit on a colander for awhile and stirring occasionally. It was still quite soupy after mixing in the evaporated milk, but it firmed up in the oven. It's quite spicy, but I guess that is what one expects from pumpkin pie. Compared to pumpkin pie we've gotten at stores, it's fluffier and less sweet, both of which are positives in my mind.

Updates from the past week

Abbreviated posts:

Saturday (6/5)
Helicopter test flight with Aaron and Max. Had some close calls myself (lost track of heading and then the wind took it far away where I couldn't see it very well), but managed to keep the blades away from danger. Let Aaron fly it. He's got some co-axial experience and some simulator time (well, 5 minutes worth), and was much better at holding a hover than I was. Unfortunately ended with crashing into a bike tire. Broke the landing gear.

Glued the landing gear back in place, replaced the feathering shaft (dunno exactly when it got bent). Lately have been seeing the system act glitchy; I don't know why and I don't even know where to start looking. The most plausible scenario I can think of is the increased vibrations (due to unbalanced blades or other damage) putting excessive noise into the AHRS.

Tuesday (6/8)
A rasbora died! :( It was the loner fish who looked like he had tail damage, possibly as a result of fights. His tail was completely gone when I found him. And that morning, the other fishes were strangely quiet (they usually fight in the morning), huddled together in the center of the tank.

Wednesday (6/9)
Muir Beach and pirates' cove with Max, Bryce, and Nick. A really windy spot. I climb a boulder. Throwing rocks. Fiji water and expensive sammiches from JJ&F.

Thursday (6/10)
Old oto (a.k.a. fat oto) died :( Afterwards, we changed the water, because that's all that we really can do, but water tests didn't show anything particularly out of the ordinary. But it is a troubling spate of fish deaths. While changing the water, did notice the thin tube (between the two tanks) was clogged by a wayward snail.

Friday (6/11)
Family (parents and brother) in town! Presented the helicopter to my dad. Took it out for a test run, but ended up crashing the landing. I think it was a level landing, just a little hard, and then the previously-broken landing gear broke, causing the helicopter to roll over on that side until the blades struck the ground. Feathering shaft is noticeably bent. Damnit. Felt pretty bad about it all.

Went to Mediterranean Wraps for lunch, then made beef Stroganov for dinner. Used beef flank this time, which I didn't like as much as the tenderloin we used last time. Also had watermelon, which was a great treat in the hot weather.

Saturday (6/12)
Went up to Muir Woods and walked around (Hillside trail, ~2 mi). Big sequoias. Very straight. Asexual reproduction through burls, which cause a ring of clonal redwoods to grow around the burnt-out stump of the parent. Also, bendy phototroping bay laurels, which seem to be able to grow out of dead logs. And redwood sorrels, which sleep in the sun and open up in the shade (except for some lazy ones we saw napping in the shade).

The hilly drive up put higher demands on the engine than I'd seen before. Even on the highway, there were parts where full throttle in fifth just wasn't enough (well, not quite WOT...I wanted to avoid the rich burn and other power-boosting tweaks that happen up there).

This whole weekend I've been feeling the car act a little more sluggish than usual. Due to the high correlation between input variables, I can't tell whether this is due to increased passenger mass (~15% of the vehicle weight) or the air conditioner load. Actually, now that I think about it, in addition to slower acceleration, I've also noticed longer stopping distances (which can only be explained by increased mass). An unrelated observation: the A/C is more powerful at higher engine speeds.

Also went to the Golden Gate Bridge visitor center, and the Richmond district's Chinatown. Came back to have dinner with family friends at Jade Palace/Duck restaurant.

Sunday (6/13)
Got up early to get a Master's hood from the bookstore. Graduation today! Turns out the Master's robe is slightly different from the Bachelor's: it's got extensions from the bottoms of the sleeves, as if you might have 2 forearms like the Gatekeepers from Schlock Mercenary. Skipped the commencement ceremony, though; just went to the department ceremony.

Afterwards, went to the San Jose Tech Museum; it was free second Sundays, which was cool, and we spent the whole time going through the exhibits. Not much new since the last time I've been there (there was a Genghis Kahn exhibit, but it was kinda expensive and the rest of the family wasn't very interested), but it was much less crowded than I've seen before, which was nice.

Oh - check engine light came on again; still the neutral position switch and knock sensor, so I just cleared it again.

Safeway ribs adventure

Had a very enjoyable afternoon (despite the helicopter crash) thanks to the confluence of:

1. Safeway ribs They had a long rack of ribs for $6; we pulled the ad from the display case but the cashier couldn't get it to ring up at the sale price so eventually management had to come over to find and tear out a coupon from the circular. It was also midnight, so there was only the one cashier and he was getting pretty nervous as the line started building up behind us. So maybe we made a scene, but it had to be done. We can't let their marketing department pull stunts like this.
2. Fresh baked bread Came out very nice...the difference this time was making the dough way too wet.
3. Cherries
4. Season 2 of The Wire This season got a lot more interesting a couple episodes in. Unfortunately we have to wait until Thursday for Netflix to send us the next disc!

Adventures!

Sunday: Hung out with our friend LA. Saw an asparagus tree, had sweet peas fresh off the vine, saw a very pretty chicken with black-outlined white feathers, went to Half Moon Bay where it was overcast and freezing and SC got attacked by the ocean, leaving her soaked. We'd gotten halibut at a nearby fish market (next to the Flying Fish Grill) and we grilled those on the beach. Unfortunately the freezing wind made it near impossible to cook anything, but the "seared" halibut was quite good. We also had beets, fresh out of the ground that morning, and they were the sweetest beets I'd ever had. Until then, I'd never understood how you could get sugar from beets; I thought there must have been some sort of enzyme conversion like in HFCS.

Tuesday: Got the car smog checked at Fair Oaks Smog check. Was worried because it almost failed HC last time, but it passed with flying colors. The tech said the CC was probably cold that last test, and that does seem consistent with the test results: high HC and CO emissions along with non-zero O2 would indicate there's something not right with the CC.

Hung out with LA again before he flew back to Princeton. Ate lobster, discussed the brutality of lobster cooking vs. other forms of animal slaughter, played Settlers of Catan, watched stupid YouTube videos (scraper bikes), discovered that a certain plastic mug catches fire in the microwave, got very nauseous from burning plastic fumes.

Thursday: Went to Sultana in Menlo Park. Had an awesome appetizer plate: various dips (Ezme, humus, babaganush, tabuleh, dolmas, kizartma and garbanzo salad) with a very soft bread. The entrees (kofte and adana  kebab) were...meh. Ground meats in a vaguely cafeteria-esque presentation. 

Started season 2 of The Wire. We didn't realize how good season 1 was until we watched another cop show. The Wire doesn't feel as dumbed-down, and it showed off some new facets of life and crime while developing a relatively complex set of characters. Season 2 is getting off to a rough start in that regard...we get quick little updates of all the characters; not enough to really see what is going on, and we got introduced to a real villain-y kind of guy who was set up in a third-degree-interrogation-of-henchmen scene. So I hope there is more to his character than just that.

Updates all around!

Lots of things are happening:

Food: We still have some strawberry-rhubarb pie left over. It's pretty great. Rhubarb has a tartness to it that is very pleasing in conjunction with the strawberries. We used a graham cracker crust for the bottom. I used an extra layer of aluminum foil around the glass pie pan to prevent it from burning, but it seems that was unnecessary. We were concerned that it was too runny and that the graham cracker crust would not hold, but it firmed up significantly after refrigerating. We used a frozen-butter-in-food-processor recipe for the top crust; cut down on the butter a bit but it still turned out good. Somewhat bland, though; maybe next time we add some sugar and vanilla or something.

Fishes: Saw a tiny fish! Maybe. I thought it moved like a fish, but SC thinks it moved like a shrimp. And it's probably more likely to be a shrimp, anyways. But we definitely saw one, a sort of grey-transparent color, quite small, hiding out around the jar.

Helicopter: Figured out the transmission noise...it's definitely on the wireless side. It helps to move the receiver closer to the transmitter, but I thought it was supposed to have at least a 30m range? Anyways, the telemetry is looking really good today. Still struggling with controlling the yaw mode; have now resorted to using the transmitter knob (channel 5) to control the gain, so I can play with it in real-time.

Fruit tart!

After getting a 4 lb box of giant hollow strawberries (one thought: fill the hollow with chocolate!), we decided to make a fruit tart.

Reviews of Stuff

FF is being a critic today:

Filet mignon: Sounds so classy, no? It turns out it's just a rather imprecise name for a part of the cow. Is good to eat, though perhaps not worthy of the quality its reputed for. Still, very tender. We broiled it over a bed of mushrooms and onions (which subsequently became delicious).

Duck broth: Buy a roast duck. Eat the duck. Boil the scraps. The first batch came out nice and strong and we used it to flavor a rice porridge. SC is saving the skimmed fat for a duck schmaltz experiment.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus: Not as good as The Fall. No cohesive plot and the visuals weren't good enough to carry it.

Opportunistic potato baking: Oven was preheated after the broiling, so we put in some potatoes to take regeneratively capture some of the heat. But it wasn't enough to cook the potatoes. We ended up microwaving them an additional 6 minutes.

And finally, perhaps the instigator of all this:

Hendrick's gin: Very flavorful, indeed. Advertises itself as "not for everybody" and comes with a pamphlet that helps you feel elitist about drinking it. Haven't quite gotten past the juniper berries, though. So I don't know about this whole cucumber thing. So far, I've only tried it on the rocks and with a little Collins mix.

French bread process development

I've made another few batches of French bread using the recipe from before. Here are my conclusions (no pictures though):

The recipe:

1. Mix 1/2 C whole wheat flour, 1 C white flour, and 1/2 t salt.
2. Dissolve 1/2 t yeast in 3/4 C warm water and mix solution into dry mixture
3. Let sit 15 min.
4. Dump goopy mess out onto well-floured surface
5. Knead in additional white flour (1/4 to 1/2 C) until satisfied
1. It should be dry enough that you can knead it 6 times without additional flour without sticking to the surface
2. It'll probably still stick to your hands and generally be a pain to knead
3. It should still be wet enough that it sticks if you knead it more than 10 times
6. Let rise until nearly doubled (~2 hr)
7. Fold, let rise again until doubled (~2 hr)
8. Shape, let rise while oven preheats (10-20 min)
9. Slash
10. Bake 30 min. @ 425°F
11. Bake 20 min. @ 350°F
12. Cool for 10 min. before cutting

Sensitivity to parameters

I don't have a lot of process control for the kneading/hydration, so I think it must be relatively robust to errors there. I think step 3 is pretty important for getting nice, elastic gluten chains, so that may unload some of the sensitivity to kneading quality.

Salt is pretty easy to measure repeatedly, so that's not a huge issue. I've been using different amounts of yeast, and that just seems to affect rise times.

Rise time, too, is not terribly sensitive. A visual inspection of volume change appears to be sufficient.

Punch down and shaping seem to affect the crumb: to get big, uneven bubbles in the bread you'd want to do these very lightly.

Finally, I've been getting lots of rise in the oven with this recipe compared to some past ones. I think having more water and step 3 both make the dough more elastic and able to support the steam generated in the oven. I suspect that the short post-shaping wait also helps keep the dough elastic going into the oven.

Slashing has a large effect on how it rises in the oven, especially in the distribution of added volume.

So that's it! I'd feel confident calling this recipe a rev A release.

French bread adventures

The recipe:
2 C flour
1 t yeast
1/2 t salt
3/4 C water

1. Mix 1-1/2 C flour, yeast, salt, and water.
2. Let sit 15 min.
3. Gradually knead in additional flour
4. Let rise 1:15
5. Fold, let rise 1:00
6. Shape, let rise 20 min.
7. Slash
8. Bake 40 min. @ 425 °F
9. Let sit in oven 15 min.

 Empirical results:

 

Above is the first time I used this recipe, and I followed it exactly (rather, I wrote the recipe to match the procedure for this bread)

 

 

This time, I was in a hurry so I added a few drops of vinegar and performed the rise in a hot water bath:

 

I skipped steps 2 and 5, reduced step 4 to 1 hour, and may have futzed around with the baking time & temperature as well. There weren't giant air pockets like the first time, but it was still a light, fluffy, springy bread; pretty good for a total of 2 hours.

 

This one was a bit disappointing. I used the hot water bath again, did a 1 hour 1st rise and a 45 min. second rise, and otherwise should have been pretty similar to the original recipe, but the crumb came out a lot denser. It could also be the flour¹ or the slashing technique (diagonals this time instead of one straight down the middle)

---

1. I used 1/2 C whole wheat flour in all these cases, but this time it was King Arthur Traditional Whole Wheat Flour, and the first two times it was King Arthur White Whole Weat Flour

Dinner Party details!

So we had this Chinese New Year dinner party last week with some of our friends. It's become somewhat PC to refer to it as "Lunar New Year",¹ but I'm okay with claiming it for China...

Preparation photos:

Roast duck: we bought a whole roast duck at the Asian supermarket. Awesomely fatty and delicious.

 

Barbecue pork buns: We made these according to the usual recipe (well, we toned down the yeast a little because the original recipe was rather excessive). The barbecue pork also came from the supermarket.

 

Sichuan noodle: Actually just linguine and chili sauce (老干妈)

 

Red bean porridge: A dessert dish, with red bean², rice, tapioca, dates, Goji berries, lotus seeds, lotus petals, and sugar. Nobody liked it except me. There are still leftovers 1 week on...

 

A fish! It's a silver carp, cleaned (scaled and gutted) at the supermarket. I'm stuffing ginger and green onion into it before we steam it. SC says fish is important for New Year's dinner.

The party:

Some dishes that I forgot to take pictures of:

1. Rice cake, tree fungus, and luffa. Stiy-fry. The rice cake is the bland kind (i.e. not sweet), so you can cut it into pieces and stir-fry it in a salty dish. Sticky rice cake is important for New Year's because of its homonyms. Luffa (丝瓜) and tree funges (木耳) are totally normal, good-tasting things to eat.
2. Steamed egg thing. I'm not exactly sure how this was supposed to turn out. Ask SC.
3. Tsingtao beer. I wanted to get some Chinese liquor, but the good stuff (I was looking for 茅台 or 五粮液) was really expensive.
4. Clementines. The sweetest ones ever, from the farmer's market³
5. Snacks. Lots of em: wasabi peas, sunflower seeds, "sesame soft flour cake" (沙琪玛), cookie rolls, haw flakes...

---

1. Yeah, that's right, I used the British comma. Wut.
2. Known here as Azuki beans
3. Saw a woman at the farmer's market with a cloth shopping bag that said "My carbon footprint is smaller than yours." What an asshole...

Lemon Meringue Pie

The Recipe
Crust
  1 C graham crumbs
  1/2 C crushed pecans
  2 T brown sugar
  4 T butter
Filling
  1/3 C lemon juice
  1/4 C clementine juice
  1 T clementine zest
  4 egg yolks  14 oz condensed milk
  2 clementines, peeled and sectioned
Meringue
  4 egg whites
  1/2 C sugar

1. Combine crust ingredients, press into pie tin. Bake 10 min. @ 350 F
2. Combine filling ingredients (except clementines), cook on stove
3. Line bottom of crust with clementines, pour in filling, and then meringue
4. Bake 8-10 min. @ 350 F to brown meringue
5. Cool, then refrigerate

The Fish Pie

We made this one about 2 months ago. It's a fish pie because there's a fish shape carved onto the meringue.
We followed the recipe above, and the results are shown in the photo at the top of the post. It was a lot of fun to make (the meringue took forever because we didn't have an electric mixer. Also I couldn't chuck a fork into the 3/8" drill. Maybe if I had a bigger drill with a 1/2" chuck, that would have worked out better), and it was great. I especially liked the clementine sections--a burst of flavor and texture within the lemon custard matrix.

The Giraffe Pie

Oh no! This one came out really runny. We used 3 eggs instead of 4 and didn't cook it for as long...maybe that's why?
Also, we used lemon+lime instead of clementines, and as a result, the citrus sections were still a really nice texture, but now intensely sour instead of pleasantly clementine-flavored.
We did use technology to our advantage this time around, though: a food processor to crumble the graham cracker, and an electric mixer for the meringue.
Also we gave part of this pie to Charlie for her aid rescuing me in the midst of the alternator adventures, and she said it was great! So there you have it; independent verification of our pie-making skills.

Giraffe Pie!

Lemon meringue pie with graham cracker/pecan crust. Made with the help of a new electric mixer and new measuring spoons that can't have their labels washed off since they're stamped metal! Yay technology!