Strawberry rhubarb pie

Recipe and notes below:

Clementine meringue pie

We made this pie from this recipe:

The pumpkin pie succumbs to mold!

After eating less than half the pie over the last few days, it has succumbed to mold, which is rather disappointing. Next time, we'll refrigerate. Or maybe get some calcium propionate.

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.

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.

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!