I had dinner guests last night and spent most of the day playing in the kitchen. I don't have pictures of the entire spread (appetizers, slow-cooked pork ribs, green salad, and wine are all out of the photo collection) but I do have photos of the Two Grand Experiments. Yes, I experiment to some degree with company, especially these particular friends.
I've been wanting to cook a Washington Post recipe for Roasted Tomato Pie with Cheddar-Parmesan Crust. I had some lovely-looked heirloom tomatoes to commit to the recipe. My gift articles from the Post don't usually seem to work here, but here's the link anyway: click. For good measure, here's a PDF of the document. Roasted Tomato Pie With Cheddar-Parmesan Crust Recipe - The Washington Post.PDF
This was a lot of work, but delicious. Next time (and I do think there'll be a next time) I'll either use a smaller pie plate or double the filling. (Edited to add: now as I empty the dishwasher, I see I used a larger pie plate than the recipe specifies. My bad.)
I'll also be sure not to reach into the food processor bowl with my bare hands to check the dough consistency. I'm not used to using a food processor for pie dough, and my thoughtless action slowed me down.
The other experiment involved making a peach pie using pie filling I'd made and frozen a couple of years ago, when the peaches were particularly good. I suspect I got the idea here someplace. Now I have to find my notes on what, exactly, I put in there: peach chunks, sugar, no doubt some lemon, and either flour or cornstarch. After I made the crust using my mother's standard recipe, not the cheese recipe from the pie above, I put the barely-thawed pie filling into the shell, rolled out the top dough and put it atop everything. I remembered to cut vents but forgot to use liquid to seal the bottom and top crusts. I also didn't think to put an egg wash on the top layer, though maybe it didn't matter. I think it's been at least a decade since I've made this style of pie!
You can see in the photo that some of the juices leaked out through the unsealed edges, but nobody complained. There was plenty of good flavor in that pie!
