Pig n' Pumpkin

With October being National Pork Month, I figured it was once again my patriotic duty to slow cook a dry-rubbed pork shoulder for 10 hours and eat it over the course of a week.

I went the pulled pork sandwich route similar to last year, and I feel it was once again the right decision.

In the spirit of October and Halloween and canned pumpkin being on sale at the grocery store each week, I've been on a torrent of making pumpkin based desserts. To start, multiple dozens of pumpkin cookies have been baked (and consumed too quickly for photographic evidence). Ever since making marshmallows for various camping trips over the summer, I had been toying with the idea of doing some flavored marshmallows, and felt that a pumpkin pie flavored marshmallow would do the trick.

I used some tiny cookies cutters to create the various leaf and pumpkin shapes. Definitely more difficult to punch out shapes from a sheet of marshmallow rather than a sheet of sugar cookie dough.

Following my first attempts at basic cake decorating with marzipan earlier this summer, I had also been looking for a good time to try some sculpting with marzipan. I thought that some simple pumpkin would be a relatively easy first project:

Surprisingly enough, they actually turned out how I intended. I think that for next time, by omitting the strong flavored almond extract and adding in some pumpkin pie spices, these would be really phenomenal if they looked like pumpkins and tasted like pie.

--Isaac.

Changing Seasons

In a last ditch effort to salvage what was left of summer, I wiped away the rainwater from the grill and fired it up. A couple weeks prior, I had dusted off my Himalayan salt block to grill some vegetables. In the process of washing/scrubbing veggie guts off of the block afterwards, the block suffered an unfortunate accident while and was split in twain. How strange it is that a block of salt would erode when exposed to liquid...

Fortunately, the split was clean enough so that I could still grill up a pile of Philly steak meat for some steak tacos...

...and some of those healthy vegetables too I guess...

I trust you won't tell those Philadelphians what I was doing to their cheesesteak meat. I was lacking any sort of Cheese-Whiz or similar manufactured cheese product for a traditional cheesesteak, but I did have plenty of masa to squish out some homemade corn tortillas and make some killer steak tacos with roasted corn and bell pepper salsa:

In a previous post, I had mentioned the Emma Torte in all its chocolaty glory. At the time, I made a patriotic version of the frozen summer dessert, but this time, I went with the tried and true original recipe:

Much more monochromatic, but probably more delicious as I wasn't screwing around with that white chocolate shenanigans. The torte was a birthday request from Mary's mom, and I was happy to oblige. I think the Emma Torte is close to passing up my pies in popularity and dessert requests for family gathering, which is quite the feat (I might add at the risk of blowing out my rotator cuff as I pat myself on the back) as my pies rank up as "really awesomely fantastic" on a scale from 1-to-Fantastic.

--Isaac.
@baconvpie

A New Standard in Pie

As September was the blog's one year anniversary/birthday, I figured the best food to mark the occasion would be a combination of what we are: Bacon and Pie.

As much as I want to make nothing but pumpkin pies for the next three months now that fall is here and pumpkins are on sale at the grocery store, a bacon and pumpkin pie combination just sounded a bit off. Bacon and apples had a much better ring to it, and pears were on sale, so the Apple and Pear Pie with Bacon was the final verdict.

I typically use Granny Smith apples for my apple pies because their tartness pairs well with the extra sugar that gets added in. Since my pears were pretty soft and ripe to begin with, I wanted to get the apple to roughly the same consistency as the pears right at the beginning of the baking process. Cooking down the apples with the bacon (some nice thick-cut black forest bacon) seemed like an obvious and delicious decision.

Overall, the apple-pear-bacon turned out really nice. I went light on the bacon this round because I was worried about making the pie too savory, and I think next time (and there will be many future next times) the pie could have benefited from some more bacon. More bacon is always a good thing.

In other pie-related news, I recently had the privilege of receving my grandmother's pie cookbook (from 1965):

 

It has seen better days, but I think it just adds to the charm. The book's authors were not joking when they claim this as the "complete" pie cookbook as there are over 700 recipes included. Very impressive collection. I thought about maybe trying to bake my way through the book, but then realized that a pie each week would take about 14 years, and a pie a day isn't feasible either. I'm really excited about using and adapting recipes from 45+ years ago and hopefully I can make the book last another 45 years.

--Isaac.