Easy as Pie

To make this dessert we

1. Thawed some puff pastry and put it in a pie tin
2. Cut up some ripe fruit (nectarines, I think), mixed it with lemon juice, cinnamon, brown sugar and a little salt and put it in the pastry
3. Made a topping by blending equal parts margarine, white sugar and flour, and dotting it all over the fruit
4. Baked it

Pumpkin Pie

If you don't live near a place like Yerushalayim, Efrat, or Ra'anana, you probably don't have supermarkets that specialize in imported American products and, consequently, it's probably hard for you to find canned pumpkin.

Fortunately, making your own pumpkin puree is super easy if you have a stick blender. Much easier, in fact, since Israeli pumpkin comes in large, solid blocks of pumpkin flesh - no messy scooping necessary. Just remove the rind, and cut the pumpkin into slices. Roast 'em on a baking sheet with a little salt for, I don't know, 20 minutes? It doesn't take long, and when they are soft they are done. Toss in a bowl, apply stick blender, and you have a pumpkin puree that is more orange than anything that comes out of a can. Tastes the same, but man - it's so orange!

Use in whatever pie recipe you like. We were invited to a dairy meal, so I took the opportunity to make Alton's pumpkin pie. Instead of graham crackers, I used Honey Nut Cheerios, and it worked, I just added a little water or extra butter or something to hold it all together.

chocolate mud pie with peanut butter cloud

Rachel and I are very proud of this dessert we made for Shabbat, and not just because it tasted great. People cook great tasting things all the time. But how often do they do so while improvising with leftovers? Or innovating new tastes, all while keeping things well within the limitations of a tight, underemployed budget?

This is what it's all about, dear SF2 readers.

Ok, now that I've got the drama out of my system, here's how it went down. Rachel crushed up some chocolate cookies we had left over from the previous Shabbat and mixed them with margarine to form a cookie crust. (See previous post.) She let that harden in the freezer, then prepared a chocolate pudding mix with soy milk for the filling.

Since we're really into the whole chocolate-peanut butter desserts, I tried to think of a way to incorporate peanut butter without relying on margarine. I settled on making a peanut butter whipped cream by first mixing a few large spoonfuls of peanut butter with parve whipped cream and a little soymilk to make a smooth and less viscous peanut butter base. Then I whipped the rest of the parve cream and folded in the peanut butter.

That parve creamer must have lots of emulsifiers in it, which worked out great for us and held the peanut foam together. A bunch of hours in the fridge helped it set nicely; not quite whipped cream texture, but definitely light, almost marshmallow like, and with the unmistakable kiss of peanut butter.

Gourmet? Definitely not. Fantawesomely delicious? Definitely yes.

Beyond Stale Cookies

What do you do when the cookies you bought last week just aren't that fresh anymore? Well, you could eat them but let's face it, stale cookies just aren't worth it. So what do you do?

Make pie. Or pie crust that is.

Crush the cookies into crumbles, melt a bit of margarine or butter (try 1/4-1/2 cup), mix it together really well. Press into a pie shell and freeze until you're ready to make the pie.