Last week may have been all about the chicken, but this week a new theme emerged: all things crusted! Again, this was not a plan, but when I uploaded the pictures of what was cooking this week, I couldn’t help but notice a certain similarity in the dishes. Also a serious shortage of pie plates in the kitchen! I had unintentionally picked the same subject matter repeatedly, but luckily it yielded delicious results!
I live in Colorado, famous for its Palisade peaches. The annual school fundraiser is a 20-pound box of these beauties, and supportive mom that I am, naturally I purchase one. I love eating fresh peaches, but at some point enough is enough. The excess gets blanched in boiling water for 30 seconds so the skins fall off like magic, and I slice and bag the remaining fruit, destined for the freezer. I tell you this little background story so you can understand how excited I was to have something other than a hundred smoothies to look forward to. Also, in my tart’s defense, the beautiful concentric circles of perfect peach slices in the cookbook picture was not achieved in my kitchen. This was largely due to repeatedly bashing the Ziplock bag against the counter in order to break off a chunk of peaches that had frozen together. And hallelujah, broken peach halves taste the same as whole ones! Granted, Jo’s recipe for Peach & Almond Tart called for using fresh fruit, but a) it’s January, and b) she then does the same blanching and slicing operation I already did last summer, so basically I was ahead of the game. 
The dessert comes together using essentially a light homemade cake mix, and it puffs up to cover most of those carefully layered slices anyway. The final touch was a topping of sweetened mascarpone cream covered with toasted almond slices. Two notes here: first, ain’t no one got time to slice almonds manually, so spend the extra buck and buy them pre-sliced. You’ll save yourself a potential trip to the emergency room too… However, you DO have time to properly toast them. The only thing you can’t do is walk away. Almonds are more forgiving than pine nuts, which will turn black the instant you blink, but you still need to keep an eye on them for the full five minutes it takes to get the brown on them. Trust me, the taste and texture difference is worth it! Secondly, mascarpone is expensive and unnecessary if you happen to have cream cheese in your fridge. I love a good snobby dessert that is full of fancy ingredients as much as the next gal, but I didn’t feel like another trip to the grocery store just to buy $6 worth of soft cheese when I already had a perfectly acceptable substitute. Believe me, no one complained!
One pie, down, two to go! With a full weekend schedule of basement clean-out in preparation for new construction AND a dinner party planned, I wanted to make sure I had meals prepped in advance. Enter Brownie Pie. Is it pie? Is it a brownie? Why would you need both? Well, really no reason, except that you can cut it into wedges instead of squares, and I guess if you love pie crust, you get that too. Mainly I was excited about this recipe because it would hold for a day or two, unlike the aforementioned fruit tart. For that reason alone I decided to make this ahead for my dinner party; the fact that I didn’t have to buy anything special at the store made it even better. 
The result was a not-too-sweet brownie dessert that of course was calling out for vanilla ice cream on top, and our company seemed to enjoy it. It was made using unsweetened baking chocolate in the batter and semi-sweet chips (which held their shape inside) and chopped pecans, but you could swap those out for just about anything. Think butterscotch chips and peanuts; peanut butter chips and pretzel bits; white chocolate chips and macadamia nuts; or whatever floats your boat. Honestly I might make this again, sans useless pie crust, and try out a few of those combinations I just thought up!
Alas, from great highs, sad lows often follow. Such was the case with my final pie of the week, Asparagus & Fontina Quiche. First of all, I’m going to take issue with Jo’s obsession with costly cheese. Perhaps in Waco, TX fontina and gruyere is cheap, but here in Northern Colorado they want $8-10 a pound for that stuff! She seems to call for one (or both!) of these cheeses in most of her savory recipes, and I’m willing to indulge her only up to a point. After that I’m filling out the remaining cheese requirements with cheap pre-shredded mozzarella or discount cheddar bought by the 2-lb block. Thankfully the rest of the recipe was fairly basic (eggs, heavy cream, and seasonings, like any other quiche) and of course asparagus. She proposed that I shave the asparagus length-wise with a vegetable peeler and retain the tips for aesthetic reasons, but I decided I was hungry and didn’t need to impress myself with such nonsense. I broke off the bottoms of the asparagus spears wherever they naturally snapped to avoid getting the un-chewable woody parts, and chopped the rest into 1-inch pieces. Problem solved. The pieces went into a steamer basket over boiling water for a couple minutes to soften up while still retaining a bright green color, and then folded them into the egg mixture. All went well until it was time to eat…
Normally I’m excited to share what I make with my family or friends, and 95% of the time I have never made the dish prior to unleashing it on unsuspecting people. Usually everything turns out pretty well! This was one of the rare occasions that I was the only one home and the sole taste-tester of a new recipe. I pulled the quiche from the oven, let it stand for a few minutes to firm up, and was quite pleased with the overall doneness and presentation. I’d even tried to flute the pie crust edge to fancy it up. Feeling fairly proud of myself, I cut out a wedge, and (yay!), it all held together instead of collapsing into an under-baked mess. I sat at the table with my cheesy, decadent breakfast pie that smelled so good and took a nice, big bite. That’s where it all went downhill. CRUNCH. That wasn’t supposed to happen… Several thoughts went through my head following that first bite, not the least of which was, “what the h*** is in my mouth right now??” First, I considered that maybe the asparagus hadn’t been cooked through enough, but this was not a “raw vegetable” crunch. Next I considered that maybe it was dirt I had somehow missed on the veggies, but they were definitely clean, so that was out. I took another tentative chew, because while I could most certainly feel it between my teeth, I could not detect a taste from anything that shouldn’t be there. Still crunchy, but less so, almost like there was sand in the food. Thank goodness I hadn’t served this to anyone else, because I’d have been mortified! I kept thinking, trying to determine if somehow the spices had clumped together and formed a ball of seasoning that didn’t mix in. Nope; still no distinct flavor. By this point, the grit had subsided to the point I thought maybe this was some weird result of the cheese melting wrong (I was really reaching by then!), and decided to just swallow the mouthful. It TASTED good at least. I looked down at the now-mysterious quiche on my plate, trying to decide if it was worth risking another bite when I spotted the culprit. Nice big chunks of eggshell, perfectly baked into my slice! Ugghh! Ok, at least I wouldn’t die, but talk about a rookie mistake! I must have really been in a hurry to get that food in the oven, because I missed several large pieces of offending shell. Once I poked through the rest of my plate with a fork and a careful eye, I finished eating what turned out to be a delightful meal. I’m also pleased to report that no one else fell victim to my oversight and we have since eaten the whole thing without anyone having to go through the trauma that I endured. This should probably teach me to crack eggs into a separate vessel before adding them to the mixing bowl like we are taught on Food Network, but I think I’ll probably continue going rogue. But just in case, I’ll always be the one to take the first bite!
Have Book, Will Cook 