Pecan Pie

Difficulty Rating:

I'm not even going to lie - I forgot to take pictures of the stuff while I made it. But it's such an awesome and perfect recipe that I can't help but go ahead and post it! So all you get is the finished product and the recipe, but trust me when I say it's the easiest dessert to make in the world. Gordon Ramsey's tiramisu took more effort.

Now I know what you're thinking - if this is so stupid-easy, why is it a 4-Cookie Recipe? Well, that's just because pecans aren't that easy to come by in some parts of the world. I mean, in Mississippi I could literally just walk outside and pick them off the ground, but they're a bit harder to find here in New York City. But if you search around in some of the specialty markets, you should be able to find a bag. And keep in mind that pecans can be frozen for... well, forever, kinda. I had mine in the freezer for about two years and this pie turned out spectacular. It's only a 4-Cookie because of the one ingredient. Otherwise, easy as pie.

Yes, I went there.

Recipe

1/2 stick butter, softened
1/2 c. sugar
1 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 c. pecans, chopped fine
1 c. Karo syrup
1 frozen pie crust

Using a fork, combine the butter and sugar. Add flour and salt and combine. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well. Pour into pie crust and cook at 300 degrees for an hour.

Execution

A few notes on the ingredients.

Apparently, it is very odd outside of the South for people to leave butter on the counter. Everyone I know keeps it in the refrigerator where it stays hard as a rock and isn't any good for spreading on toast. So if you don't keep a stick of butter softened at all times, you can just put it in the microwave for 20 seconds to get it to the proper state. Just be sure NOT to melt it.

Also, you can cut the pecans up by hand but that gets rather messy. As I stated in the post on Kitchen Basics, I like to use a Food Chopper for such things. Noisy, but oh-so-convenient!

And it doesn't matter whether you use dark or white Karo syrup. I prefer dark if I have to just pick one. My grandma always mixes half of each. Up to you whether you want to shell out for the second bottle or not.

Now. To make it!

Throw the softened butter and sugar in a bowl and squish it up with a fork until it's combined completely. That's exactly what my recipe says, by the way: squish!

Add in the flour and salt, and squish again. It may threaten to get a teensy bit dry, but the main point is to try not to leave any big chunks of butter unmixed.

I like to add the eggs and vanilla, mix again, then the pecans, mix again, and then the syrup, but my gramma just dumps it all in at once and stirs it up. It'll end up a sloppy, gooey brown mess either way. Mmmm. Sugary syrup.

Pour this into a pie crust - I like the 9" deep dish ones best. As a side note, those come two to a package, so I usually double the recipe and just make two pies, but that's entirely up to you. You can decorate it with unchopped pecans if you like; my gramma covers the whole top in them, but I like to make a design so I can avoid them when I cut myself a piece. Weird as it is, I hate whole pecans. The only way I'll eat them is in this pie.

Pre-heat your oven to 300 degrees and cook the pies for about an hour. I find it usually ends up being a little more than that, but I start checking it after an hour.

Knowing when your pie is done is a somewhat subjective artform in and of itself. The best thing to do is to check it about 45 minutes in: open the oven and (using an oven mitt, of course) jiggle the rack gently. You'll see the middle of the pies wiggle as if they're still all liquidy. This is what you are trying to overcome - you do NOT want a jiggly middle.

How like life, huh?

So after an hour, check it every five minutes or so. Just jiggle it slightly to see if the middle has firmed up yet. Don't be tempted to turn up the heat, because doing so will just burn the crust on your pie instead of cooking it any better. Be patient, and eventually you'll jostle the thing and it'll just sit there and be all brown and perfect.

Like that! How awesome is that? A Southern delicacy, all for you. Here's a close-up so you can see what the consistency looks like:

Now, you can, of course, serve it immediately, but it'll fall apart a bit when you try to get it onto the plate. If you let it sit a little while it'll firm up a bit more and be easier to serve. Since it's made of syrup and butter, you don't really have to refrigerate it as long as you're gonna finish it within the week. And really, who could possibly leave a pecan pie laying around for more than a week?? No one in my house, that's for damn sure.

Puerco Pibil

Difficulty Rating:

I will start out by apologizing for some of the picture-fail that came out of this recipe. It is my first 4-Cookie Recipe, and as such it's a bit more complicated, with several steps to it. Plus I habenero-ed myself pretty severely, and my camera froze twice. So... yeah, there's like two pictures missing of the final product. But I'll explain 'em really well, I promise!

Anyone who's seen Once Upon A Time In Mexico knows puerco pibil. I first learned how to make the dish from watching Robert Rodriguez' video about it, but since then I've adjusted the recipe a bit so I hope you enjoy!

Recipe

5 tbls. Annato seeds (sometimes sold as Achiote)
8 All-spice seeds
1/2 tsp. whole cloves
1 tbls. whole black pepper corns
2 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 c. orange juice
1/2 c. white vinegar
2 habenero peppers
2 tbls. salt
8 cloves of garlic
1 lemon
6 limes
2 tblsp. brown sugar
1 shot of tequila
5 lbs. pork butt

Hardware needed:
Extra-large baking pan
Aluminum foil
Coffee grinder
Blender
Large freezer bag

Put annato, all-spice, cloves, and black pepper in the grinder and grind until powdered. Add cumin and set aside.

Remove veins and seeds from peppers and chop up. WASH HANDS! Add the peppers to the blender along with the orange juice and vinegar. Add the ground spices, salt, sugar, and garlic. Blend until smooth. Juice the lemon and limes into the blender and add the tequila. Blend until well mixed.

Chop the pork into 2-inch squares. Put the meat in a large freezer bag and pour the blended mixture over the meat. Close the bag and squish to distribute. Place this in the refridgerator for 4-6 hours, turning every half-hour to hour to redistribute the spices.

Place meat in extra-large baking dish and cover with foil. Cook at 325 degrees for four hours. Serve over rice.

Execution

If this wasn't so damned delicious it would just be torture. This is not a hard recipe, but it is grueling and takes all day. But I do like to do this when I'm having a party and want something that I can set out buffet-style for people to eat.

Ingredients:

Now, if you'll notice there next to the garlic I have two different kinds of peppers - red ones and green ones. The green ones are the habeneros, which are what the recipe calls for. However, you can't always find them in your local grocery store (I wasn't even sure these were habeneros since they're usually orange or red, but apparently these just weren't quite ripe enough) so you can substitute with equal an equal amount of scotch bonnets.

Also note that although the container on the counter says "Dog treats for good dogs," I do not actually have a dog. I have a cat named Captain Dog, who is always good. Mainly because he's always sleeping. Like this:

He's very lazy.

So! First thing's first - you're probably going to have to de-bone your pork. Pork butt, by the way, is not actually the butt of the pig. It's the shoulder. So if you go to the store and see no pork butt, only pork shoulder... you know, buy it. It's the same thing.

Don't cut all the fat out since that's what makes it juicy and yummy. If it's got skin on it, though, get rid of that. I usually buy a 7 lb. pork shoulder so it yields about 5 lbs. of meat. You can just keep it in the roasting pan while you do the rest of your deeds. Also, I lost the picture of the meat in the roasting pan, so here's what it looks like pre-cooking and you can just imagine it all cooked and stuff:

I always buy the throw-away aluminum ones because this gets kind of gross otherwise.

Next comes the spices! If you're like me and you occasionally grind your own spices for recipes, make sure you have a grinder that's specifically for spices. You can use a regular old coffee grinder, which runs about ten bucks at the cheap places, but DO NOT, for the love of little apples, ever use the spice grinder to grind coffee. The cross-contamination, it is dreadful to the tastebuds.

The original recipe calls for grinding up your own cumin too, but I've searched and searched and never found cumin seeds available for sale, so I just use ground cumin and throw it in with the rest once I've ground them all up.

Once you've got that done, set it aside and prepare yourself for the habeneros.

WEAR GLOVES.

I really don't know what to say other than that. Most people say you can just wash your hands immediately afterwards and be fine. But some people (like me, which I discovered this weekend) have a serious reaction to the capsaicin, which is the chemical that makes the pepper spicy. This might, say, make your hand feel like it's on fire for about ten hours after you chop up the pepper, even though you washed your hands six times. You might even spend all day with your hand in a bowl of baking soda and ice water wishing for death. Let's just say that wearing gloves is a safe bet.

What I will do for delicious food, my darlings.

Cut it open, remove all seeds and veins (the inside connecting parts and anything NOT the same color and texture as the fleshy middle).

Then you just chop it up into tiny little pieces.

Then wash everything that ever touched it.

Next dump those spicy little suckers into the blender, along with the orange juice, vinegar, spices, salt, sugar, and garlic. Bleeeeend.

Put the cover on! You don't want this all over your counters! Now blend. Yesss.

Juice the lemon and limes (the original recipe called only for 5 lemons, but I prefer it with limes) and add that and the tequila to the mix.

Now, dump all that raw meat into a large freezer bag, pour that gooey red mess on top, close it up and squish it all around. Stick it in the fridge and let it soak for a while. Soak-soak-soak. Every now and then just squish it around some more so it gets in all the meat. I say leave it about 4-6 hours. The good thing about this recipe is that you can do this the night before, and then when you wake up you're all ready for cooking.

Once that's done, just dump it back into the aluminum pan, spreading it out evenly so it can all cook. Cover with foil and stick it in the oven for about four hours. You can take it out at 3 to 3 1/2 hours, the meat will just be a little more solid. Four hours makes it more the consistency of pulled pork, where the meat just sort of shreads and falls apart. This is really just up to how you want it - if I'm throwing it over rice, I like it a bit more solid. If I'm making sandwiches, I'll cook it longer.

The cooking really is the easiest part. I'd suggest serving it over yellow rice with a bunch of very cold beers. I only had white rice in the house, so this is what it looks like:

Mmm. The cooking process and the little bit of brown sugar keeps the peppers from completely overwhelming the dish, making it spicy but still very flavorful. And you've got five freaking pounds of it, so you can feed an army or just feed yourself for a week!

And I promise you, for all my complaining I love this dish. I only make it once a year, but I eat the hell out of it when I do!