The Way To My Heart Is With A Garlic Clove, It Smells Hella Sexy When It's On The Kitchen Stove

You know that feeling you get right after the 27th straight day of eating Christmas food when it's like if I never see another sugary substance for the rest of my life it will be too soon? Yeah that's me right now. Never mind the fluffernutter I had for breakfast. I that doesn't count.

On December Five and Twenty, Twenty Ten

If Guinan was my waitress...

Tasty TV - Madeline's Chicken Soup

I was kind of a dreamy child and like the very first crowd of people to ever watch a moving picture, for a long time it was hard for me to grasp the idea that I couldn't actually experience what I saw on screen. In a way this aspect of reality still kind of bugs me, I have a maddeningly long list of foods I've seen eaten in cartoons and books and movies that look delicious that I will never get the chance to taste. Now that I've started cooking I've decided to start a new spot on my blog dedicated to the fictional dishes I'm dying to sample and their real life versions which I'll be cooking up. The only thing I don't have yet is a catchy name for it (suggestions are definitely welcome here). This week : Madeline's Chicken Soup

My childhood in my mind is measured (as I suspect is the case with most kids from the 90's) by the shows I was watching and the food I ate. Christmas in particular is much easier to remember since by nature of the "traditional" aspect you tend to do the same things over and over. This memory I think marks a tinier window around 1990 and just a few years following.  Madeline's Christmas was a cutesy book first, published around 1956 ( my mom read it growing up) and then (in retrospect) a slightly craptacular  television Christmas special that aired around 1990. I was about 4 when I first saw it and in love with all things french ( I suspect because somebody told me my name was french) so for me this movie was a big deal.

St. Lucia Buns / Lussekatter

 

 

We got our first good snow of the season last night ( super early and uncommon for Nashville) which is really helping me with my Scandinavian fantasy. Today( in any place that's awesome) it's Saint Lucia day which is something that I only learned about this year.

Breakfast

For breakfast today I am dreaming I'm Sandra Beijer.
Croque Madame and peppermint tea with my friendly salt and pepper shakers.

Gingerbread Men

 

Gingerbread men are one of those cutesy Christmas things that I love to admire but have always been way to chicken to attempt.

#52 Snickerdoodle Cookie

 Mmm mm mmm

Pear Anise Pie

 Whenever I bake a pie I always picture that scene in Disney's Snow White where she's humming to herself and effortlessly putting a pie together with what looks like the softest most delicious dough of all time. What's always been so sad about that (other than the fact that I'm comparing myself to a cartoon) is the fact that both times I've attempted to bake a pie from scratch my dough never turns out that way. It usually crumbles and sticks to the board and I end up having to press it into the pie pan with hardly enough to go up the sides. Seeing as I'm the only one in the kitchen when this happens I resigned myself to keep the whole thing a secret and silently move on to pastry I was good at.

In the last few days though some things have come together to make me realize that I really can have that Snow White pie, (minus the animation and the little bird helpers, because really how gross is that?).

This week I got a free trial issue of Ready Made magazine, (which I'd honestly never heard of before but hey it was in my mailbox) and oddly instead of just tossing it in the trash, I flipped through it a while and suddenly from the very back these magnificently juicy photos of latticed pie struck my eye (and my heart strings). There was an article about a little pie place in Brooklyn, NY called Four and Twenty Blackbirds , and (be still my heart) recipes! Unique ones too. There was a recipe for a Pear Anise Pie (pear!) that I instantly decided I was dying to make but it called for a top and bottom crust. Nooooooooo! So, aware of my personal limits I sadly filed it away in the back of my mind and wished I was a better baker...
Hm... "baker". That just brings me to part two of our Journey, my recent discovery of my current girl crush Joy The Baker! I honestly couldn't tell you how I stumbled upon her blog, (you know the interwebz) but once I did I couldn't stop reading it.

And the further I read the closer fate lead me to finding her video on how to make a double crusted pie. And it turned out to be so simple. And the stupid thing, my whole problem was flour, I wasn't sprinkling it on the top and bottom to keep it from sticking, ugh! It's funny how sometimes you just need to see somebody else do something for you to figure it out. As for the lattice part  YOUTUBE! Although it really isn't that hard to figure out, luckily I got to try it out on a pretty forgiving (colorless) pie filling  and I think it looks pretty good to be my first one. As for flavor? The crust is amazing, however, Anise I came to find out has a flavor like black licorice (it's what's in absinthe) so, if you absolutely can not stand that flavor (like my boyfriend) then don't make this pie. I personally only mostly dislike black licorice and I thought the pie was just perfect. I think it compliments the pear in a way you wouldn't expect and is really amazingly good if you give it a chance. It just sort of smells like the taste of licorice, it really comes off as more of an apple-y flavor if you can believe it. I think if I made it again I might try and switch out the anise extract for almond extract and see if that was a better at pleasing the crowd. Or maybe just leave it the way it is, so I can keep it all for myself.

P.S. Swiss Miss + Kahlua = Win