Christmas Slab Pie, Part 2

In the last post (which you can find here), we made the dough and the filling for this Southern wonder, a dried-fruit slab pie, inspired by Karen Barker's apricot rendition in the August/September issue of FINE COOKING.

Now we're putting it all together. It's not more than an assembly job. Get ready for pie!

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Christmas Slab Pie, Part 1

As you may know, we're fans of FINE COOKING magazine. One of the things I like most is that it calls me to my best cooking time and again.

Sometimes, it even calls me back to it. Until I saw a recipe for a slab pie in the magazine, I hadn't thought of this old-fashioned dessert since I was a kid in the South.

If you don't know, a slab pie is like a gigantic, baked turnover: a flaky butter crust, like a long thin envelope, sealing in a sweet fruit filling. You cut the pie into narrow strips. There's no pie tin or plate, so the crust gets extra-crunchy--so much so that those thin slices can be eaten out of the hand.

This summer, there was an apricot slab pie recipe in the August/September issue, in Karen Barker's fabulous article called "A Pie in the Hand," all about fried pies and other pie-ish delights that can be eaten without a fork in sight. (If you want to look at that article, click here.)

I dog-eared the page to try it--but never got around to it.

Until last week--when I wanted to make a dessert for the book group at the Norfolk Library. (If you want to know more about the book group I lead, click here.) We were reading Colum McCann's LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN, it was a dreary and cold day, and I thought about that slab pie. Apricots? No way. Not at this time of year. But maybe I could reinterpret it for the holidays.

And I did. (Hey, sometimes I not only write, I actually cook.)

Here's my version of Karen Barker's recipe. We're going to do this in two steps. This post is about getting the crust and the filling ready. The next (here) will be about putting it all together.

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Marmalade Muffins

I'm still reeling a bit from that last bit about "The Silence of the Goats." If you haven't seen the post, check it out here. I'm so grateful for all the replies. I posted a new comment at the back of that post, sort of a follow-up--because I'm still processing that experience.

In the meantime, I wanted to pass on this very quick, easy muffin recipe from THE ULTIMATE MUFFIN BOOK. It's great for a holiday morning--because you can make these muffins in advance and squirrel them away in the freezer, only to reheat them in a microwave or the oven the morning you want them.

And no need for jam! Because the marmalade's already inside. What could be better?

Here's the recipe:

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Cranberry Buckle

Want to know a secret? I've been married four times. Three times to the same person. What am I, Elizabeth Taylor?

Bruce and I have had a commitment ceremony (1999), a legal civil union (2007), and now a legal marriage in Connecticut (2009).

OK, there's three. But before those, I was married, yep, in "the traditional way" to someone else. Without a lot of blathery confession, let's just say that it was a wonderful relationship with a great person. And in many ways a darn fine marriage: companionable and safe. As well as a part of my life I still cherish. In fact, a part that Bruce and I talk about all the time.

One of the best things about Bruce is this: he's not threatened by any of this stuff. I talk about my past and he doesn't blink. He accepts it--and assumes we'll always talk about things that may be painful, may not include him, and may be made up of great memories that happened long before him. Even relationship memories. If his grace is not the heart of redemption, I don't know what is.

So how does this all relate to buckle, that American coffee cake with a sugary topping so heavy, the cake buckles underneath it? Because my first spouse loved buckle. And I'd make it for her all the time, a breakfast treat for quiet, special mornings--or a dessert after a long day. (I was in grad school; she was working her way far up the corporate ladder.) I associate buckle with that marriage. And mostly feel warm and safe when I do.

Still, I haven't thought about buckle in years--until I ran across a recipe for Blueberry Buckle in The Ultimate Cook Book, our 900-recipe tome. I pointed it out to Bruce, told him about making it so many times before in a "previous life," told the story very nostalgically--and he asked me if I'd like him to make it for me as a treat this past weekend.

Isn't life nuts? It twists and turns into redemption with the most shocking abandon.

Anyway, he did. Except we had no blueberries. Instead, lots of cranberries. (We live in New England, after all.) Here's how to get eight servings of this terrific treat, with some real food morphs on the recipe:

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Buttermilk Blondies

It's hard to beat blondies. Cake + chocolate chips. Buttery. Not quite as dense as brownies. Better crumb. Did I mention chocolate?

They may also have been the first brownies. That sort of culinary trivia is hard to decipher, so many competing claims without proper documentation--but it appears that the "original" recipes for these bar cookies were for what we now call "blondies." Later, cocoa was added, then the chocolate was melted, and so came about the brownie.

No matter. It's a great American treat. Especially with buttermilk. And one little secret Bruce threw in.

Here come the blondies.

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Cocoa Brownies

If it's time to sift some flour and cocoa powder, it's time to make some of my favorite brownies!

Yes, good brownies usually require you to melt chocolate. But these are a little simpler: just cocoa, in fact. Yet they're dense, fudgy, and a little chewy. If you want them even fudgier, bake them a minute or two less, until a cake tester inserted into the brownie cake comes out with several moist crumbs attached.

Before we begin, two quick things. One: that darn sifting. Yes, it's important--to remove lumps from the flour and the cocoa. The brown lumps can be forced through the wire mesh, but leave any little bits of floury lumpiness in the sifter. We use a fine-mesh strainer for the task. Better still, the sifted flours make for a lighter cake and crumb. In other words, num num num.

Second: cocoa powder. As you know, there are two kinds--Dutch processed (with an alkali that helps it dissolve more quickly) and "natural" (without said alkali). This is not a fussy recipe. Either will work, although the natural kind will produce slightly chewier brownies.

Let's get to it. . . .

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Brown Sugar Brownies

For us, the process of writing a cookbook involves finding the middle ground.

It's ever the dream, no? I once had a discussion once with a sommelier who told me that he tries to gauge the middle bottle of wine and then build the list out from there in both directions. (Unfortunately, he thought the middle bottle ran about $90US. Ah, well!) 

When Bruce and I write cookbooks, we also try to figure out that illusive middle. Which recipe stakes it out--and which then have the freedom to break it?

We believe the middle ground is made up of three things: taste, effort, and cost. To give you a little peak into the behind-the-scenes thinking in our latest book, REAL FOOD HAS CURVES, the seven-step plan to get off processed food, we staked out the middle ground with the oven-fried fish fillets, the ones included in the discussion about effort v. cost in our food choices, found in chapter 2, "Make Informed Choices."

We later included far easier and less costly recipes (like the no-cook peach salsa) and more difficult, challenging ones (like the Mapo Dofou--which you can also find on this blog here).

That process is perhaps nowhere more evident than in The Ultimate Brownie Book. So many people have their notion of brownies: there's the caky camp and the fudgy camp, for one thing. So we first sat down to try to find something that fell right in the middle, all other brownies moving out to the edges. And believe me, there some out on the edges. Like the caky brownies made with a can of Coca-Cola, a riff on my Cousin Wilma Faye's "co'-cola cake." (Yes, I had a cousin named Wilma Faye. Doesn't everybody?) Or like the fudgy Sour Cream Brownies. Crazy. Barely holding together in the pan. One minute less baking time and you could use them as an ice cream topping.

So here's the middle ground of brownies, a little bit cakey, a little bit fudgy, with only one kind of chocolate not three or four, certainly indulgent as a treat but not too much so, a little decadent but certainly not too much so.

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