Avocado Pie FAIL!

Let me start by saying that this pie was DELICIOUS! It also looks like Slimer from the Ghostbusters cartoon. I’d say it also qualifies as a FAIL inspired by Pintrest.

Almost every week one of my favorite bogs, Serious Eats, has a Share Your Sweets photo roundup. This weekend’s challenge was “summer pie.” I had just bought a bag of HUGE, Costco-sized avocados (from Costco) and decided that since I’d purchased them in August they were a summer fruit and therefor I would look for a recipe for avocado pie (also because I realized WTF am I going to do with 7 huge avocados when they all ripen within 24 hours of each other?!). This seemed like a good plan to use up the smallest two (AKA normal sized) avocados.

Here were my inspirations:

Pinch My Salt’s seemingly simple avocado pie, as modified by chez us.

simple avocado pie from Pinch My Salt

inspiring avocado meringue pie from chez us

Yeah. Mistakes I made:

1. We didn’t have any sweetened condensed milk, so I googled how to sub evaporated milk and sugar (hint, it’s 3/4 cup of sugar for every 5 oz of evaporated milk, I eyeballed 1 1/3 cups of sugar into 12 oz of evaporated milk to “keep the sugar content down”). You have to heat the mixture to combine the sugar and then cool it completely before using it, mine was tepid. FAIL ONE.
2. I misread 3.5 oz of lemon juice for 3.5 Tbls. FAIL 2. Plus, I used lime, but that shouldn’t have mattered as much as the missing 1.5 Tbls of juice.
3. I tried to “bling out my pie” by slicing a small avocado into thin slices and fanning them in the crust before pouring in the goop. FAIL 3. SPLORT!

Oh, you want to see how mine came out? Sure, OK:

avocado lime pie with meringue topping

attempting to serve avocado pie

VERDICT: I will try it again with the right ingredients, without sliced avocado, and without the meringue topping and maybe just a dollop of plain yogurt or unsweetened whipped cream. Even with the slightly reduced sugar it was a seriously SWEET dessert. I remember sweetened condensed milk as a more mellow sweet, kinda caramel-y, rather than the assertive WHITE SUGAR sweet that I got from the glop I made. With so many possible easy fixes, how can I not try to make this again in the future?

avocado lime pie “glamor shot”

I know I’m not going to win any food photography contests any tim soon, but I really did want to try with this! Look, I had props and everything! I was going to cut open the avocado and display the 1/2 with the pit, but decided against “wasting” good fruit on such a deliciously sloppy pie.

FINAL LATE NIGHT THOUGHT: If I rename this Slimer Pie, would that make it better?

NUTRITIONAL INFO: I don’t want to know. I guessed 7 WW PointsPlus per 1/8th. It might be closer to 11. Like I said, I don’t want to know. I ate my slice 90 minutes ago and now I have a slight sugar hangover.

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Colca Cañon Quinoa Soup recipe on Food52.com

For a yummy KOSHER soup recipe, please click on, visit, like, save, etc. my Colca Cañon Quinoa Soup recipe on Food52.com. If you all like, save, click on read my recipe enough times over there in the next 2 days, maybe I’ll win some swag from Bob’s Red Mill (a company I’d love to support more, if their products weren’t so out of my price range).

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Homemade Cherry Lime Yogurt Popsicles

What happens when you’re bored in the summer and a former Michgander who is SUPER excited by gorgeous, late season cherries in the grocery store? POPSICLES!

See that photo below, those beautiful cherries are are almost as big as the lime in the background! Yum. This popsicle tasted a lot like store-bought cherry yogurt but less sweet and with a little extra tang from the lime soaked into the cherries. Mmm.

CHERRY LIME YOGURT POPSICLES

• 1 cup of cherries, pits removed and chopped into bits
• 1 Tbl sugar
• 1 Tbl lime juice
• 7 oz Fage 0% yogurt (one single serving package)

1. Chop up your cherries (I cut them into 8ths), removing the pits as you go (if you don’t have a cherry pitter).
2. In a bowl, macerate the cherries in the sugar and lime juice for at least 30 minutes, but no more than an hour.
3. Combine the yogurt with the soupy cherry mixture.
4. Spoon the mixture into your favorite popsicle molds, using a chopstick to knock out as many bubbles as possible, insert popsicle sticks or the handles that go with your mold before freezing.
5. Freeze for at least 4 hours before serving.
6. To remove your popsicles from the mold, place the mold in a glass of room temperature water for about 3 minutes to soften the edges and make it easier to remove the popsicle from the mold.

Nutritional Info: 3-4 servings, depending on your popsicle mold size. 1 WW PointsPlus each.

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Honey Green Tea Spritz Cookies

OMG, you guys, these cookies are AMAZING, tiny, buttery, slightly sweet, matcha scented gems. Plus I got to use my cookie gun. Yeah, you heard me: cookie gun. Well, technically it’s called a cookie press, but look at it!

Kuhn Rikon Cookie Press

Yeah, that’s a cookie gun.

For these cookies I was inspired by Food Network‘s Honey Spritz Cookies, found via The Foodie’s Kitchen; but those cookies sounded too wintery so I had to change them without trying the originals or having used a cookie press in probably 15 years. I’m living on the edge here. The edge of DELICIOUS!

Honey Green Tea Spritz Cookies

Honey Green Tea Spritz Cookies

• 2 c minus 2 tsp all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 tsp matcha (potent green tea powder)
• 1 stick (8 Tbl) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/3 c white sugar
• 1 egg (large)
• 1/4 c honey
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F after putting the racks in the 1/3 and 2/3 position. Move two clean, unlined baking sheets away from the oven to keep them cool.
2. Combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and matcha in a medium bowl and whisk to combine.
3. In your mixer bowl, beat the room temperature butter with the sugar. Beat the butter and sugar on medium high, stopping every few minutes to scrape the bowl down. In about 5 minutes you should have fluffy, glossy, creamed butter.
4. Use cooking spray to lube a measuring cup and measure out your honey.
5. Add the honey, egg, and vanilla extract to the creamed butter. Mix to combine, stopping to scrape the bowl down every minute or so.
6. Following the directions that came with your cookie press, fill the chamber about 3/4 full of dough (I make small blobs and shove them in and then keep packing them in until it looks full). *
7. Press out your cookies! Fill two whole trays. **
8. Bake for 5 minutes, rotate the pans front to back and top to bottom (unless you’re cooking in a convection oven, then just subtract a minute), and then bake another 6 minutes for 11 minutes total. ***
9. Let cool for 1-2 minutes before moving to wire cooling racks to cool completely.

* It will take 2-3 loads of cookie press to shape all the cookies. There will be a bit of ugly, raw dough at the end that you can’t shape., just eat it because you know you want to!

** The first few might come out ugly, that’s OK, pull them off the try and you can re-stuff them into the press later.

*** I baked mine for 6 minutes and 6 minutes and they came out a bit browner on the edges than I’d have liked. If your third tray is going in the oven solo, just use the top rack and bake for 11 minutes.

Nutritional Info: 1 Weight Watchers PointsPlus point per cookie/1 Tbl of raw dough (every nibble counts!)

raw cookies

baked cookies

PS- Does anyone know how to get my baking sheets CLEAN again? Bon Ami and elbow grease hardly make a dent in the baked on brown spots!

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Curried Coconut Popcorn

Wednesday night was a pre-wedding potluck for some new/local friends. I made this Curried Coconut Popcorn as an appetizer for a potluck and people went gaga over it! This recipe will definitely be joining my regular repertoire of potluck contributions, it’s got that sweet, salty, crunchy thing going for it plus it’s vegan and gluten free. While I am neither vegan nor gluten free, I do have a lot of food allergies/sensitivities and like making things that everyone can eat.

Do you have a favorite home method for popping corn?  I use the paper bag in the  microwave method myself, but with 2 squirts of cooking spray (I use grape seed oil) instead of olive oil and rolling down/folding the top of the bag tightly instead of stapling it.

Curried Coconut Popcorn

3/4 c popping corn (I used 1/2 blue and 1/2 yellow corn)

cooking spray, if using the microwave method – see above

coconut oil, if using the stovetop method

3/4 c coconut chips, toasted

3/4 c raisins (dark or golden)

2 heaping Tbs coconut oil

3/4 tsp curry powder

3/4 tsp ginger powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 Tbl coconut sugar

1) Pop your popcorn using your favorite method*. Keep a large bowl on standby for mixing/serving the popcorn in.

2) You can lightly toast your coconut chips while making popcorn, if the chips are older a little spritz of cooking spray can help them be less chewy. I made a tinfoil tray and toasted mine in the toaster oven using the “light” toast setting.

3) In a small bowl (I used a 6 oz ramekin), melt your coconut oil for 10-15 seconds in the microwave, just to get it warm.

4) Add the seasonings (curry, ginger, salt, and sugar) to the coconut oil.

5) Put all the popcorn in a large bowl and pour the seasoned coconut oil over it, shake/stir to coat.

6) Add the raisins and coconut chips and shake to combine.

7) Let cool to room temp (about 10-15 min) and then keep covered until you’re ready to serve (no more than 2 hours).

*If you’re going the microwave route for this recipe, pop only 1/4 cup of popcorn at a time, and use a new paper bag for all three rounds.

Credit where credit is due: this recipe was inspired by Naturally Ella and A Pinch of Glitter.

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