These days, there aren’t too many things that whip me into an immediate, spiraling frenzy. I feel so inundated every day with horrifying headlines and Am I The Asshole reddit posts that the biggest reaction something might get from me is an eye roll and a head shake. There are very few things in this world anymore that really surprise or devastate me, and not much makes me instantaneously viscerally angry.
But there is one topic that grinds my gears these days: the sentiment I see every few months or so, where people complain about the “endless” paragraphs that they have to scroll through to get to a recipe on a food blog.
I have SO many thoughts and feelings about this, but the gist is: if your Google-searching ass is too inconvenienced by skimming through a wordy prologue, or you can’t be bothered to just scroll through it to get to the (free) recipe, then find your recipe elsewhere. There are plenty of websites that will give you just a recipe, so take your search there. Try Epicurious or Food 52 or All Recipes, to name a few.
So many food bloggers put time and work into every single blog post and recipe, and many of them give that content out for free. Writing is work; developing, adapting and writing recipes is work. Giving that work away for free is a gift to the world, and if you want to be a dick about it, you don’t deserve the content.
Last week, I tackled my first test version of a pie that I’ve been planning to make for quite awhile. It all started with Joy the Baker’s recipe for a no-bake Dark and Stormy Cream pie. For those who don’t know, a Dark and Stormy is an alcoholic beverage that is made of rum, ginger beer and lime juice. It’s one of my favorite drinks, and to have that in pie form? An obvious no-brainer.
So I made it to take over to a friend’s house for a dinner party.
Joy’s recipe calls for a ready-made pecan crust and relies on gelatin, pasteurized egg yolks, chilling, and time to hold everything together. The pecan crust she called for wasn’t available in my area, so I made my own crust out of home-baked gingersnaps. I followed the rest of the recipe pretty exactly. By the time I realized I should have chosen to make a baked good that I had extensive experience with, I was knee-deep in the process, so I crossed my fingers and prayed that it would all set in the fridge and no one would get food poisoning.
When I took the pie out of the fridge 6 hours later to put the whipped cream and candied pecans on top, I sensed something was terribly wrong. The filling was jiggly, but it seemed to be firm on top. When I watched the whipped cream sink into the filling a little bit on contact, I started to panic. Since the whipped cream didn’t sink all the way into the filling, I held out hope that everything would be okay.
Long story short, this pie was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made, but turned out to be 100% soup. It was delicious and boozy and my homemade gingersnap crust with a thin layer of chocolate complemented everything, but it was soup just the same. I was mortified and quietly talked myself out of crying actual tears at the dinner table.
Since then though, I’ve wanted to make the pie again, but I wanted to make it my way, without the gelatin and raw egg yolks (sorry, Joy the Baker!).
So what I did first was look at a pie recipe that I’m familiar with and have executed successfully at least twice — Cook’s Country’s North Carolina Lemon Pie. The crust is made out of saltines, butter (I use salted butter because I love that salty-sweet combo), caro syrup and salt. The filling is made from sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks, heavy cream, lemon juice and zest, and salt. The result is tangy, lemony, a hint of salty, and sweet-but-not-too-sweet. I’ve made this pie for the past two Thanksgivings, and I’ve never regretted it.
And then I took Joy the Baker’s recipe and made a color-coordinated spreadsheet, where I compared the two: ingredient by ingredient, stage by stage. This seems a little nutty (and maybe it is), but breaking down the two recipes side by side really helped me visualize what happens at each stage of the process so I could see where each recipe was similar and where they diverged in ingredient or process.
And then, I added my own test recipe to the spreadsheet. I put together my own ingredient list and wrote out the process I would go through to make my very own version of the Dark and Stormy pie.
I don’t consider myself a food blogger, at least not in the traditional sense. I started blogging about my food adventures because food and writing about food was a way to keep myself alive. Learning to cook and bake while writing about everything I learned in the process helped remind myself that I was a human being who was still very capable of learning new things and self-reflection and skill-having when a lot of things in my life kept telling me that I wasn’t doing enough or good enough or capable enough to accomplish anything.
Actually making this pie took 2-3 days. On the first day, I made gingersnaps for the crust. I opted to go with the same gingersnaps I made for the first disaster pie. They’re softer than your standard gingersnap, but I figured it would be fine. They tasted great with the soup I made the first time around.
The next day, I used a Martha Stewart gingersnap crust recipe to make the crust, which entailed crushing up gingersnaps in the food processor, mixing the crumbs with melted butter, brown sugar, flour and salt, and then pressing them into my 9-inch pie plate. I popped the whole thing into the oven at 350 on a baking sheet for a few minutes, and then took it out to cool on a rack.
These days, I don’t blog in hopes of finding sponsors or monetizing it (although, dang, that would be nice), and I’m not so concerned with SEO or being an influencer, and I don’t blog so I can share my mom’s empanada recipes with the masses for free. I guess I continue blogging because it helps me explore and learn things about myself that I wouldn’t know otherwise without cooking and writing about the cooking.
That probably doesn’t fit under the definition of a food blog, and it certainly doesn’t exist in the same universe with SEO, trending search terms, cute influencer Instagram posts, posting 3 times a day at peak times, etc.
I embrace the slowness, the messiness, the uncategorizable-ness of whatever this is I’m doing.
While the pie crust cooled, I made the pie filling by whisking together condensed milk, egg yolks, heavy cream, ground ginger, fresh ginger, and lime zest. When that was fully combined, I whisked in lime juice and a lot of spiced rum from our favorite local distillery until it was all fully incorporated. I poured the filling into the crust and baked at 350 for about 15 minutes, until the edges were just set and the center still jiggled a little bit.
When I took the pie out of the oven, the consistency was what I wanted, but it looked like the filling had split a little bit at the edges. Maybe I hadn’t incorporated the rum and lime juice as thoroughly as I thought? Maybe I had added too much rum and lime juice?
I let the pie cool on a rack for a few hours, and then I popped it into the refrigerator to chill and fully set.
There are some weeks or months where everything you plan goes pretty much according to schedule. You can predict how much time and energy you’ll have that week, you set your goals accordingly, and you follow through on every single thing on your list for the week. I love those weeks. I used to never have them, and now I have them on a regular basis. I love that feeling of crossing to-dos off my list, even if my to-do list is made up of a bunch of basic stuff.
And then there are some weeks or months where nothing goes according to plan. Where you overbook yourself, set too many goals, and plan your time far too ambitiously. For example, you think you’ll be in the mood to write a Friday Bites post while on a plane flying across the Grand Canyon, but when it really comes down to it, you’ll only have the energy to pretend you’re asleep and turn up the volume on your podcast when your airplane seat mate tries to talk to you. And then, you think you’ll be able to bang out a post while you’re sitting with your mom as she goes through a chemo treatment, but when it really comes down to it, all you want to do is eat snacks with your mom, read recipes for people going through chemo, chat with your mom and the nurses, and finish the book you’re reading.
And when I say “you,” I mean, “me.” I think you’ll be able to relate though. I hope.
A day later, I made whipped cream, spread it on top of the pie, and then garnished it with candied pecans. The crust was welded to the pie plate. I wondered if it would still weld itself to a disposable aluminum pan. The filling was appropriately firm, but it was so boozy that even Mary Berry would’ve taken issue with it. Don’t get me wrong — I love a boozy dessert, but I could taste mostly the (delicious!) Lake House Spiced Rum and only hints of the ginger and lime that, to someone who didn’t know what the pie flavors were supposed to be, were rumored to be in the filling as well.
Still, M and I ate slices of that pie every night, and I made notes every night about what I wanted to do differently the next time I made it. I’m becoming obsessed with getting this pie just right.
I don’t have the baking knowledge to adapt a recipe exactly right the first time. When I tell you I’m testing a recipe, I mean I’m testing it over a period of months. Because ingredients don’t come cheap, I don’t live or work in a test kitchen (can you imagine if I did though?!), and who wants to eat versions upon versions of the same dessert week after week (unless you’re practicing for Bake Off)?
If you’ve made it this far, I’m so very pleased to tell you that I’m not going to give you my recipe for my version of the Dark and Stormy Pie. Partly because it’s not right yet, and partly because…I don’t feel like it?
I guess what I’m trying to say is: so much work goes into blogging (and writing in general) that a reader never actually sees. The same is true for recipe testing and recipe writing. This is why I get so irritated with people who complain about food bloggers and their stories.
That writing is important. It took a lot of work. It gives you context for the recipe. Food and recipes don’t exist in a vacuum. They tell you a story, sometimes very personal ones, and if you don’t want to sit there for it, go buy an issue of Bon Appetit or Food & Wine (no offense, honestly, I buy them both every time I fly). They’ll give you plenty of recipes without bothersome context or stories.
Plus, the people who write those recipes get paid. There’s so much to say about that, too, but I’ll leave you there for now.
When I get this recipe right, I might share it but you’ll probably have to read a lot of words before I actually get to it. :)