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Can you detect the difference between butter that has 84 percent butterfat and one that has 91 percent butterfat? What do you think of the taste of cultured butter compared with sweet cream butter? These are the kinds of questions I pressed on my ever-patient colleagues in the newsroom during yesterday’s butter smackdown. And just like they always do, they came through with flying colors. This smart, observant

A bunch of my friends got into an animated discussion the other day on Facebook about buttermilk pie and chess pie. Many of us weren’t too familiar with these pies, hailing as we do from some place other than the South. So I decided that this was a great chance to do another CurvyMama Pies smackdown. If you’re not familiar with our smackdowns, you can calm yourself, because there is no violence involved.

Okay, I used the old journalism trick of hijacking you with the headline. I confess that it was a bit misleading. The contest wasn’t really about the lemon pie filling; It was about the crust. And I wasn’t sure you would click on a post about a pie crust smackdown. But hey, before you abandon me in annoyance, let me tell you that the filling was also really great. And I’m going to give you the recip

The idea of an apple pie baked in a paper bag comes to me from Barbara Mautino, the mother of one of my dearest and oldest friends, DesignerPie. From her kitchen in Los Angeles, Barbara started reading the CurvyMama blog and sharing recipes. I’ve heard of people making Thanksgiving turkeys in paper bags, but I’d never heard of baking pies in a bag until Barbara told me about it. Barbara found her recipe i

  I admit that I’m kind of obsessed with butter. I can’t figure out any other way to explain to you why I decided to spend a beautiful summer evening making it from scratch. No, it wasn’t a scene from Little House on the Prairie. It was more like Woman With A Bottle of Cream and Her KitchenAid. A totally different thing, really, from the laborious process described in mind-numbing detail i

It’s been an interesting 24 hours in my little corner of Pie Nation. Those of you who follow along with us here know that we set up a smackdown yesterday between two identical apple pies: one baked in a paper bag and one baked the typical way, in the open, hot oven air. If you’re thinking, “What the hell? Pie baked in a paper bag?” then you need a quick refresher, which you can get from readin