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You might have read late last week about my wonderful private tutoring session in gluten-free piemaking. I’ve updated my blog post now with a link to Kate McDermott’s recipe and methodology. This is a truly wonderful pie dough. It’s not just “good for a gluten-free” pastry, like that’s a lesser standard. It’s good by any standard. Take a look at my post, which links to Kate&#

“I want you to be pie makers, not recipe followers.” That’s how Kate McDermott opened the first of two Washington, D.C., pie making workshops today. As you probably already know from reading in this space, Kate agreed to leave behind her scenic little pie cottage on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula to give two workshops here in my kitchen. She’s blogging about them in her Art of the

I’m lucky to have Kate McDermott, piemaker extraordinaire and mistress of the Art of Pie blog, as my guest in Washington D.C., this weekend. She’s giving two workshops in my kitchen to a handful of lucky bakers. But yesterday, as we got ready for all the action to begin, I got a great fringe benefit: a one-on-one tutorial from Kate in gluten-free piemaking.

I’m thrilled to tell you that we here in D.C. are about to have a pie guru in our midst. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, I was able to persuade Kate McDermott to leave behind her lyrical little perch in Washington state and join me here for a few days so she can offer pie-making workshops in my kitchen. Yabba dadda doo! I pick her up at the airport in a couple of hours! In addition to runni

CurvyMama took her beloved “Sweetie Pie Sara” and a couple of friends to a local pie contest the other day. My little pie didn’t win anything, but we humans had a ton of fun meeting new people and tasting all the pies that jockeyed for attention on the table. It was all for a good cause, too: bringing people together to talk and think about local food sourcing and new ways to get healthy foods into

CurvyMama’s got her first gig at a farmer’s market! Yippee! On May 20, I will be selling pies at DC Grey Market, which is a really cool, renegade little venue for just-getting-started vendors like me. Read about the market on their website. It was inspired by underground markets in San Francisco and elsewhere, as The Washington Post reports in one of its stories about Grey Market. If you’re nearby,

You can’t see CurvyMama, but she’s dancing around the kitchen in her apron, waving a happy whisk in the air. Why all this jubilation after 10 p.m. on a weekday? I made the perfect pastry cream! I have suffered through the slings and arrows of outrageously–and inexplicably–runny pastry cream. So I am savoring this victory, knowing that on another occasion I might screw it up again and lose all

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

When Melissa wrote in about her pastry cream crisis, I felt her pain. I had just had the same experience: Hours before 25 guests were to arrive at my house for a pie social, I awoke to find that the lovely pastry cream that had set up so nicely in the refrigerator at bedtime had turned into a pourable custard. This meant that instead of enjoying nicely formed slices of honey-vanilla pie with gingersnap crust, my gues

Remember the mousse terrine and the Bavarians we made last night in pastry techniques class? I didn’t have good photos for you because the terrine was, well, not that fetching in its waiting-to-be-served state (upside down), and the Bavarians were in Tupperware containers, since they were the leftovers of a cake project that’s still at school, to be finished next week. So I thought I’d share a coupl