How to Grill a Pie

When I took the pictures for this post, I didn't know if the title would be How to Grill a Pie or How Not to Grill a Pie.  As you can tell, there's a happy ending to today's blog post!

There has been a giant bag of rhubarb burning a hole in my freezer for about a month now.  I've been dying for an excuse to make a rhubarb pie, the most delicious dessert on the planet.  With temperatures over 105 for the last several weeks and the air conditioner laboring to keep the house under 80, I haven't turned on the oven, dishwasher or dryer since the heat wave started.  And yet, there was the rhubarb.  And it was our turn to host dinner club.  And nothing is better than rhubarb pie.  Maybe the flavor of rhubarb would compensate for our guests having to blot sweat from their faces all during dinner.

Heat-dispersing platform for baking a pie in the grill.

I called Mom to remind me about the perfect ratio of sugar to rhubarb, and she suggested opening a window to vent the kitchen if I must make the pie.  Then I got to thinking about our grill.  It's really just an outdoor gas oven, right?  If I could figure out how to cook the pie out there, the house would still be cool for dinner.  So this time I called Dad, and he thought it would work, but I should put a heat-deflector under the pie dish with some air between the heat-deflector and the pie to allow air and heat to circulate.  The above picture shows my system for evening out the heat from the burners, with the metal grill for elevating the pie off the cast iron pan.  I think any baking sheet would work in place of the cast iron pan for a heat-deflector. 

Pie with edge protector for protecting the crust edge from burning.

To the left of the pan, you see a crucial element for the success of grilling a pie: an oven thermometer.   I preheated the grill to 400 degrees, the temperature required by my pie recipe.  My grill doesn't have any sort of temperature gauge besides purely decorative 'low' and 'high' markings, but after some playing, I discovered that keeping both burners on low would keep the temperature somewhere between 375 and 450 - close enough! 

Success!  One rhubarb pie baked in the grill.

The pie was supposed to bake for 50 minutes.  I checked it every 15 minutes or so, and ended up letting it cook for about an hour and 15 minutes.  It cooked perfectly - no burnt crust and no grill taste - just delicious, tart, heavenly rhubarb.

Some tips:

• Clean the grill really well before you start, especially if your grill is full of meat fat that might burn and smoke your pie with carcinogenic meat fat smoke.
• Use metal pans so they don't crack from uneven heat.
• Elevate your pie dish off of the pan underneath it - this is a must.  I also cooked cornbread in the grill, and I made the first batch straight on the pan and burned the bottom.
• Put foil under the pie to catch any juice dripping out of it - you don't want smoke from burning sugar to flavor your pie.
• Check frequently until you trust your temperature, but just barely crack open the grill to keep the heat inside.
• Maybe try some cornbread or something easy first to learn the process before you use expensive and time-consuming ingredients.

Three Sisters Molé Enchiladas with Blackberry Salsa

This is a special cooking edition of my blog.  Don't panic - cooking is nothing more than applied Biology (and Chemistry and Physics and Math and Art...), so there are some way interesting biological phenomena to write about here.  One of my cooking heroes, Isa Chandra Moskowitz, has issued a cooking challenge, and I took the bait.  Isa Chandra is the author of several vegan cookbooks, including Appetite for Reduction, the most useful and well-thought-out cookbook I've ever used.  The challenge is to cook a vegan entrée in under 40 minutes using black-eyed peas, bittersweet chocolate, mint and blackberries.  The recipe must be published on the internet, and there are prizes and fame/fortune involved.  I'll report back about the results of the contest!

Here is a picture of my invention, Three Sisters Molé Enchiladas with Blackberry Salsa: 

Three Sisters Molé Enchiladas with Blackberry Salsa

The contest ingredients got me thinking about agricultural centers of origin.  Agriculture started in many concentrated locations (centers of origin) throughout the world, and cuisines arose based on what crops were domesticated from the species growing in the area, with foreign ingredients added in to the extent that cultures traveled and mixed.  See if you can match the crops with the center of origin here based on what you know about modern international cuisines.  Answers are below the table.

Center of Origin	Crop
1. China	a. wheat, oats, fig, pomegranate
2. India	b. maize, beans, tomato, potato, pumpkins
3. Ethiopia	c. wheat, barley, sorghum, okra, coffee
4. South America	d. wheat, rape (canola), peas, lettuce, asparagus
5. Mediterranean	e. rice, chickpea, eggplant, tangerine
6. Middle East	f. millet, soybean, cabbage, radish, apple

Answers: 1f, 2e, 3c, 4b, 5d, 6a

Since two of the challenge ingredients (chocolate and blackberries) originate from the New World, and beans are mostly a New World crop (though black eyed peas originated in Africa), I decided to mine this vein and emphasize New World crops.  I ended up with enchiladas based on the agricultural icons, the three sisters: beans, corn and squash.  I also used tomatoes, peppers, onions, blackberries, chocolate and sunflower seeds in the recipe.  If only I could have figured out how to add cranberries, potatoes and sweet potatoes, I would have hit all the biggest crops to have originated from the New World.  Ingredients from elsewhere in the world include cumin, cilantro, oregano, wheat, cucumbers and lemon.  Isn't it strange that cumin, cilantro and cucumbers, ingredients that are indispensable to Tex-Mex cuisine, were imported to the Americas?  And that tomatoes were not an original part of Italian cuisine but were brought to Europe from Central America? 

So who are these sisters, and what are they doing in a vegan recipe?  The three sisters are staple crops grown together as companion plants by several groups of Native Americans.  The seeds of beans, corn and squash are planted in a group on a mound.  The corn grows tall and straight, providing both food for people and a pole for the beans to climb.  The squash stays low to the ground and keeps the soil cooler and moist by shading it around the base of all three plants.  It also has prickly leaves, deterring some potential pests.  The beans stalks climb the corn, lifting their fruits off the ground and taking advantage of light above the squash leaves.  At the same time, the bean roots enrich the soil with nitrogen for all three plants.  The three sisters produce more food when grown together than any of the plants grown separately.  In addition, the beans and corn provide complete protein from vegetarian sources for their human cultivators.

The recipe is below, if you'd like to make this meal-with-a-story.  It turned out to be delicious, and it's a low-calorie and low-fat meal as well.  The first time you make these, you'll need to be a Zen kitchen master to get everything done in less than 40 minutes: banish the pets and kids, turn off the radio, stand up straight, elbows in, breathe into your abdomen.  You can do it.  It's quick and easy the second time through, since all the components are actually very simple once you know how they go.  I've found this to be the case with any new recipe I make - there's always a learning curve.  You can also prepare the salsa a day ahead and let it sit in the fridge to develop its flavors, but that would violate the 40 minutes thing.

Three Sisters Molé Enchiladas with Blackberry Salsa

Three Sisters Molé Enchiladas with Blackberry Salsa
* Ingredients with asterisks evolved and were domesticated in the New World
Serves 6, at approximately 450 calories per serving, depending on your corn tortillas

Molé Enchilada Sauce Ingredients
1 T sunflower oil*
1 T whole wheat flour
2 T chili powder*
1 t cumin
2 c vegetable broth
1 small can tomato paste*
2 t fresh oregano, minced (1 t dried)
2 oz vegan bittersweet chocolate*
1/2 t salt


Enchilada Ingredients
1 t sunflower oil*
1 large onion, chopped (reserve 2 T for salsa)*
1 medium zucchini, chopped*
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 jalepeno, diced*
1 t cumin
1 15 oz. can black eyed peas, drained and rinsed (*most beans originate from South America, but not black eyed peas)
1 15 oz can hominy, drained and rinsed* (you could substitute sweet corn if you prefer, but add it with the zucchini while cooking)
12 soft corn tortillas
2 T roasted, salted, shelled sunflower seeds*

Salsa Ingredients
2 T chopped onion (from above)*
Juice of one lemon
1 t olive oil (ok, you could use sunflower, but olive oil is yummy in salsa)
2 cucumbers, chopped (peel if you like)
1/4 c chopped fresh cilantro
1/4 c chopped fresh mint
1/2 t cumin
1/4 t cayenne*
1/2 t salt
1/2 cup blackberries*

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Make the enchilada sauce:  In a medium saucepan heat the oil on medium, add the flour and stir until toasty (30 seconds), stir in chili powder and cumin for 30 seconds, stir in broth, add all other ingredients.  Bring to a boil, reduce temperature and simmer 5 minutes, stirring often.

3. Make the enchiladas:

• In a large sauté pan on medium heat, sauté the onions in the oil until they start to soften, add the zucchini, garlic, jalepeno and cumin and continue to sauté until the zucchini starts to soften.  Stir in the black eyed peas and hominy and allow to heat up. 
• Dunk the tortillas in the enchilada sauce and wrap a large spoonful of filling in each tortilla.  Careful - everything should be hot at this point - don't burn yourself.  Line up the tortillas in a large glass baking dish.  Pour the enchilada sauce over the enchiladas and sprinkle sunflower seeds on the top.  
• Bake for 10-15 minutes uncovered, until the edges of the tortillas start to brown and the sauce is bubbling.

4. Make the salsa while the enchiladas bake: Combine all ingredients except blackberries in a dish and stir well.  Gently stir in the blackberries.

5. Serve enchiladas topped with a spoonful of salsa.



I owe a big thanks to my friend, Jenny, a vegan food aficionado, for the idea to make enchiladas.  Thanks also to my friends for being guinea pigs: Bruce, Coke and Linda, your bravery and enthusiasm are inspiring!

In a Pickle

I was out of town last week, and I came home to cucumber vines loaded with over-sized cukes.  I picked every little baby cucumber before I left, and still they exploded with fruit in five days.  There was nothing to do but pickle them. 

Kirby Cucumber

I have always pickled my cucumbers by adding vinegar, salt and spices and then processing the jars in a water bath to sterilize the pickles.  Since pickles are acidic (from the vinegar), it's easy to home-can them without a pressure cooker, as they don't need to be heated above boiling.  I always use Kirby cukes, since they are crisper.  They have tiny spines on them, but I just rub them off with my hands, cut off the ends and cut the cukes into long spears.  I remove the seed core as I cut - it just makes better pickles that way.

This year, I had no time to home-can when the cukes were ready.  My cucumbers had to do the work themselves.  I found a recipe for fermented Kosher cukes, and went to town.  Home-fermented cukes don't use vinegar - they make it!  There are bacteria and yeast naturally found on the cucumbers, the spices, the dill, and if you give those little critters the right conditions, they will turn cucumbers into great pickles.  Here is a jar of cucumbers in the process of becoming pickles.  You can see the dill and spices I added.

New pickles plus dill, coriander, mustard seeds, pepper, garlic and more.

Here's how fermentation works.  There is an enormous variety of bacteria, yeast and fungi on every surface around you, including you.  Those microbes are all either actively eating whatever they are growing on, or they are waiting come into contact with something that is food.  Microbes use food resources in a variety of ways, all producing energy, but usually producing interesting byproducts too. The process of microbes breaking down food (usually without oxygen) and producing byproducts is called fermentation.  Some microbes break down perfectly good produce for food, leaving behind bubbles of carbon dioxide and a watery mess.  Incidentally, this is also what we produce when we break down food for energy!  When you see a rotten spot on a tomato, you know one variety of microbe has won a battle and is taking over.  When oxygen is absent, other bacteria can break down the produce and leave behind methane or botulism toxin.  Others produce a variety of acids, and these are the ones we're using for pickling. 

Acid-producing bacteria grow well with a limited amount of oxygen, and many of them are salt-tolerant.  Most disease-causing bacteria are not salt-tolerant.  If you give them a food source, such as a fresh cucumber, and eliminate competing microbes by keeping out most oxygen and adding salt, the little acid bacteria can go nuts.  They break down the sugars in the cucumber and release lactic acid and acetic acid, which tastes sour and helps keep even more harmful bacteria out of the food.  It is not a coincidence that vinegar is acetic acid.  In fact, vinegar is produced by a similar process as my home pickles, but using apple cider, wine or some other food source for the bacteria. Other sour-tasting foods are produced by a similar process, for example yogurt and kim-chee. 

Once a food has been fermented, the acid adds extra protection against spoilage by non-desirable microbes.  Before refrigeration and easy inter-continental transportation, pickling food was a major way of having food in the winter.  All kinds of things can be pickled: green beans, okra, hot peppers, eggs (they're good!), carrots, garlic and more.

After two days, my cucumbers are pickling away.  There is a little foam on the top of the pickle jars, and the liquid is becoming predictably cloudy.  I'm going to taste them each day, provided they look and smell like I expect them to, and when they are sour enough to my taste, I'll seal the jars and refrigerate them.  They should theoretically keep a long time if we don't eat them, and I could can them to make them last even longer.  Since canning involves heating them in boiling water to the point of sterilization (about 20 minutes, depending), the cucumbers will be less crunchy. 

Active fermentation going on here.

A little reassurance for the germ-phobes out there:  the microbes that live on you are mostly helpful.  They compete with disease organisms, they help digest your food, and they help keep your immune system working well.  A good variety of microbes is a great asset to your health.  If you add everything up, our bodies contain way more non-human cells than they do human cells.  The microbes in fermented pickles are good for you.  Yes, a stray bacterium can get into the batch and spoil things, so you have to watch out for contamination.  Remember, if it looks like a pickle and it smells like a pickle, it is probably a pickle.