Mr. Sean's Crazy Idea Regarding Pies

Recently my dad brought home a pie from a local business called Tuttle's Treats (link to their Facebook page here: Tuttle's Treats). It was a delicious pie and it got me thinking about pies. Thinking about pies got me thinking about the mathematical constant pi (π ≈ 3.14) and that maybe I should try to find 314 recipes for pie. As the days have marched on since eating that delicious pie (I've been told it was a chocolate chess pie) I've been coming up with how to approach the Pie-pendium. At first I was going to allow duplicates within the 314 (100*pi) recipes, but I figured that would make the collection of pie recipes less challenging. So I came up with the idea of letting pies that have multiple recipes available to me have one recipe in the first 314 pie recipe collection and the multiples would occupy the second 314 pie recipe collection, for a total of 628 (2*pi*100) pie recipes. 

The more I try to hammer out my Pie-pendium idea, the more I think of how hard it will be to properly attribute each recipe since some of the cookbooks I can look at involve groups of people from years past (such as an Enlisted Spouses Club of a military installation from around 1999). I will try my best to give proper attribution of recipes by writing the names associated with each recipe and which group of people they are/were associated with and/or the title of the cookbook I got the recipe from.

There are also some issues in the world of pies and pastries. Some people argue that quiches and tarts are not pies. Besides different baking pans and words, there aren't very many differences between pies and tarts. Then there are also the fried pastries of various kinds to take into account (empanadas are somewhat similar to the apple pie turnovers in the outer shell). My verdicts are that tarts are fair game for the Pie-pendium and so are dishes such as empanadas.

I'll have to figure out how to keep all the recipes together later, but I know that loose leaf paper will need to be placed in a binder and that five subject notebooks can be quite expensive, though with loose leaf paper, I won't have to worry about running out of room on a finite space in the way I would with notebooks.

Anyways, here's some pie to serve as visual inspiration for my crazy idea. I have got to find that postcard I bought from Lancaster County in 2009 that is a recipe for Shoo-fly pie. I love Shoo-fly pie!

Mr. Sean's Small Cookbook Collection

So recently I've been learning how to cook more so when I'm finally ready to move out of the house (with a job that pays enough to do so) I'm not a complete amateur in the kitchen. My parents have encouraged my brother and me to cook more instead of relying on take-out so much (though I think making an exception for local joints is fine). The parents fished out a few cookbooks from their stash for me to peruse and to find recipes I could probably succeed at making and that sound delicious to me. It was from reading their cookbooks that I decided to expand my collection of cookbooks and this blog post will highlight six books in my collection so far. I'm sorry for those who don't like reading, but this may be my longest blog post ever despite the omission of two cookbooks from this post (my total collection currently stands at eight).

The Chesapeake Collection

The Chesapeake Collection was, "created in 1983 by the Woman's Club of Denton, Inc." as part of a series of fundraisers to preserve the club's clubhouse which was originally a schoolhouse built in 1883 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Denton is the county seat for Caroline County in Maryland. Located on the Eastern Shore, one would expect seafood to be heavily featured in local cookbooks and that is indeed the case. There is also a section of the cookbook dedicated to the preparation of Game dishes such as Maryland Fried Quail and Muskrat Stew. The recipe I'd like to try and create from The Chesapeake Collection is Crab-Shrimp Casserole by Barbara Maske. I was able to purchase a copy of this cookbook from The Maryland Store: The Chesapeake Collection.

A Cook's Tour of the Eastern Shore

Along with The Chesapeake Collection and another cookbook later in this post, I bought this from The Maryland Store. Their website is themarylandstore.com and they have a physical location in Westminster in Carroll County, Maryland. So this cookbook was first published in 1948 by the Easton Memorial Hospital Junior Auxiliary and when I opened it up I was surprised. The recipes might be photocopied in my book, but they are photocopies of the handwritten recipes that originally went into the book. I also noticed that each recipe was credited to Mrs. *Husband's name* rather than the wife's name. 1948 was definitely a different time and the Eastern Shore keeps traditions up longer than the western shore. The recipe that I'd like to try out from this book is the Curried Chicken #2. I love curry in all sorts of forms and found it interesting that there was a curry recipe from people who live on the Eastern Shore. This book is available for sale at The Maryland Store: A Cook's Tour of the Eastern Shore

My Favorite Maryland Recipes

My Favorite Maryland Recipes are not words coming from my mouth. Instead, a former First Lady of Maryland is the person making this bold claim. This cookbook features First Lady Helen Avalynne Tawes' favorite Maryland recipes and menus which she cooked for her family and for entertaining State Guests at the Governor's Mansion. Governor J. Millard Tawes must have eaten well. There are some recipes which currently cannot be cooked exactly as stated such as Maryland Diamondback Terrapin Soup due to the depleted number of Terrapins leaving it nearly endangered in some places. Luckily for me, the recipe I'd like to try from Mrs. Tawes' cookbook is the Seven-Layer Chocolate Frosted Cake. It's not quite Smith Island Cake tall in number of layers (a Smith Island Cake typically has ten layers) but I like layered cakes with chocolate frosting. This was the third and so far final cookbook I bought from the Maryland Store. The book is available for purchase at The Maryland Store: My Favorite Maryland Recipes.

The Ultimate Cooking for One Cookbook

So I was looking for recipes for one as I do plan on cooking some when I move into my own place eventually when I found a neat website. The website is https://onedishkitchen.com/cooking-for-one-recipes/ and I found interesting dishes such as Cornbread for one and Pecan Pie for one. I wondered if Joanie, the creator of the One Dish Kitchen website, had a cookbook full of recipes for one serving. Yes she does, though I ordered mine from Amazon. The book is available at various online retailers and you can find the list of retailers selling the book at Cooking for One Order Page. The dish I'd like to try from the book is the Maple Pecan Breakfast Bread Pudding. Honorable mention dishes from the book and the website include Butter Chicken and the aforementioned Pecan Pie for one.

Binging with Babish

Andrew Rea, the man behind Binging with Babish the cookbook and Binging with Babish the YouTube channel, has for a few years now tried to re-create various food items from film, television, animation, and even video games. Some dishes are ridiculously sized such as Bubble Bass' order from SpongeBob SquarePants (his stream of diner lingo was translated into a 24 patty burger on toast) while others are something even a novice home cook could pull off with style. My dish to try to cook from this book is okonomiyaki. There is a video of Rea cooking the okonomiyaki from Sweetness and Lightning over on YouTube at: Binging with Babish: Okonomiyaki. Okonomiyaki literally translates to "cooked how you like" and the base of it is a cabbage and flour based pancake with many options to top and add to your meal such as bonito flakes atop or seafood within. Sweetness and Lightning is originally a manga series written and illustrated by Gido Amagakure but was later put on television as an anime and is basically about a widower father who, inspired by one of his students, learns how to cook for his daughter.

Joy of Cooking

Joy of Cooking is arguably the grandmaster of cookbooks in the United States. First published in 1931 by Irma S. Rombauer, this book would see nine different editions throughout the more than ninety years it has been in print. The most recent edition of Joy of Cooking, published in 2019, had John Becker, Irma's great grandson, and Becker's wife Megan Scott updating the cookbook for today's home cook. If there is a dish you'd like to create, there is a good chance that you can find a recipe for it within this huge tome. Some people prefer the older editions of this book, especially the 1975 edition of the book, but if you'd like to purchase the most up to date Joy you can! I bought my copy of Joy from Amazon but such a ubiquitous cookbook should be available for sale in pretty much every online retail store that sells cookbooks. The dish I'd like to cook from this book is the Thai-Style Yellow Chicken Curry.

Closing thoughts and Anticipations

I would have described the other two cookbooks I have, but this post is already long enough as it stands. I could probably have made a blog post for each cookbook, but that's more for the readers to decide. When I do get around to cooking the dishes I'd like to cook from each book. I'll try to make a blog post about the experience of cooking each dish and have a picture of the finished product. I'm already considering adding another cookbook to my collection. This cookbook would relate to me in that I was born in Hawaii. The cookbook is called A Taste of Aloha Favorites by the Junior League of Honolulu.